The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,9

and ready to listen.

“Remember how deep we go.”

As she said it, it became true.

She honed in on the bottom of the ocean, deeper than any wajinru of this generation had ever lived, the old homes of their ancestors destroyed.

She let her mind sink into the dark, dense, salty waters. So heavy. She pulled the wajinru down into the rememberings with her, as her mind reached out to theirs. They could not resist her magnetic energy.

They had to adjust to this new depth. Wajinru ruled the deep as one of the hardiest and most flexible of sea creatures. Their ability to survive in the dark, sparsely populated depths as well as hunt meat in the shallower, slightly sun-touched waters gave them an advantage. But the deepness that Yetu shared with them now was something different altogether. It was so, so low to the ocean floor. Though their bodies were protected by the safety of the mud womb, in their minds they had become someone else, taken by the remembering Yetu foisted upon them.

At first, struggle and breathlessness. Then an uncomfortable stillness, like being wrapped in layers of kelp, too disoriented to break free. The waters suffocated them.

Yetu felt Amaba’s body cease to struggle and go limp, then someone else’s, then yet someone else’s, until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom of the womb, mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers, just as Yetu intended.

“Remember,” she said.

This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.

“Submit,” Yetu whispered, talking to herself as much as to them. She was begging herself to do what needed doing, what she told her mother she would do. As she commanded them to remember, she wished she herself didn’t have to. The rememberings had stolen Yetu away. Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?

Yetu sank into the pain, allowing her body to relax despite the intensity of feeling. She would transmit the story to them, as she had always done every year since she was fourteen, as historians before her had done for many years.

“Tell us!” someone shouted, their voice high-pitched, loud, and demanding, a screech that sliced through the water. “Tell us! Tell us now!”

“Remember,” Yetu told them. “Remember.”

It wasn’t a story that could be told, only recalled.

The wajinru who’d shouted nodded their head, and soon every other wajinru was nodding as well. A dance of bopping heads, causing a beautiful pattern of zigzags in the water. It went from a nod to a dance, their bodies rising from the wombfloor where they’d sunk. They moved their shoulders, then torsos, then waved their fins.

“Tell us! Tell us! We must know!” the screeching wajinru called again. “I do not remember. I must remember.”

“What is your name?” Yetu asked. The wajinru felt her soft voice easily through the moving water, so attuned her people were to her in that moment.

“I have no name. I am nothing. I am sunk!”

“Remember your name,” said Yetu.

“No name! I have no name,” they said again. “Help! Tell me!”

They were drowning in that deepest deep Yetu had shared with them. Swallowed by the blackness of the below. “Remember!” Yetu said. “Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!”

“Ayel!”

“Ayel!”

The chorus shouted their name. They were all in this together. They couldn’t let any one wajinru get lost in the grief of the remembering.

Yetu joined the chorus in calling Ayel back into the fold.

“The feeling of emptiness will pass. Soon you will be overfilled,” said Yetu.

Ayel swam up to her, weaving through the mass of wajinru. “I am starving. I am no one.”

This happened sometimes. The process of remembering demanded an openness, and in some people, openness became nothingness. The void of the ocean washed out their identity as the History tried to get in. “Help me!”

Though it hurt to do it, Yetu reached out her front fins and grabbed Ayel’s. She shared with the woman the image Yetu often used to retether herself: the first infant wajinru being rescued by a whale.

Images of connection. “Do you remember?” Yetu asked. “Do you remember this moment?”

Ayel said, “Yes, yes. I remember. I remember now.”

Yetu transmitted the memory to the others as well, something to calm them.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have started with the lonely heaviness of the deep, not at a time when she was so consumed with her own loneliness. It was too much for them.

She couldn’t help