The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

  “I can’t imagine a hole as wide as that,” said Yetu, looking out at the sea. When she made her skin receptive to it, she swore she could feel the wajinru’s anguished weeping through the water. It was like fish crawling all over her skin.

  It wasn’t real, though. Just her imagination. Through the rocks, it was difficult to feel the wider ocean.

  The ocean looked calm, but in the distance, she felt the sort of heavy rain and winds that signaled a coming storm. It was too far away to see how big it was, or which direction it was moving. If they had broken from the mud womb and decided to rise, the wajinru could cause a storm like that, couldn’t they? They all possessed the electrical capability to move the waters.

  Yetu shook her head. She had no evidence that was going on. Wild speculation wouldn’t serve her. It was just another way to tie her to the past, and the past had been responsible for nearly killing her.

  * * *

  She’d learned how to deal with the rememberings. The other wajinru would too, in time.

  “I am sorry for what happened to you, for all that was taken from you,” said Yetu. Even though she’d left her family, Yetu didn’t like to think of her amaba not existing. Such a thought was intolerable.

  “It’s the way things go,” said Oori.

  It was, and Yetu knew no words to console her. “Is there anyone to enact vengeance upon?”

  “Everyone and no one,” Oori said, inching forward through the water closer to Yetu.

  “Sometimes it’s not the worst thing to lose everything. Sometimes it’s good,” said Yetu, thinking that for the first time in twenty years, she could feel the ocean now without it overwhelming her senses.

  She had room to think. To know what she wanted and believed. And all it had cost her was everything.

  “Good?” asked Oori. Her steely facade cracked, but only infinitesimally. Yetu wondered if she’d even seen it at all. She felt the brokenness of Oori’s voice against her skin, but that was the only sign.

  “If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, it’s good for it to go, don’t you think?” said Yetu. “I was a historian.” It made her feel so good to say that. Was. No longer. She blinked her eyes shut and tried to cast out thoughts of the wajinru locked in the Remembrance. “It was a very holy thing for my kind. It meant I held on to all the memories so no one else had to, generations and generations of them. Six hundred years of pain.”

  “Were you like a storyteller then?” asked Oori.

  Yetu shook her head. “All the memories of those who’ve come before, they lived inside me. Real as flesh. I remembered them like they were my own. I walked inside them.”

  Oori nodded, curious and intrigued. “Touched by spirits,” she said sagely.

  “By electricity,” Yetu countered. “And it hurts. I gave up the memories so I could be free.”

  So she could live.

  Oori looked out at the sea, unblinking. “I would take any amount of pain in the world if it meant I could know all the memories of the Oshuben. I barely know any stories from my parents’ generation. I can’t remember our language. How could you leave behind something like that? Doesn’t it hurt not to know who you are?”

  “I know who I am now. All I knew before was who they were, who they wanted me to be,” said Yetu. “And it was killing me. It did kill me. I wasn’t Yetu. I was just a shell for their whims.”

  Oori shook her head and stood up from the water. “But your whole history. Your ancestry. That’s who you are.”

  “No. I am who I am now. Before, I was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. Nobody. You don’t exist. I didn’t exist. If you prefer a world where I don’t exist, then stop bringing me fish.”

  “Fine,” said Oori, turning to leave. The water splashed, brushing Yetu’s skin. She hated that despite being as angry as she was at Oori, she was thrilled by even that small amount of connection with her. These feelings were unfamiliar. More than anything, she wanted Oori near, but Yetu yelled at her to go.

  “You are nothing but a silly fish,” said Oori. “Of course you wouldn’t understand the importance of having a history.”

  Oori did not come back for three days.

  6

  HISTORY WAS EVERYTHING. YETU KNEW that. But it wasn’t kind. Abandoned now by Oori, Yetu dwelled in the darkest parts of it. Not the History. That was all but gone. Her own history, the once upon a time when she’d been fourteen, small, and totally unequipped to handle the darkness she had been a host to.

  * * *

  She remembered Amaba shouting at her, as she’d started doing a lot in that time, because Yetu was supposed to go practice-hunting with some young girls in the nearby den but had been away in a remembering and had forgotten.

  When she awoke, she refused to go.

  “I can’t see them anymore,” Yetu cried. The same way that Amaba was always shouting, Yetu was always weeping.

  “It’s been weeks since you’ve seen anyone. You cannot prefer this loneliness,” Amaba insisted. She was right, in her own way. It wasn’t a preference but a necessity to keep out the pain. “Go, right now! Go to them, or else.”

  But Yetu revealed a shark tooth in her front fin and held it to her neck. “I’d rather die than go.”

  At fourteen, the rush of rememberings from the History had been so new that they suffocated her.

  “My child,” Amaba said, frightened. “What sickness is this? What madness would cause one to put oneself in fatal harm purposely, knowingly? Surely, it cannot exist.”

  Yetu turned from Amaba and toward the dark fold of infinite ocean beckoning her from all sides. There were pockets of the deep still untouched by sentient life. Yetu had ached for them. For their quiet.

  “What of your responsibilities to us, to the wajinru?” Amaba added. “Without you, we perish. Without the Remembrance and the gift of the memories you bestow on us annually, we would flounder until there was nothing left of us but cartilage.”

  Yetu swam in pacing circles, speed increasing with each repetition, still clutching the shark fin. No amount of explanation would make Amaba understand what it was like to have the rememberings. The two of them had been here before, and before, and before.

  With each twist of her body, she churned the water into thick, impenetrable blurs. It was a maelstrom to hide in, Amaba’s words unable to pierce.

  “Still yourself. Now,” Amaba said, reaching her front fins through the dense cloud to touch her child. “And drop that thing!”

  Yetu, small for a wajinru of fourteen years, slipped from her amaba’s grip and continued her efforts to spin, mouth catching up to tail. Moving was the only way to quiet the restless energy burning through her like electric cancer.

  “Such madness does exist,” Yetu said, dizzy, her words gobbled up by the eddy she was whirring. “You all made me this way. I carry the burden of remembering so you don’t have to. So acknowledge it, then! That it’s a burden!”

  Amaba tackled Yetu from above, wrapping her fins around her child’s torso and curling her tail fin around Yetu’s to immobilize it. “Still, child. Still,” she said.

  “You’re always wanting answers to why I do the things I do, but when I try to give them, you cannot fathom it. Is this my curse? To be unfathomable? Am I even alive anymore? Maybe Yetu is already dead,” said Yetu. “Are you even holding me now, Amaba? Or are you holding a corpse?”

  Amaba pressed the webbed appendages at the ends of her fins over Yetu’s face as she let out a moaning cry. “Stop it. Don’t speak such ugliness.”

  But Yetu couldn’t keep silent, not now that the truth was gushing out of her so freely. “All I have is ugliness, Amaba. All I have are these ugly rememberings. You say madness such as mine doesn’t exist, but it would exist in you, too, if you had to experience the ugly things I do all the time,” she said, defeated and deflated in her amaba’s arms, near suffocation. Amaba held her so tight, she c
ouldn’t sway her body enough to filter water.

  “What about the rememberings could be so, so maddening?” Amaba asked. Yetu tried to writhe free, but Amaba’s strength was irrefutable. “Tell me, child!” Amaba said.

  “Dying,” Yetu cried out. The pair was jowl to jowl as Amaba overpowered Yetu from behind. “Today I was three boys in the moments before their deaths, then I was them during their deaths. They were three bodies and then they burst from the inside into thousands and thousands of little, incomplete bodies. I know what it’s like to be turned into splinters and fragments.”

  Amaba shook her head forcefully, the rushing echo of water against Yetu’s skin enough to make her wish she was inside of one of the rememberings now, rather than here, because when you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain.

  “Why are you telling me these horrible things?” her amaba asked.

  “They’re true.”

  “They are not. Such a thing—what could even cause that? Such breaking apart of bodies?”

  “Energy,” Yetu said.

  Oblong slivers of cartilage, seared skin, tooth shards—Yetu had learned so much about the past since taking on the History, but she’d learned about the present, too. Her amaba didn’t want to believe that the things Yetu spoke about the past were true. If they were, what would it say about her as a parent to have consented to her child becoming a vessel of such ugliness?

  “Stop, stop, stop, child,” cried Amaba. She swam away, putting as much distance between herself and Yetu as she could. She could not even look at her.

  “I tell the rememberings to stop,” said Yetu. “But they don’t. So why should I stop for you?”

  Frothy water spewed from Amaba’s mouth as she made gurgled, choked noises. This was why Yetu was to remain silent about the things she knew. These rememberings, these secrets of their History, were for Yetu and Yetu only.

  It was at this age that Yetu first considered abandoning the History all together. All wajinru could live in peace, unburdened by the past. No more historian.

  But when she brought her ideas to her amaba and other wajinru, they scolded her for her blasphemy. A people needed a history. To be without one was death. This was a feeling they knew all too well when the Remembrance drew near. It was an ache for knowing, and Yetu had had it once too.

  * * *

  Those years were far behind her, but still, she could not shake the memories. Sulky and scared, she had spent most of her youth feeling abandoned by the wajinru, even when they most tried to show their love.

  Amaba held a gathering in Yetu’s honor once, certain that that was all her daughter needed to perk up, to become the old Yetu again. Slightly sensitive, yes, but loving and warm.

  “We don’t have much time. People will be arriving soon,” said Amaba. Yetu had been instructed to hunt meat for the get-together. Amaba fluttered off to make her own preparations, fully expectant that her daughter would do as she was told. Yetu, though, was far past an age where she blindly followed her amaba’s commands. That would’ve been true even without the History inside of her. Absent the rememberings that aged and embittered her, she would’ve yearned to know herself as just Yetu. Who was she outside of her relationship to her kin?

  Still, Yetu swam off to hunt, using this new freedom Amaba had granted to do something she’d been meaning to do since her failed suicide attempt. The prey she was after was not for meat. It was for a sacrifice.

  It was only a short time before the gathering would begin. Yetu needed to locate a worthy animal, kill it, and do the ceremony, all before anyone was the wiser.

  Amaba didn’t like “that nonsense” as she called it. Her only god was Yetu herself. Her only religion, the History. She showed her devotion by ensuring its preservation in her child.

  But through the rememberings, Yetu had seen the many ways throughout time that the wajinru had communed with the world beyond knowledge. One way was to offer blood to the ocean, and in that blood, there was truth—if one knew how to look.

  Yetu swam quietly, smoothly, with no extraneous strokes of her tail. She tended to be a distinctive swimmer, sometimes twisting and turning her body into a swirl pattern as she pulsed forward. The result was a wake identifiable by other wajinru who knew her. Today, she didn’t want to be found.

  The best prey lived a little shallower than where she and her amaba were currently staking out the waters, but there were more wajinru higher up too. There was more potential for her to be discovered, especially because wajinru would be nearby to get to Amaba’s gathering.

  Yetu kept her nerve endings poised as she carried out the hunt. She wanted something big. Something old. The easy answer was a shark, but they were more difficult to find this deep, and she didn’t want to have to go too close to the surface.

  That left squid. Clever and therefore difficult prey. She didn’t have time for that.

  Then she caught a wisp of it on her skin. Something gargantuan moving, perhaps a mile away from her, several hundred meters closer to the surface than she.

  She swam toward it, disguising her identity by fluttering her webbed fins and blowing bubbles in interesting shapes and patterns so her prey might think she was only a school of deepwater fish.

  As she got closer, the creature’s contours became clearer. She could just begin to make out what it was. Something strange. Something she didn’t see often.

  Yes, yes, she could see it now, feel it on her skin. A frilled shark. Perfection. She swam decisively toward it, realizing speed now was more important than anything else. In the dark, it wouldn’t be able to see her well. She rarely saw the frilled shark this deep. It’d be less used to the complete blackness.

  She’d come on it like a sudden current from underneath. Open her jaw and crush its throat. Swimming faster and faster, she was almost there. She bared her teeth. She reached out her fins, more flexible at the base than any sharks, and grabbed hold.

  They were belly to belly, her arms wrapped around it. She plunged her teeth inside its tough skin and shook her head to undo its flesh.

  The creature shook and writhed, trying to throw her off, but the appendages at the end of her front fins had suckers that stuck to its scales. It didn’t take long for it to die.

  She pressed her teeth into those places where the arteries were juiciest and most prominent, then let the blood drain from it. She let the blood cover her. In lighter seas, she’d have appeared pink with it.

  Yetu had never done anything like this before. She’d only seen this precise ritual once in her rememberings.

  She exsanguinated it, then danced her body in swirling circles to mix it into a torrent, a miniature hurricane. When she was so dizzy she couldn’t carry on, she was to carry on anyway, submerged in the red lifewater of this ancient creature.

  And she was to put all her wills, all her intentions, into telling the ancestors that this was an offering for them, so they might reveal themselves to her and grant her what she desired.

  What she desired was to be free of the History.

  Yetu was so ill from spinning that she was on the verge of vomiting. Thankfully, her stomach was largely empty.

  She near passed out in the blood, and from above, the frilled shark body began to come down on her. She tried her mightiest to push the heavy beast away, and she finally did. More blood came from it. That was why it wasn’t working. The ceremony required every last bit.

  She squeezed arteries with her fins. The smell was sickening and metallic all around her.

  “Historian!”

  Amaba?

  “Historian!”

  It was many wajinru, her amaba among them.

  Several came toward her in the water screaming her name, her title.

  Through the chorus, Yetu singled out the voice of her amaba, but instead of calling her by her name, she said historian.

  Yetu was too sick to attempt to escape their scrutiny. She didn’t want to remember how she’d failed to live up to the standards of the
previous historians, who had carried the History without complaint.

  She was a failure. The ancestors hadn’t come to grant her anything. The only wajinru here were the live ones.

  Yetu floated in a black, heavy haze of bloody ocean as she lay in wait. When the wajinru came, she could feel their racing hearts, their scrunched noses.

  All could smell the uncharacteristic carnage of such a large creature drained of all blood. All could feel the strange, thin texture of blood in the otherwise dense seawater. All could feel maddened energy crackling off Yetu, and they were scared.

  “Why would you bring all these people to me, Amaba?” Yetu asked. Her voice was so low and without energy that she wasn’t sure her amaba would hear it.

  “My sweet child, why wouldn’t I?” she asked.

  Yetu groaned. Was it the nausea, the crowd of frightened wajinru floating in a circle around her, or her amaba’s refusal to accept that she was not her sweet little girl anymore?

  “I will send them away. We will go home,” said Amaba, perhaps apologetic for insisting on this gathering that had brought so many people near.

  Amaba did what she could to soothe Yetu, but the problem was that she could not share in this tragedy. She could not share Yetu’s loneliness. All she could do was stroke her tremoring, sob-wrecked body.

  There was no saving Yetu.

  7

  OORI FINALLY DID COME BACK three days later, but Yetu didn’t feel as happy by her return as she thought she would. Left alone to stew in her past—the past Oori insisted was so meaningful and important and good—she felt tender. She was fourteen again, too young a creature to hold so many sorrows.

  “Say you’re sorry, or go,” said Yetu, channeling the petulant energy of her recently recalled youth. “I will soon be well enough to clear the boulders on my own. I won’t need you to hunt then.”