Strangely, despite the physical pain her body was in, she felt better than she had in ages. The ache of her muscles, bones, and cartilage was nothing compared to the pain she was used to carrying, of the History and what they’d been through. There was no doubt that despite the disorientation of life without the rememberings, Yetu felt tranquility, too.
Not far off from sleep, she wondered if she’d still be here in the morning, or if she’d wash up on a different, nearby shore. How miraculous it was to go where she pleased. No past, and no future, either. Before leaving the History, she’d had little chance to discover who plain old Yetu was. The wajinru inside her from the past had pulled her backward, and the wajinru around her had pulled her outward toward their various ends. The combating forces had stretched her so far this way and that way that she had lost her shape. If she had a will of her own, she was too deflated to actually exercise it. Now, though, reduced to a skeleton, she could build herself back up however she wanted.
Prior to this Remembrance, the other wajinru must’ve felt this way all the time. Unburdened, they could do as they pleased and follow their whims wherever they took them. Now, trapped in the mud womb, they had to endure the limitations Yetu had had since she was fourteen.
As Yetu drifted in the tidal pool toward sleep, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had cursed them. After all, when she held the rememberings, only one wajinru suffered. In the aftermath of her leaving, all of them did. All but Yetu. That wasn’t right, but neither was the alternative. She didn’t deserve to die, did she?
The wajinru weren’t faring well, Yetu had no doubt of that, but eventually, hunger and fatigue would draw them out of the trance. They’d carry the rememberings, but they’d be able to resume hunting and live the rest of their lives.
Yetu watched the ocean. Waves collided with the surface at regular intervals, water spraying. Overhead, clouds gathered. The seas were not particularly rough nor the sky particularly gray, but a heavy rain was on the horizon.
It meant nothing. Storms came and went for any number of reasons. It wasn’t a sign anything was amiss, that the wajinru were worrying the water. Still, Yetu kept guard over the water, eyes steady on the sea as she succumbed to sleep. Everything would be all right now that she was free.
Yetu next awoke to the smell of dead fish. A pile of fifteen of them lay next to her on the beach, their tails tied together with a piece of browned, twined seaweed.
She recognized it for the gift it was and devoured it. She slept again.
The next day, there was more. Still hungry from having eaten so poorly over the last year, she devoured it too. There were blacktails among the bounty, one of her amaba’s favorites. She was about to call out to invite her to join the meal before she remembered that Amaba was not here. Yetu chewed the fish slowly, hesitant to take another bite. While she feasted on gifts from a stranger, Amaba and the other wajinru were trapped in rememberings. They would recover in time, Yetu had to believe that, but without her guidance, they were surely stumbling and scared.
Reminded of the heavy rain in the distance, a rain that would not touch the corner of the earth where she was settled, Yetu looked out to the ocean. When would the wajinru wake up from the trance of the Remembrance? They didn’t have that much time before they’d work themselves into the same kind of state Ayel had when the Remembrance had first started and she’d forgotten who she was. Without direction, they’d break open the walls of the mud womb, leaving themselves exposed, and the world in danger. Taken by rage and grief from the rememberings, and without the cognizance to hold themselves back, the wajinru all together could stir the ocean waters to a degree that would disrupt the natural weather cycles. The winds, the skies—they’d both be electrified into a whipping frenzy. The wajinru could make a storm as big as the one that prickled like a half memory in the back of Yetu’s mind, the one that drowned the land.
It wouldn’t come to that. Yetu worried because that was what she always did, prone to fits of anxiousness and over-reactivity. She shook her head and took another bite of fish. She forced herself to swallow it after realizing she’d been chewing the same morsel for several minutes.
The vastness of the ocean looked so different from above, so much less comprehensible. Its murky blue waters were a dark veil separating her from her people. Cut off from them, she had trouble making sense of who or what she was. Without them, she seemed nothing more than a strange fish, alone. Absent the rememberings, who was she but a woman cast away?
Yetu squeezed her eyes shut against the light of sunrise. She had not been granted stillness like this since she was a child. Never had she had so much time to think. She wasn’t even sure she could do it.
Another day passed, and the next morning, when she awoke to fish, she saw the person who’d left her the food just as they were walking away. Yetu whimpered to grab their attention, and the two-legs turned around, startling back a few feet as they took in the sight of her.
“Hi, there, fishy fish,” they said. “Shh, now. Quiet. I’m Suka, and I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.” They were one of the original four who’d seen her the day she had first become beached.
“It’s all right,” they said, holding out their hands to placate her. She recognized the same gesture as one her amaba did sometimes. Was such a thing passed down in DNA? Was it a part of the History she’d never noticed before? She went to flick through the rememberings in her head to find previous instances of it, but—she had no rememberings anymore, not like she used to. When she reached for the past, nothing was there. The emptiness inside her stretched far and wide in every direction like a cavern. It was lonely. She had thought herself unmoored when she was the historian, but this did not compare. She was a blip.
“I promise, all right? I promise I’m not going to hurt you,” Suka said. “Not that I could if I tried. I know you can’t possibly understand me but— Everything’s all right. I promise.”
She believed them, that they weren’t going to hurt her. After all, they’d given her all this food. But Suka didn’t seem like an authority to trust on whether everything was going to be all right or not. They didn’t know anything about her. They didn’t know what she’d swum from.
“I understand you,” Yetu said, the words spitting up from her throat unexpectedly and in an odd configuration. She sounded croaky and rough; her voice so deep she wasn’t sure the two-legs would understand. She had never spoken this language before, and the words felt strange sliding against her esophagus and tongue. The words tickled faintly against her skin, but not in the same way they would were she in the water.
Everything about life on land strained her senses. It was disorienting to use her eyes rather than her skin. She was like a newborn, cast away from its amaba and grasping outward for anything solid on which to hold.
“My god, my god, my god,” Suka said. “You are— What are you?”
Yetu breathed deeply in, but it just rattled her more, the oddness of getting oxygen through the air rather than the water.
“Thank you for the fish,” she said. “I’m recovering from a difficult journey and unable to hunt for myself.”
Suka looked at her in silence, their eyes wide and mouth agape, showing the tips of what looked like very useless, blunt teeth.
“I am Yetu,” she said, hoping that might calm them.
“You speak. You’re alive,” said Suka, trembling.
“If you didn’t think I was alive before, why did you bring food to sustain me?” Yetu asked.
“I meant you’re… you’re like us,” Suka said.
It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different by her role as historian.