Yetu squeezed her eyes shut, regretting the thought. She wasn’t ready to be swept into the fold of a stranger. She was wajinru, no matter how far away they were from her. Being historian, being different, didn’t change that. “I didn’t mean to startle you so. I only wanted to thank you for the fish,” she said.
Suka calmed, limbs visibly loosening. “It actually wasn’t me. It’s Oori who’s been catching them for you. I just, I happened to be here.”
“Oori. Is that one of your siblings?” asked Yetu. “One of the… people… from the other day?” The words were much more fluid in her mind than they were coming from her mouth. It sounded like she was belching them out.
“No. Oori fishes around here, but she’s not family,” Suka said. “She’s from an island off the northwestern coast. We’re inland mainland folk, and much farther south. I’d say she trades with us, but to be honest, mostly she just gives. I tried to give her a blanket once and she laughed at me and asked if I’d mistaken her for an infant, so. That’s Oori.”
“Can you tell Oori thank you for me? Then tell her I’d like more?”
“More?”
“More fish. Or preferably a seal. Something fatty.”
“Oori is—she doesn’t take kindly to requests or demands on her time,” said Suka, like it wasn’t something to be wary of about her. Yetu found the quality fascinating. She wanted to be a person who didn’t take kindly to requests, who knew her own mind. Maybe if she’d had a stronger will, she’d have been able to resist the pull of the ancestors, able to carry the History without so much grief.
“That’s admirable,” said Yetu. “It was only a question. Not a demand. She should do what she wants.”
“Oh, she does.”
Despite what Suka warned, Oori did bring bigger loads of fish over the next few days. And fresh seal. Small sharks. King mackerel.
Yetu swam in tiny circles in the pool in an attempt to keep herself awake for longer hours. She wanted to catch a glimpse of this Oori. The tightness of her temporary resting quarters was stifling, but the border of boulders formed an appealing bubble around her, shutting out the sensations of the ocean. She’d tire of the curious blankness against her skin compared to the open sea eventually; for now, she lapped up the calm, the finiteness of it. As long as she didn’t make a point to tune her skin to the waters beyond the wall, her world ended but a few feet from wherever she was. It was a cage, but also a protective cocoon.
On the third day of trying to spot Oori, Yetu finally did. She awoke when the sky was only just turning light, a pleasing dark blue shade that reminded Yetu of being underwater where sunlight barely reached.
“I see you,” Yetu said, using a wajinru greeting.
Yetu heard a startled splash.
“So?” Oori said, her voice quiet, deep, and raspy.
“I was just letting you know,” said Yetu, alert now. It was too dark to properly see her, and sound didn’t travel as well through air. She could neither feel nor hear the shape of this strange woman beyond a vague outline.
“I suppose now I know,” said Oori.
“Thank you for the food,” Yetu said, swimming closer to where Oori stood in the pool, slowed down by the shallowness of the water.
“It’s nothing,” Oori said, the gruffness in her voice showing no signs of retreating.
“It’s food. It’s helping me get better.”
“What should I have done instead? Not provide what is necessary? Don’t take it to heart. I fed my mother till the day she died, and I despised her. Good-bye.”
Their conversations over the next several days continued to be short. Oori had no interest in Yetu, nor in anyone, it seemed. She spent her days out on the water in a wooden sailboat Yetu had spotted, which, given the calm winds of late, had become more of a paddleboat. She spent nights on the water as well, sleeping in her boat, the rope tied to a large boulder. According to the others, she didn’t always tie herself to shore, letting the water carry her wherever it would, living off fish and stores of ocean.
“I wish there was a way to properly thank her,” Yetu said to Suka one day.
“Who? Oori?”
“Yes. Who else?” asked Yetu.
“She doesn’t like to be thanked. That’s too close to kinship for her, which she doesn’t do.”
“Well, kinship isn’t inherently a good thing,” said Yetu, beginning to understand Oori more and more. Perhaps for Oori, kinship meant taking care of a mother who’d hurt her. For Yetu, it had meant isolation from her people as she tried to cope with the rememberings. And now? She wasn’t sure what it meant. She would always see herself as wajinru. That was one thing she’d figured out since being in the tidal pool. The sea beckoned her, and it pained her not to join it, to be one with it, to feel it all over her. Even though it often hurt, her skin relished the pressure and the feedback. Above the surface, everything seemed so insubstantial and light. She missed being a part of not just the sea, but the whole world. Without the History, she felt out of place and out of time. She missed being connected to all.
But connection came with responsibility. Duty choked independence and freedom. If Oori didn’t want kinship, Yetu could understand. Why be beholden to anyone else’s agenda? Oori was obligated to herself and herself alone.
“I just mean that she’s different, you know? Not like us. She’s not so good with, hm, how do you say, human interaction and any trappings of decorum or rules. I suppose that’s why she prefers animals to people. Most animals don’t exchange hellos and ask how the other is. They just exist next to one another.”
Yetu’s ears and skin perked at the sound of that. Oori preferred animals, did she?
“Perfect, then. I’m not human,” said Yetu. Though her foremothers were two-legs, she felt she had very little in common with these strange land walkers, whose teeth were weak and flat. “I am animal.”
Suka played with their breath in the back of their throat then pushed it through their mouth—a strange habit of the two-legs. It was too thoughtful to be a sigh. Too calm and content to be a groan. Just a sound, meaningless, as they considered what to say.
“Yes, but only animal-ish?” they said, hedging.
Yetu didn’t understand what that could mean. She groaned, unable to keep track of it all. Without the vivid images of the rememberings, she was left only with outlines of memories, and even those were waning. Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu didn’t like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled the land and what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said it themselves—existing alongside it.
Suka didn’t understand Oori. Yetu did. And what she didn’t understand, she wanted to. Suka had written Oori off. But Yetu was happy to simply exist alongside her whenever Oori made herself available for such things.
The first time Oori stayed longer than a few moments, Yetu got to see her in the sunlight. She had dark skin, darker even than Suka’s, and there were scars and markings cut into her face in elaborate patterns. They were beautiful and strangely familiar. Yetu squinted to get a stronger impression, but she couldn’t place them. Something from the History? That didn’t feel right. The memory felt more present than that, more recent.
Yetu wanted nothing more than to keep looking at Oori’s face, which was startlingly captivating. Her eyes were dark as the deep. Yetu drew her into a conversation about fish bait so she might keep looking upon her. Oori remained for nearly an hour debating the merits of this and that technique. Yetu felt bereft when she left, and she spent the rest of the day coming up with topics that might bid Oori to stay even longer.