“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 couldn’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.