The Deep by Rivers Solomon & Daveed Diggs William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes

Author:Rivers Solomon & Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

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.

The next day, Yetu taught Oori how to better read the winds as they related to the currents. For that lesson, Oori remained the whole morning and part of the afternoon. The next day, Yetu opened up about her thoughts on fishing nets, how sometimes, when she was a pup, she’d sneak off and tear all of them to shreds with her teeth. Oori listened, eyes toward the sea but ears toward Yetu, then asked if all nets were the same or were some worse than others. Yetu could talk about this topic at length, and she did, Oori never once standing up to leave. She nodded at random intervals and asked clarifying questions, but was otherwise content to hear what Yetu had to say.

A week passed, and Yetu ran out of topics, but Oori remained anyway. She told Yetu that despite her comfort on the ocean, she got seasick still. She loved riding waves on her little boat. She loved to swim. She could hold her breath for three minutes, which Yetu understood was supposed to be a significant amount of time for a two-legs.

When the both of them ran out of things to say and Oori looked like she might be getting up to leave, Yetu convinced her to stay by saying that there was a special sound she could make to attract certain types of fish to her. It was a hiccupping whistle, a gentler, more musical version of a seabird’s call. It had a hypnotizing effect, for one, but also stimulated pleasure centers in many creatures’ brains when combined with an electrical signal that wajinru could project.

“Like this?” Oori asked, making the sound in the air.

“Close,” said Yetu, but it wasn’t really, not at all. Her vocal apparatus was too different from a wajinru’s. “Make the sound in the water. See if that works.”

Oori hesitated, unsure for several moments. She was currently in a full squat on one of the boulders that surrounded the tidal pool, heels to ground, bottom nearly touching the rock.

“Come,” said Yetu. “Come here now.”

Yetu relished all the time she got to see Oori in the bright light of day.

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