under me is babbling too, rigid from the screaming glory of an image she has never touched before.
I slip off her shell, back into deeper water, and lie there panting, too weak to hold the stem with limp jaws or the yau leaves on my back with my trembling left hand.
The soul finds rest more easily than the flesh, and in a moment my thousand fingers are again reaching out, seeking other fingers, and finding the same two other distant souls.
Murmursome far away, bouncing in excitement, but not approaching....
The soul of girl, different now....Though the distance is great, it seems as if she has received the screaming image, swallowed it.
(And it seems that she too is trembling in a similar image—another crawling fish brought to life inside her by mine—but I fail to understand this, so I make no effort to believe it.)
I try again. Move the yau leaves onto my back. Place the end of the hollow stem in my mouth. But now I hesitate.
(My skin is cool now—and memory of my brief moments in the hot dryness frightens me.)
“You must go,” lavender says. “Your second time will disturb you less. I do now, as I have been there a hundred times....”
For a moment the euyom—whose name continues to be lavender whether or not it really is—offers rhythms that are certainly those of a mother, and I say without will: “You are alive. I did not kill you after all.”
Lavender understands enough. She says, “You are falling into other times. Do come back. We must go now.”
My thousand fingers reach out one last time, find neither murmursome nor the strange soul of girl, and—
(—For a moment I am afraid. Have I injured, killed a soul, many souls—with the force of the crawling fish? Have I hurt murmursome? or the soul of girl? No, the crawling fish doesn’t do such things.)
“Go, then!” I say, pulling myself back onto the shell.
Lavender moves.
The dryness strikes.
My soul stirs, but the crawling fish dies in the bones of fatigue, and refuses to return.
I am completely in dryness now, and I suck frantically on the hollow yau stem.
(Fear! Will my chest be strong enough to pull the water through the stem for a longer time?)
At first the water resists, but then rushes into my mouth. I breathe deeply.
The dryness invades my nose. My head begins to ache.
(Will the yau leaves slip from my back—leaving my flesh to crack in dryness?)
The yau leaves grow heavy on my back and do not slip. I pull my left arm up to my side and hold it between my body and the euyom’s shell.
After a few moments of sucking, I become aware of stranger murmurings everywhere.
But in their strangeness they are also familiar. They are yellow, soft, come from everywhere, but lack the solid forms of ioe, ayom or euyom souls. They respond in waves of pale colors to my own thoughts, and in a moment I understand their presence.
These murmuring souls in the dry world are the brothers of the tiny invisible souls, the hordes of invisible bodies who make talk possible in the sea.
(So I realize now that talk will be possible in the dry world too—and proof of this truth lies in the unnoticed fact that I can still hear the rhythms, the rippling colors of lavender under me, under her own shell.)
“I thank you for all of this,” I say. “A hundred ways, a thousand corners—”
“I am poundgrayly’s,” she says, and the dryness seems not to distort her soul’s message at all. “He is yours, you are his, so you are always welcome to this body and soul.”
Slowly but perfectly the euyom continues crawling, her limbs weding into the sands of dryness, and her beak opening and closing as if she were breathing the dryness itself.
“You breathe dryness?” I ask, the pale blue of astonishment.
“I do—as does poundgrayly, all of our kind.”
(I should have realized it long ago. Although they seemed infrequent, poundgrayly’s visits to the surface have always occurred according to the larger rhythms of his euyom soul, and have always been born of a reddening need for something I never bothered to understand....)
My left arm has slipped down from my side, down the euyom’s shell, nearly touching the sands of dryness, so I try to lift it back up—and find the motion very difficult. And the strength of my face’s eyes is dimming too, so I close them quickly.
(I am weak....)
(Or is it that my arm is somehow heavier?)
(Or both?)
“In dryness,” lavender answers, “we are all weak. Wetness embraces, holds us lightly, and we move with ease.”
“Then I will never be able to move by myself here!” I say, brown rising.
“Why the brownness? You will not find me throwing you from my back.”
My tails are beginning to shrivel, and I feel it. The skin on my legs, back and arms is tightening too. The embrace by dryness is far from the good touch of soul that dispels loneliness, and I begin to whimper in fear.
I open my eyes, and for a moment can see again.
But before long the dimming returns.
“I cannot see!” I shout, scream with the gray to black of annoyance to anger. “Face’s sight is gone!”
My shadowed shout does something strange. The hordes of invisible little souls and bodies in the dryness around me hear me all too clearly—they die by the millions.
(I am surprised, then sorry, then proud, then afraid again....)
Lavender has no precise answer, and she chooses not to offer murky visions of the imagined or guessed.
“Where is your need of round eyes,” she says, “when your soul is able to touch with killing here? The many little ones now dead had never known deep slaps of darkness—my kind certainly cannot wield such slaps. They were unready; and now they are merely food for their own kind or other little ones.”
(“Your kind throws darkness uniquely,” poundgrayly once told me. “The souls of my kind have never lifted a scream as finely ribbed with teeth of blackness as your own fellow yom have.”)
The blindness persists. Face’s eyes begin to sting, tiny talons grating them.
In a moment I realize: again the work of dryness! Dryness hurts—would hurt my chest but for the hollow stem which brings the sea to me. Yes, my face’s eyes have no touch of the sea on them now.
I cup my right hand and into it exhale the next breath of water. Bringing
