of blood, salt of sea.)
His fists rip the sac completely.
(Now!)
He breathes pure water.
(Now!)
Waterjoyup dies.
Ripping pains of death, over moss, over child, descend in the wave of sharing.
I die, glad to die, brown pounding with her down.
Praise the end of water’s embrace!
(But—)
A light jumps from the dying her. To me a light, one image, and then I lose it. Darkness only as she dies.
As we die, the ripping nearing end....
I am dead.
(But—)
I am—
It clears. Death’s dark colors brighten, and I live. Still screaming, blaming still.
Waterjoyup’s soul is still here, somewhere nearer than darkness. Screaming still, but distant. Body near, but dead.
Even if the screaming is hers, nothing can be done. The cupping hand is gone, the flesh is finished.
We are never certain about the screams that follow body’s end. Perhaps they are merely the face of our own deepest screams...from the loss of a soul once nearest.
(Move on.)
With face’s eyes I look to the second son. I look for a long time.
(His raw new soul, you must enter it. Find his name.)
No...I refuse.
The first son was born deformed—legs without tails, hands without webbing. The second son is no different. He has small normal tails moving before me, has webbed fingers fanning the water, but he is deformed, for his soul will be deformed.
His soul will have no mother. And a father broken by his woman’s death.
With face’s eyes again, I look at the child. Floats in water reddened by birth. His left hand is twisted in its bones, and always will be. No matter; he has greater deformity.
I look beneath his skin. He floats in shallow darkness, wanting touch of warming flesh and still warmer rivers of some mother’s soul.
(Look deeper.)
I cannot. Will not.
I am screamdeep, and my soul cries to me: “He does not know what his birth has done!”
I refuse to enter.
(Listen!)
Suddenly something rises, some light to the inner eye.
From a hidden crack in my soul, from pains shared in her death, springs again the last brief light she gave me.
In her sinking down, her rushing out, she found a truth as a mother finds. Found a moment to look deep in the soul of the son, and to throw her finding out and up, to another soul.
Her vision bobs up in sight, and remains for me to know and hold.
“I haaave found it!” she cries, as she secretly cried before she died. “In it, in it, in his soul, I seeeee a million fish dancing on the surface, on the sea, dancing in dangerous dryness—but they sing, glad singing!”
(Misunderstand?)
Is it not the same vision?
There is another vision, known to every man when given by man to woman, in the truest act before their child’s birth. The vision of a fish...pale scaleless flesh...crawling gasping from the sea to dangerous dryness....
No, that is another vision—lacks singing, dancing.
So I take him now, my hands larger than his head. To place him in the basket of living stems.
So I know that this living son’s name is fishsinger.
I—
I—
No, I—
I am—
I am fishsinger. The pink waking in the real now!
I am fishsinger, but I can be my father or mother or a thousand of my forefathers whenever I want—or whenever I am pulled, pushed, sucked into such memories. Such is the purple manner of soul and memory for us all, and the truth is one sparkling crag: the precision of sharing and talk between the souls makes past times, places and souls no less than now, as near as here.
Yes, of course, a brown truth: There are dangers in memories given to you by others...and they are dangers without promise of a real death, only dangers of madness.
Mother’s death through Father’s eyes happened to me many times—but the impressive time in memory’s eye was four hundred twenty-one days after Father’s—yes, Father’s—death.
So look to see it all:
In body, I am alone this day, in the territory given me by screamdeep’s death on the four hundred twenty-first day before. My flesh is alone, without the two other bodies familiar to my soul and eyes. The old poundgrayly, sensing the proper season, has gone to be with his gentle females. And the dumb ayom, whom I know as murmursome, is away for no reason other than the fickle bouncing of his dumb pale soul.
I am floating, one leg and tail curled around a thick brown yau stem, not far from the surface of the sea. I am floating where the light from the twin lights shining in dryness far beyond sea’s surface softens all the darkness thrown up by the ocean floor. The water around me was as warm as blood, woven with fish-eye sparkle, bright with the murmuring souls of nearby fish, of plants flowing leafy brown around.
See further: ah, the distant bottom. Dark pores of crags. Endless coral souls in yellow mumblings. Red roaring souls of taloned ioe. Enormous oio, dangerous only in their bulky carelessness.
So I am floating where the quiet current comforts those souls of brighter colors, where no fish flees, since no teeth snap nor dark souls scream. I am the young body who wants to relax alongside the simpler games of fish.
My soul churns in the deep brown mounds of aloneness. Though unaware that a common wish for death is the arm of my deepest churning, still I feel it, and try to flee through my face’s eyes alone.
My eyes move; I look. I ignore my deepest soul.
But the scales of nearby fish flash in a way that reminds me of Father’s eyes, and this brings more churning.
So I close my face’s eyes, try another fleeing, try thoughts of common truths.
(See it: Your own skin is not shiny scaly. Its color is a yellowed gray, and it feels like the raspy hide of a muyom.)
