waters, souls roaring redder.
(At last.)
Talons on face, one eye dark, pain deeper darker—
“Poundgrayly! Get away!”
Pains are darkness. Yellow never was—
I di—
I—
I—
I—
“Fishsinger, fool!”
Who where what here?
“Always the stupid boy.”
Poundgrayly? Poundgrayly....
So I stir without will from the memory. Many, many times since I snatched Father’s experience from poundgrayly’s moment of relaxed guarding have I relived it this way, and each time I fail to reach Father’s death moment—but only because it does not exist for me. Poundgrayly managed to keep it from me, so I hold only the moments leading up to it to sink myself in.
And this time! Poundgrayly himself has arrived to interrupt my reveries, to pull me from the edge of memory’s incompleteness.
I throw at him brown teeth of instant hatred.
I sink back down, try to be the dying man again.
I—
I—
“Fishsinger!”
Again I try. I—
“Listen to this old soul. Young hardened reef, shallow love of self, listen. Foolish and fooled, your soul is an ioe’s stomach. Shall I shed the dark used food of my body and feed you with it?”
This is the way poundgrayly always pulls me out: a wave of insults demanding soul’s defense in the presence of now.
I begin my own wave of insults, but then stop.
A thing is different this time. There are always reprimands from poundgrayly, but this time his soul is unusually disturbed, sharp purple feelings, nervous edging.
“A secret problem?” I ask, green paling in sarcasm.
“Secret only to your blindness: a personal world swallowing you. Indulge yourself, selfishsinger, and miss the brightest day your kind has ever wanted.”
Such talk is meaningless to me. Brightest day? Of course he is trying to fool me, pull me completely from my waking dream of dying.
So I play with the old soul. “I understand. You have finally decided to give me Father’s moment.”
“Stop this! Listen: A bigshinegray has come.”
I ignore him. “You still refuse to—”
And then my soul rises up in understanding. Bigshinegray?
“You are trying to fool me!” I shout
“No. No.”
“One has come?”
“Yes.”
“One has come! Has come!”
“So you do remember the waiting dream inside your kind’s souls. If you had bothered to hold memory of it all along—in all times since screamdeep’s death—feelings of aloneness would not have taken you so strongly. The waiting dream has always held your kind together—”
“Yes, yes, but such advice is unimportant now! A bigshinegray has finally come—to where?”
“An island, as the dream expected. Two females of mine witnessed its coming. You see, I prepared their souls well for this day—gave them clear formed visions of what the big, tall, pointed, upright, shiny, round, gray dream of your kind would look like to face’s eyes—”
“Yes, yes, I will certainly thank your two females—all of them too—but—”
“It is without a single doubt,” poundgrayly continues, interrupting with the babble of his own excitement, “a bigshinegray, no misreceived light to face’s eyes, nor nervous dream forced into the present. It surely came from endless dryness above us, slowed with bright hot light as it neared the island falling down, and came to rest upright—”
“I believe you! Where is the island? A territory near?”
Poundgrayly arrives now within eyes’ range. I stare at the two small eyes that blink over his beak, and grow impatient.
“Which territory?”
“I told you a moment ago, but you were not listening. Yours.”
“No....”
“No? You fear the responsibility?”
“Of course not! It is no because I cannot understand how.”
My territory? How? There are thousands of my kind, and their thousands of large territories. That mine is the one the bigshinegray has come to is impossible!
“More foolish thoughts—when this is one day no foolish soul should have awakened. Listen: every soul of your kind thought as you, believed the dream would eventually come—but not that the coming would be to his or her territory. ‘The world is large, and I am small,’ each soul thought as you. But when the bigshinegray came, it could only touch one territory, and chance does not apply to places or souls chosen by certainty’s ways. Cease your pink chattering, begin your swim.”
Perhaps I do fear the responsibility, deeper than the fringe of my self’s pale knowledge:
Suddenly the wish for Father’s death moment rushes to me again, offering strange escape from another moment—this one that my people have wanted since the beginning of our times.
“I go, but before I go,” I say, “give me the death moment.”
“Dumbest soul, starved yourself today? Your hunger for death so fierce. You are truly one of your dark-dreaming kind in their—”
“Give! Please....”
“I say no. Perhaps you will get it soon, perhaps never. If it is given, it will not be before you have greeted the souls inside the bigshinegray. If your kind could see you now, view your craving of a moment deeply trivial in this moment’s light, they would make pieces of your flesh. Go! A day’s swim lies before you.”
The hunger dims. I begin to remember images of who I am, who my people are, why our world is divided into wide territories of lone waitings, why we have been waiting, watching, living at all for so long.
I begin to move my tails, one up, one down, knees not touching. I tuck my head against my chest, arch my shoulders properly, kick harder, and the bright water begins to slip by.
Behind me poundgrayly offers: “I shall move on to tell your kind
