A SMALL SIDEWAYS STEP

When we saw them first, throwing themselves into the water, gasping and choking, lungs filling, finally dying, we could not understand what had happened. We did not know, and still do not, what horror brought them fleeing from the dry centers of their world to the edges of ours. There were thousands upon thousands, choking the shores, some being trampled and dying before they even reached the water.

From the stillness and the deep dark, we watched. We mourned for them. We wanted to save them. I wanted to save them. My own crowded around me, begging in their soft burbling voices, pleading with their golden eyes. “Please, please, go get them. Bring them back to us!”

I could not. My own darted about, silvery, glittering, - enormous fish with huge wedding-ring eyes. They were almost indistinguishable to me now, one from another. I could only recognize my first. He had been a slim-hipped boy with platinum hair and bright sparking blue eyes, and I had loved him. I had taken him by the hand and said to him, “Look, how easy. Come with me.” And he had come, unquestioning, his arms and heart open to me. Even now, I could see his eyes in the flash of his scales, could see his lithe body in the powerful stroking of his fins. I still loved him.

I gathered my own around me, stilled their desperate entreaties. They hovered, almost motionless, quiet. We were almost always quiet, by then. But the hundred thousand gasping dying people had reminded us how to talk and for my own, how to plead.

Before we were fish, we could fly. And before we could fly, we were as the gasping dying ones are now. Until one day, like a small sideways step, from one place to another, I realized that I could fly. I took my platinum-haired lover by the hand and leapt off the end of the pier, and he came with me, so easy, swooping up into the sky. We glided on the air, at first giddy with happiness and excitement and later, with a strange sort of peace, a floating distant joy.

For a long time, we floated, wrapped up in each other, lazy with contentment. Until one day, another small sideways step, and again I took my lover’s hand and said “Come with me.” And we began a long gliding dive into the ocean. We sliced into the water like bright knives, leaving no wake and no foam at our entry. As we slid down into the dark, I saw my lover’s skin begin to silver and flash, and by the time we had settled here, just above the deep sands, our transformation was complete. We admired each other’s gold-ringed eyes, our flashing skins. We floated in the deep green light.

Later, I swam upward, long powerful strokes of my tail, and finally burst through the surface, and found I could fly again. I flew fast and jubilant, and by the time I landed once more upon the earth, my silvery skin had long since vanished and my legs walked confidently on the dirt. I found someone else, took a hand in my own, said “Come with me.” And after flight and float, we returned to the sea, to our glittering dark where my lover waited. Over the long years, I gathered them one by one. I waited, for a time, for others to join us. But none came, except with me.

We lay in the dreaming deep dark, waiting. Sometimes we were so still that only the barest flutter of gill belied our life. Sometimes our fins stroked hard, water flowing from us upward to create rippling and waves upon the surface. Sometimes we floated fin to fin, and other times the currents and tides and our own needs took us far away from each other.

But now we gathered and watched in horror as men and women rushed to the waters, screaming, pushing into the shallows, tramping each other, racing from the centers of the dry ground towards the edges, driven by terrible need. But none of them had flown, and so none of them could live. We watched them, those that got to the water, taking huge gulps of it into fragile lungs, thrashing in despair, dying.

My own did not understand. My heart broke for them as they swam around me, burbling pleas and cries. They formed a spiral, circling and circling me in pain and bewilderment. Couldn’t I go out and take as many as I could, taking them one by one by the hand and bringing them to the sea? Couldn’t I save them from whatever horror crept over the land?

I stilled their desperate voices and calmed their hopeless spinning. I called them to me and explained what I had seen, in my first sideways step, before I took my blue-eyed lover’s hand.

The men and women crashing even now into the ocean would die.

Our task was not to save them. Our task was to wait, here in the half-light, until the surface of the earth was barren and empty, all life long lost. Then we would start to move our powerful fins and tails, we would create small ripples and great thrashing waves on the surface, and send sprays of water high into the air, where they would catch the rays of the still-burning sun. We would stir and stir the water with our fins and tails, bringing air to water and water to air. Our stirring would throw together tiny bits of water and air and matter, and small things would begin to move and grow in our deep world.

And then we would wait. We would wait until another small sideways step showed us that it was time. Time to take our spark of humanity and leave the ocean with it, to walk upon the land once again. So it has always been, I told them. It has always been that humans crawled from the ocean into the first blush of a new world, all the makings of them in the smallest part of life. It was for us, as it had always been, to first take to the sky, and then to slice down into the ocean, and to wait. To wait in the dreaming dark until we are needed.

I did not tell them then, but still they knew. They knew that once we crawled into the sun of the newly-begotten world, we could never go back. We would give up our flashing silver skins and our golden eyes and the soft dark rhythms of the deep. We would leave behind our memories of the bright golden world where we once flew. And that too would be part of humanity, the inarticulate and hopeless longing for something lost, but not remembered.