It doesn’t feel right. Layala’s story isn’t what I expect. I know her feel, the way her soul felt when she was an infant.
But I shake my head to clear the thought. An infant is not the same as a child is not the same as an adult. An infant barely has stories to their soul, and Layala was far too young when I raised her before. Of course she would feel different.
Still, her story is different, ripe with a grief I know I’ve had a hand in. It makes my heart bleed, because it’s a story I understand.
A fisherman lived alone in a hut on a small island of one hundred souls. Every morning, he threw his nets, hoping for a catch that would let him both have a warm meal for the night and something to sell in the market in the morning.
One day, he was out on his boat, his nets cast into the sea. He felt a tug and so went to look to see what was caught in his nets.
He was met with two large eyes and a pleading mouth.
“You are a woman,” he said, and lifted the nets out of the water and dragged the woman from its tangles. “Where did you come from?” he asked her.
“From the sea, from deep in the sea,” she told him.
“But you are a human woman,” he said. “How can that be?”
“I have been cursed by a wicked witch and banished from the sea. She forced me into this skin that breathes the air and not the water I was born in. I was caught in your nets as I was trying to swim to shore.”
“Come home with me,” the fisherman said. “I will make you my wife and I will offer you safety.”
The woman agreed and she went home with the fisherman. The next day, they were wed, and all the people living on the island were invited. There was a meal made of the fish caught by the other fishermen and the spices and herbs their wives grew.
The first year, the fisherman and his new bride lived happily. He took his boat to sea every morning, and she took a long swim and sang to the waters.
But after the first year, the woman grew sad, longing for her family deep under the waves.
“I have to go,” she told the fisherman one day. “I don’t know when I will return.”
“I can’t protect you if you leave,” he told her.
But she only said, “I will protect myself, and before I leave, I will make sure you are blessed with a catch each morning so you will never grow hungry.”
The woman left the fisherman, and for days and weeks, until a year had passed, he mourned her.
On the aniversary of her leaving, the fisherman was out in his boat when he felt a tug in his nets. He glanced over his boat and found his wife caught in them. But her eyes weren’t looking at him this time. They were closed and she wasn’t breathing.
The fisherman pulled his nets in and cut his wife free. He tried to blow breath into her lungs, tried to warm her with his jacket, but she stayed as still as a rock against pounding waves.
“She is dead!” he cried to the sky. “My beautiful wife is dead. She has drowned in the very sea she so loved.”
And so, the fisherman carried his wife back to shore and buried her in a cave where the land and sea kissed. Every night, after he came back from his catch, he visited her, leaving her a bit of his fish as an offering, hoping that one day, through some magic, he would find her again in his nets, her wide eyes staring up at him and a smile on her beautiful lips.
I’m crying at the story, as I feel the pain and longing in it. I swallow the sob of guilt welling up in me, choke back my screams. I touch my child’s body and rub my blood all over her again and again. I wash her body with the sacrifice’s blood. And I write her own soul’s tale over her, sketching the sea, the nets, the fish and the cave the woman was buried in.
I sit back on my heels and survey my child’s body, covered in blood and earth and ash. The blood and the stories are intertwined now, the two souls merged. Now all that’s left is to let steam enter her nostrils and breathe life back into her body.