myaamia
Downstream People 10
“Miami”
2300
Under a shiny dome, water flows freely around buildings. We surface in front of a glass “flower-pod” tower. No people or naniki in sight nor sound. We climb onto a deck in the plaza and shift into android Ke Ara, supposedly Earth People. I laugh at Skelele’s shock. We are a composite of all kinds of ethnic features, in a brownish skin-tone cladding.
[WTF!?]
The central courtyard is a huge mall and in there, some of these strange Ke Ara are moving around with robot naniki, visiting stalls around a pond feature. Everywhere, everything is tagged with a digital code, including the Ke Ara droids and their robots, and now that we focus through our built-in lenses, we can see their QR data and price tags.
A large code reads: Myaamia Heritage Festival.
We’re drawn to a stall selling digital naniki. Here the extinct ones are the highest priced as “new” shiny things. No words or sensations run through our plastic blood even though I search for them.
In hologram bubble packaging with their virtual environments, the digital naniki look alive and real. But the seller texts onto our screens that they can be turned on and off, [and you can learn about what they need, to be kept “alive”]. We know, it’s what they needed to survive.
Caddisflies, with their ornate, jewel-like larvae, spider cave and all sorts of crayfish. A frecklebelly catfish, staring with its muddy eyes. Sherman’s short-tailed shrew and a cotton rat imitate cute stuff-toy keychains. Most popular — Chamberlain’s dwarf salamander, a shiny S with short legs, and the Florida Keys mole skink, glistening in its sleekness with its reddish almost-glowing tail. The small, striped mud turtle and Florida red-bellied turtle, with ornate neck and bright boat-belly shell, are popular too. They are polished to look like pristine “gems.”
[Maybe they’re popular because they look and move like robots too,] Skelele texts.
[But here!] The seller blinks the highest-priced ones at us — the South Florida rainbow snake, with its pink, red, yellow, black shiny stripes, and the Florida fairy shrimp, with its legs like beautiful feathers rippling, as if it’s swimming upside down.
Saddest of all is the tall Florida sandhill crane, so regal with its bright red forehead, elegant long neck, and short tail, oblivious to its artificiality and enveloping bubble. No words.
We stumble away and end up in a small crowd gathered around a massive turtle robot. A Ke Ara is telling a story by projecting a hologram of an Indigenous elder onto the shell of the turtle.
“This is the traditional story of Onondaga. The Earth on Turtle’s Back. Long ago, before the Earth was here, all was water …”
One of the soulless Ke Ara sounds a flute. Amazingly, the notes become a pair of live whooping cranes. Are they holograms?
The cranes soar up to the glass ceiling,
Kar-r-r-r-o-o-o-o! Kar-r-r-r-o-o-o-oo!
diving sharply into the pond.
Without hesitation, Skelele and I dive in too.
As the cranes become giant otters, we are changing into our Ni Ara selves again. Relieved. The otters lead us under the floor to an exit.
A foul exit. Concrete walls give way to a swamp of the dead roots of cabbage palms and red mangroves. Stumps stick up through the slimy water.
We slow and tighten.
Breaking surface, all we can see is a wreck of a dead swampland. Grey Spanish moss swinging from broken trees and a large crow, with a white human head, turns to look at us.
In this maze of devastated everglade rivers of grass, we must keep moving. Not knowing where to, which way. There is no feeling in these waters, nothing to sift or sense. Only slime. It is choking and Skelele tugs me on.
CAAAWWW!! CAAAWWW!!
Jim Crow swoops down and Skelele catapults up to meet him, almost standing for a while
on the water, defiantly.
And the crow pivots away.
“They are afraid of my people,” Skelele says,
and he folds with me below the surface.
Fear is everywhere.
I am sinking, and something
something is flowing differently.
“Manatee River.” I can barely tell him.
“So where are they?”
Ocama. The gentle flow whispers.
It is faint. Cre-a-a-a-k, cre-a-a-a-a-a-k, from ahead where the river spreads into a brown bay. But I am not feeling better.
There are more pipes again.
Murky Tampa depths are weighing us down and now the manatee squeaks are piercing, pitching up to the sound of a flute. And SCREAAAAAAEEEECHHHH, we are sucked forward, vacuumed into a huge pipe with the screeching. Deafening. Pumped at top speed, mangled along what seems forever but never, never, please. We are flung out of the broken edge, high up into the air, sailing over the remnants of a flooded city.
Sail me, sea me
Freeing the air
With Skelele, I fly
Nothing else
Now
No place, just us
Flowing through airstreams
Through his rivers of air
Through my hair
Now clouds
That look and sea
Through me
A lightness
More silver than a flash
Keeping me. Turey toca
Keep me in air
As much as water
Is me
We can’t help but look down because I am sinking and Skelele is staying close. He hasn’t changed into his sky self, and we are our own flying fish, soaring. He smiles at me and in his smile, I see through my fear.
I see through
Everything
A thousand horizons
Before time
And after, I see
Wind mingling water
Lifting my breath
The tiniest droplets
Into the skies
I feel it
I see how light
Makes me look
Up here
Floating, I am magic-coloured like Skelele. Like the bubbles I chased as a child in sparkling surf and the rainbows we trailed through on shallow-clear days. The feeling of coloured air passing through me is my heart, My Heart. But water brings air back down to Earth, and we are falling, falling to this lost city. With a note.
There it is, we both hear it.
A sound from Earth People that defies their home.
It is coming up to meet us, invisibly
homing and climbing.
There are two now, heading back down with us.
“Our naniki,” we both say at the same time
smiling as another note joins our fall.
They are blue notes
dropping with us
groaning a mournful, haunting
melody
falling.
In this free fall, like a free dive, in our flying fish selves with our naniki the bluest notes — Skelele’s kora-like beauty and elegance is clear. It is the quality of ethereal music you can never forget. Lag phrasing. The transcendence of element and time. I can hear his core harmony in innocent timing with the blue notes.
We drop
Our air and water
Now acid
Cutting the sounds
To pieces