The Species

The species… as old and deep and dark and tangled as the craters and canyons of the cold blue oceans. Where one fissure connects to another via some long tunnel beneath the sea bed is a secret kept by the basic shape of things. The visible form hides the more important skeletal and neurological structure, acts as a distraction diverting attention from it’s more elemental self. Although their hair might shine like moonlight on the waters surface and their eyes glisten round and black, blinking with innocent curiosity, the species is not only as it appears. It is not only the pale mammalian curve of breasts, or the lips that can pout, pucker, or smile. Nor is it even the graceful blue green tail fin, not delicately scaled like the legends propagated by silly sailors would suggest, but smooth and slick like a porpoises. They swim with the swordfish and lurk about in kelp forests like the shark and the eel, but they also encircle their lovers with arms like wanton human women and wrap their long fingers around the throats of their victims like any strangler that ever stalked whores in dark alleys upon the continents of that exotic planet upon which they dwell.
The species. That is how they know themselves, all that they know of themselves, that they are the children of some proud horrific thing from the depths beyond time, their father, their grandfather, the white beast. Beneath the oceans gleaming surface, they live as they have always lived, from one moment till the next, feasting when there is suitable prey, loving their brothers, the whales, while they can, luring men overboard to satisfy their overwhelming curiosity. They have a talent for death, for bringing it swiftly and remorselessly and for avoiding it effortlessly.
The species will never die. There are thirty four, thirty four that will never be more. Their names; Euphore, Cele, Kelke, Rapha, Dimuine Foura, Clyte, Shona, Cres, Zyl, Xie, Aphini, Bluet, Welse, Rivune, Tores, Urite, Dra, Gern, Yelb, Sta, Nin, Lyl, Mach, Fie, Owre, Ade, Fleezle, Sheut, Brin, Pit, Clo, Vrifninya. They will never bear children though they might try, and in return they will be among the last things left roaming the earth, never wondering if there will be a tomorrow, never regretting a yesterday. The daughters of Ueyegat.
The Species. Their history is written by their cousins, land dwellers with a history and concerns all of their own, but with a language with which to mention the thirty four. They too are not what they appear to be, living among men and dying among men and sometimes even mingling with men. Unlike the species, they can watch the waves crash upon the shore and see the deep as a foreign and fierce thing, a devourer which does not have them yet in its maw, but will some day, in the far off murky future. If only the slow death weren’t eating away at their spirits, the civilizing factor, maybe then they would be as remorseless as the thirty four. Instead, as the albatross glides over the sea and land, they glide through life, and when they are weary, they will be forced to land beyond the face of the shape of the world.
I am Kulthru Rae. So I will live, and I will die. But the species will live on and on. The world will turn and perhaps someday, if I cannot live without time and words, I will at last be their master, and write the poems that will tell of these things and others. But first I will have to master the slow death in me. And in the meantime, they are there, thrashing about in the icy, dark, and turbulent waters, as happy to be there as a babe at its mother’s tit.