There's one rule shared between the island's tribes: don't touch the water. When Cressa-la breaks this law, her world, and body, changes. Sure, change is normal... but when has growing scales ever been normal?
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Watty Award Winner 2015: Best Us...
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By the time the full moon returns, we've received three babies. Most of the time, we don't receive a single child. When we do... they tend to just add to our high mortality rate.
Most of my tribe has grown numb when it comes to losing the children we gain, which, I guess isn't surprising. Personally, I don't want to lose that human characteristic. It's too sad not to mourn over all those potentially great lives gone forever.
Forever. Such a heavy word.
This morning before daybreak, I walk along the tree line at the bottom of the island, water as far as the eye can see. Staring out at the dark horizon, my mind begins to wander to places I try to stay away from, but sometimes the curiosity is too strong to overcome. I've always wanted to know if we were really the only people left on Earth. If this was the only island left untouched by the water we're warned to keep away from, or if there was something else out there, another place to explore.
The water laps at the shore, its foamy whispers trying to lure me into its depths and learn about all that lives inside it. My eyes watch as it pushes and pulls the sand. We aren't allowed to touch it, even if the forest was on fire. I've tried asking why, but the Tribe Leaders would reprimand me and tell me I'd have to wait until I was eighteen to learn. Until I was a Tribe Leader.
Few children are fortunate to live as long as I have. In fact, lately, no one has survived past year two since Lily-flor, but that's because I'm here to protect her. It's my job.
She turns five in a few days and she is the toughest little girl I've ever seen, but that doesn't mean she can fend for herself, just yet. That's why I'm here. The Tribe Leaders assigned me to her to teach me something about the importance of family and of the tribe and to learn about "responsibility". I don't have to provide for her, necessarily; that's my tribe-assigned job—hunting, but instead I'm more of a role-model or a big sister. Don't think I'm old enough to be like a mother to her yet. Tani-mah is the one who cooks for her and gives her a place to live, and until I'm eighteen, Nan-ah has taken up that role for me. Or, at least she did, until I decided I could fend for myself.
When I was a baby, just received, Nan-ah claimed me as hers and she raised me. I know she was really young when that happened, younger than I was when I received Lily-flor five years ago. Our relationship with each other was much like how I am with Lily-flor. Protective. Loving. Caring. Then I started learning how to do things on my own and I drifted away from her. I hardly ever talked to her; I was always busy hunting or trying to study the Tribe Leaders so I could become one of them someday. Tani-mah was the one person I couldn't seem to impress. I'd catch something so terribly hard to hunt and all she'd do is nod. I was the best hunter in this tribe and yet I couldn't get the one person I wanted to accept me to say, "Good job".
In two days, it'll be my seventeenth year on this planet. It will also be a full moon. Which means I had exactly a year from that day before I could try to become a Tribe Leader.
