allegedly fiction

It was foretold that after the Seventh Prophecy, their distant kin, the Two‑Legged, would be given a choice between two paths. What the Two‑Legged did not know was that if they chose wrongly and it led to a scorched earth—as the water‑kin know to be true now—the water that fell from the skies would have nothing left to water. So their home, the lakes and rivers, the seas and the deep waters of salt, would grow deeper and more vast.

We struggled too, as our elders will tell you. Our world here beneath the land of emergent green grasses and trees, beneath the return of the Four‑Legged and Winged Ones to the lower lands, trembled in those days. We did not know if they would ever come back. We did not know who survived the flooding and the submergence of their world. And because the waters are One, each affects the other, salted and fresh alike.

“Do you see the raised image on this container here in my hand?” Oland ran his shimmering aqua‑scaled palm over the embossed fruit stamped at the center of the glass jar. The peaches inside were slightly misshapen but still a soft, pale orange, and when he turned it, the light from the sun far above the cool surface of the deep lake caught and held them.

“Oh yes, I see it!” Chacoo exclaimed, her finned legs kicking up little storms of sand along the lakebed. “What is it?”

Oland hesitated. The word for what it had been in the time‑before sat heavy on his tongue. “It is a peach,” he said at last. “It was a kind of sun‑fruit. They grew on trees that no longer stand above our cove.”

Chacoo’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she turned her head sideways, as if a new angle might answer the twenty questions suddenly schooling through her curious mind.

The weight of the story was in the truth as much as in the telling of it. Oland, now an elder among the merfolk, carried that weight each time he spoke. He had loved telling how, as a young Finling, he grew tired of eating the same food day in and day out. This was during the time when the scorched earth brought changing and severe weather above the surfaces of their watery world. As the surface became submerged, it changed their world below as well. Food was dying off there too.

Before the land grew smaller and smaller under the rising waters, young Oland had once swum up close to a drowning hill where a tree heavy with sun‑kissed fruit now leaned into the lake. In his frustration and rebelliousness, he swam closer, reached up out of the water, and snatched one. It was so bright and tender that the slightest pressure caused the fruit to open and release its essence into the watery world the finned ones inhabited. The water around the fruit turned sweet. It brought a smile to Oland’s face as he discovered its softness, bit into it, and delighted in its flavor.

The rains and storms began again and eventually drowned much of that orchard—and so much more. As Oland grew, he surfaced again and again to see where the lands had sunk, until at last he had to retreat into the deep dark of their lake to escape the Two‑Legged chemicals that seeped in and destroyed their habitat too.

Even in the depths, the remembrance of that peach and of the Two‑Legged—who had once been friends to the finned‑kin—stayed with him. One day Oland swam up to a submerged structure that held row upon row of rusted tins, the foods favored and stored by their distant kin. There, among the fallen shelves, he found this embossed jar of peaches.

“And now, Chacoo, that is how I came to have this container,” Oland said. “Inside you see the fruit, but inside the fruit is the seed. It is my hope to bring it to the emerging Two‑Legged who will return to this healing world, and to re‑establish our kinship by gifting them what they once gifted me, when I was a young Finling.”

Each time he told it, the young ones fell silent, their hearts stretching to hold a world they had never seen. Oland knew that this quiet ache was how their spirits grew strong enough to carry the story forward.

“We are One, and we are all connected—the waters and the lands, and even the air that carries the storms and the sun. We all have the responsibility to care for our home, whether above or below.”

This story was inspired by a dream my husband had (we often discuss dreams) and an assignment for NAS330 @ NMU based on our reading and essay assignment of chapter 3, Mapping Neshnabé Futurity: Celestial Currents of Sovereignty in Potawatomi Skies, Lands, and Waters by Dr. Blair Morseau. Story image created with ChatGPT.