lightning bank

CARIBBEAN SEA BASIN 2050

The sea is my sky. This is where I float, dream, travel, and thrive. The sea is in me and I am the sea.

Kissing the air of a brilliant sunrise, washing my face in the softness — a pelican plunges suddenly and something else follows from the air. In my water, a churning and thrashing, clouds of bubbles foam and the pelican is changing into … a flying fish.

Grey feathers float out of the cloud and the flying fish is still, suspended.

He looks stunned.

White feathers stream out of the churning bubbles and that thing from the air is in there. It is changing too. Into something … like me, someone. The movement stops, and as the bubbles and feathers clear, the most beautiful Ni Ara is staring at the flying fish.

Suspended in shock, they stare at each other. The flying fish’s fin-wings flutter and the Ni Ara moves his arms, staring at his fin-hands. He, it is a he, looks at his long rippling legs and fin-feet and he waves them. The flying fish, his naniki, darts around him and he spins around. His shoulder and dorsal fins pop out, surprising him. He laughs and flips. When he spins and stops, his iridescent segments make magic-coloured water. His fins stretch out and retract, the water flows through him, like me, and he is the sea, the most beautiful form of water and being, Ni Ara, and growing, like me.

Now he spots me. I can’t quite fit behind the brain coral and, out of all of the fishes in the sea, my naniki is a bold parrotfish — gawking brazenly at him. His flying fish darts up to my parrotfish. They touch beaks and recoil instantly. But we are smiling at each other, swirling around, fast as fish but magic as lightning and free as air.

“Skelele,” he says. “My family are Sky People, you would call them Turey Ara. My ancestors, Eniyan Orun — the ‘people who could fly,’ back to Africa.”

“And yet you are here,” I say. I hang upside down for a second and he circles me. “I am related to the First People of this region, of water, Ni Ara. And I, Amana, should be training.”

“Yes, we should!”

But we chase each other in a fluid vortex and a gaggle of bright sergeant major fish and baby Ni Ara crowd out of the reef to cheer us on. They flutter and bounce around like butterflyfish, dizzy with laughter, making us laugh. It is as if all the colours of the reef are laughing, playing with us. Brightest fluorescent yellow flashes, greenest weed waving.

Speeding, silver tickers fly by. Skelele almost catches my hair. His is sea sponge, but my hair is seaweed, moving like squid tentacles. I can, I will catch his fin but … my moray sense tingles, I stop.

My elders and the guardians are approaching. They glide without effort. Acres of ocean in each one, the wisest. With their octopi, squid, and eel naniki, they know everything without having to ask or speak. Barracuda silver flashes around us as they gather and the laughing babies are hushed, hiding behind the leader’s big grouper. Bibi and Baba are among them, as parents for everyone, not just me. I signal my mother, but she doesn’t signal back. Her beautiful ocean gar does though. The quiver runs through me reassuringly.

My elders look up. In the air above my sea, high up, a V-formation of Turey Ara trail away. Their angel wings of see-through feathers and flowing muscle segments spread wide. Their bodies disappear and reappear as they fly, changing colours to match the morning sky. A scoop of pelicans follows them, also in V-formation. A Turey Ara leader is at the head of the V, old and powerful, with a flowing mane of white clouds.

“Skelele is almost ready. He is playful but he has extraordinary transformational ÿê-owópàrö skills. You must be proud of your abarimaa, male child.” His voice is like the wind in your ears above water, a hoarse Yoruba whisper.

Skelele’s chest glows with an orange tattoo as he watches his father and elders disappear.

“We speak a mixture of African languages,” he whispers to me. “Igbo, Yoruba, Twi, Akan …”

I signal him silence as he’s encircled by barracudas and my mother glides forward, followed by her elegant naniki.

“Guarico,” she summons me, and her voice ripples through me like a water drum.

Every time.

As we move away from Lightning Bank, the strongest and fastest guardians and their barracudas guide Skelele into the deeper blue for training. His flying fish is busy keeping up. My parrotfish keeps looking back as I follow my mother and trainers along the reef.

We flow over unending pipes. Blue harmony stroking through us and with us. Flashes of brilliance may be fish, but are also a silver sun stoking this blue, daggering, dazzling its silky depths. Our soothing movement forward through this warm Caribbean Sea, over ghosts of gorgonians, elkhorn, and brain corals, is a sometimes blurry but seamless journey.

The flex and strength of fins, a scaled curve slipping glimpses of iridescence, sliding with currents that match trade winds above. Now on the surface there’d be ripples, chippy and sharp, streaking the way ahead. Undersurface, a starry dappled sheet, always billowing, swaying.

A hum, wider than this sea, carries us forward. Echoing with the crackle of shrimp and seabeds, it is part of the light and liquid roll. Unlimited, soundless to us, it is a stretch of sight and sensing, vast as this blue.

And as we glide with our manta rays, our shadows trigger the light lines. They flicker dimly, flashing ropes of pain and hope. The light of our ancestral migration patterns still senses our presence and guides us. This was the path of the “Black Caribs” from Hairouna2 to Honduras. For us — a straight line toward the Great Blue Hole,3 always, in silence.

• • •

It is the longest day this time, and even though my friend and her clownfish try to make me laugh, I can’t help but see Skelele’s colours and movement in everything. And long to see him again. He is out there in this blueness, sweeping forward also, I know.