Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(13) The Tribe

The little girl doesn't look like she plans to leave anytime soon. At least she hasn't bitten me yet. She signs something. It's vaguely familiar, but also saturated with the messiness of childhood in a way that robs me of any ability I might have had to decipher it.

"I don't know your language," I sign back. She tips her head. I feel like a beached shark, pinned by curious, staring eyes. I half expect her to produce a stick from somewhere and poke me.

She fidgets for a bit, then points to my belt and tips her head again. I light one hand to show her the twisted sea-fan strands and my dagger sheath. Her eyes go wide. She reaches out a hand, then pulls it back like she's remembered it's not polite to touch strangers' things. I sigh and tilt the sheath out for her to look at. She touches it like it will melt beneath her fingers. Her whole face registers her surprise. This must be a novelty for someone who's lived their entire life seeing nothing but Nekta, other Kels, and featureless open water.

I put my finger where her hand was and poke the sponge, which is firm enough to protect me from my dagger, but squishy enough to poke. The little girl copies me, and her mouth falls open. We poke it together several times, and she gives me a dimpled smile. She jets away without warning. A few heartbeats later, I have not one but three small children poking my dagger-sheath. One gets bored faster than the others, and rocks back and forth in the water, watching me instead. They raise a shy hand and mimic my hair.

I should have seen this coming when I saw them with the other adult who's already awake. I'm being treated like one of the Kels, and the fact that even the children do that is more than a little unnerving. As for my hair, I would normally offer someone a broken finger or two for trying to touch it. Bored children might be another matter. Not that I would ever let anyone in my village know that. But I really do like children.

The little girl appears again. She mimics something with her own head, then points to mine. Yup, she wants to style my hair.

On a scale of interference and damage control, this could go kind of well or very, very badly. I highly doubt these children have any sense of the ins and outs of hair that isn't like theirs no matter how they see me, and from the little I see anyone dealing with theirs, it's got a lot less life of its own than mine does. The child who asked first joins the girl. They poke each other and giggle, then both give me begging eyes. The little girl then signs to the boy. He jets to join them, and grins shyly.

I relent. All three children jet around behind me again, and I'm set upon by tiny hands. I sign for them to be gentle, and they are. My hair is also soft enough that I'm not as worried about breakage as I would have been if we were on land. There's some kind of an argument—hands keep vanishing from my head to sign furiously at each other—then they all descend on my hair.

I didn't really have to worry. Their "styling" doesn't go very far, though they have a lot of fun. From what I can tell, my tight curls baffle them too much for them to actually figure out what to do with my hair; there's a lot of pushing it down or gathering it up, then releasing it to watch it spring back again. By the time the other Kels have awoken, I have the second child on my lap, braiding their unlawfully soft, floppy mop into cornrows while the little girl and little boy attempt to use all four of their hands as a hair tie for a single puff at the back of my head.

A Kel comes to find me with food. He's older than I am—maybe in his mid twenties if Kels age the same way humans do—and an objectively good-looking specimen. I'm a little embarrassed to be caught having such a good time with the children, but he doesn't seem perturbed by it. He hands out the squid he's carrying to the kids, then jets away, presumably to get more. The child in my lap looks at the squid in each of their hands and offers me one. When I decline, they lift my hand, close my fingers around the food, and push it back towards me. Sharing, it seems, is indoctrinated here at a young age. We eat our squid together, making faces at one another.