BY A. ALLAN CHIBI
Copyright is held by the author.
THE MANATEE surfaced just after dusk, her whiskers trembling as the tide brushed past her like an old friend. The river was quiet tonight — the kind of quiet that meant something was about to change.
She drifted toward the mangroves, where moonlight pooled in silver ribbons across the water. She had been waiting for this. Every night for the last seven lunar cycles, she had come to this same bend in the river, listening for the sound she remembered from long ago.
A soft humming.
Not the hum of boats or insects or distant engines.
A human hum — warm, wavering, familiar.
A girl had sung to her once, years ago, when the manatee was still small enough to hide beneath the roots. The shape of the place had changed in ways she didn’t understand, but the humming had not. The girl had leaned over the dock then, hair falling like sea grass, and hummed a tune the manatee had carried with her ever since. A tune that felt like sunlight on her back.
Tonight, the moon rose full and bright, and the manatee lifted her head above the surface. The humming drifted across the water; older now, steadier, but unmistakably the same.
The girl stood on the dock again, grown taller, her voice softer but truer. She hummed the old tune without knowing why, as though something in her bones remembered the rhythm of the river. The tune rose unbidden, the way certain childhood smells return in winter.
The manatee exhaled, a warm plume of breath rising into the night air.
The girl paused. A catch in her breath. She leaned forward and looked over the water. Their eyes met; one pair human, one ancient and dark and full of tides.
The river released its breath.
There was a shift in the moonlight, and the girl smiled. The manatee sank slowly beneath the surface, carrying the tune with her into the deep.
***
A. Allan Chibi is a Canadian writer living in Windsor, Ontario. His short fiction has appeared in House of Long Shadows, Altered Reality Magazine, Infinity Wonders, Tut Social, and The Wise Owl Magazine, among others. He is also the author of two historical fiction novels and two fantasy novels.