Drowning - Judy Albietz

“Can you save these fish?” Bakari asked his mother, Isis. They were both standing on the edge of the Ebony River, where dozens of fish had thrown themselves up on the rocks. Other fish lay dead on their sides in the mud.

Tears running down her cheeks, Isis said, “I don’t know. I’ll try.” A medicine monkey, she had been trained to heal all living creatures. She knelt down and picked up one of the fish which was flopping in the mud. Then she gently placed it back in the water but it jumped back to the riverbank. Its gills looked as if they were trying to suck in air. Desperately trying to keep alive, its bright colors were already fading. Isis reached her other hand into the rushing water to sense if something in the water was killing the fish. With sad eyes, she turned back to her small son. She could tell from the look on his face that this too was a scene he had seen before—in one of his visions. “The water looks and feels clear. There’s plenty of dissolved oxygen in the water for the fish. And I can’t detect poison—or anything that could have caused this,” she said.

Isis then sat back on the muddy reeds as she gently held the dying fish in both hands. Bakari stayed at her side while she hummed the notes of an ancient healing melody. Then Bakari saw them—images swirling around them. These were faces in his mother’s medicine vision. She was linking her mind to her Medicine Monkey ancestors. Bakari at first was scared that his growing powers now enabled him to share her visions. Then he felt a calm warmth spread over him. He knew it was his mother’s heart reaching out to shield him.

Isis stroked the fish, willing it back to life, but finally she stopped humming when she saw the fish was now still in her hands. She walked over to the river’s edge and bent over to place it back down with the others. Then, wrapping her arms around Bakari, she said, “Something very wrong is happening. These fish are jumping out of the river and dying. They can’t breathe out of the water because they have gills, not lungs. But for some reason they think they can’t stay in the river so now—here on land—they’re drowning in the air.”