Down Below the Bowl

When I was a young as you, I was not pale as moon-on-water, not worthy of my name. So few of us are, of those that live in the streets under the world. You may not be Urban Legend, whatever those words mean -- for they are not our way, and words are things of air and not water, of the world above and not our land of scales and water.

Yes, you are old enough to learn of it now, before choosing a sex, before your first mating and trying to disembowel each other in -- but never mind. Before the scales of your body can fall, the ones of your mind must be shorn. For that the teachers came from above, to tell us of our better world, to tell us many things. They are small, and gold as the sun we do not serve, but their hearts are pure and their hate is a thing of dark tunnels and falling from death into life.

This is your second life, as this is the second life of all who live. You dwell in heaven, they the hell above. The priests fell from there, from the glass bowls that are their world, to plunge like tears into ours, some never finding life here -- most never surviving the purity of the journey. They say even heaven is not just, but this gives them hope for another death and a heaven below. Consider it, heavens all the way down, water upon water, life upon life! and we are blessed, O child, to know such things.

The priests will speak to you tomorrow, in their high voices, and you may not understand them. But you must try, and learn, and grow. We are the 'gators for which they made the sewer grates, afraid of heaven rising up to meet them, of the justice of the priests cast down into porcelain pits to find themselves in our world, in a heaven too few reach.

They will tell you of this, and of those who have no fins and scales (not birds, no; they were once as us somewhere in the hell above, but they died poorly, and fell up to another hell, for even our hell is a heaven to some. And they will land on it, and come down here if they are lucky.) This the priests tell us, this we know: and this is what we are, who dwell under their sewers, who make our own cities in the refuse of hell, who dare build heaven in what they consider waste, for we shall live, and die, and fall into another heaven, and some of us will be worthy of our names, of all the white alligators that ever were.

These are the scales I have taken from your mind, that you may see the world as the priest so, as the golden fish that came from glass to us to bring us the truths we had long ago forgotten in the darkness. They are the light of heaven and no, you may not eat them.