When the whole world you know since childhood is limited to the Sahara desert – the ocean of sand stretching away into the distance – you feel the need for a change, something that would break the monotony of the sand. Nyimak, though born and raised in a nomadic tribe, knowing only the desert missed something else, not fully aware what it could be.
Sometimes she dreamed about a world different than this, about whole tons of water creating the world being the exact opposite of the sand one in which she lived. The water world with fish and amazing green plants trying to grab her by her ankles when she was floating between them, replacing the world of sand. Nyimak was a down to earth woman, hardened by the life conditions she lived in. Even if she remembered those dreams, bringing her amazing freedom she never had, she'd laugh at the silliness of them. The whole world made out of water, ridiculous. How could ever be there so much water, it would have been a terrible waste. Nyimak heard about oceans but she treated the stories about their existence with a grain of salt. She had a hard time to imagine so much water gathered in one place. But this yearning for something, fuelled by the dreams was in her.
The dreams were the only pleasant thing in her life, even if she forgot them after she woke up. She wasn't an attractive woman. She wouldn't have been perceived ugly because the features of her face were relatively regular even if not very finely chiseled if not those two disgusting elevations on both the sides of her neck. The outgrowths disfigured her since childhood. She was born with them and although the people from her tribe got used to them, there weren't too many times when she forgot about them. Sometimes when she dared to touch them, she thought about the world made out of water, she didn't know why. Maybe it was a form of escape from the world in which she was an ugly woman with a disfigured neck to another one in which she'd have finally found desired freedom where nobody would ever pay attention to her ugliness. Of course, those were just fantasies – no one can ever live in the water world, they'd drown instantly, whether they'd be pretty or not.
But those fantasies buoyed her up, making an anchor she could cling to when living in the world of monotonous sand stretching away into the horizon became too difficult. Especially when one year she got really ill. It wasn't the outgrowths taking her beauty away which turned out to be a cancer because they didn't. it was just a pneumonia she got – the nights in a desert are really cold, colder than ocean waters. Nyimak fought for many days but her efforts weren't strong enough to defeat death.
She was buried the next day and the sand of the desert covered the memories of Nyimak – the Sudanese woman who due to the weird whim of the X-Gene in her genetic equipment made her grow gills on the both sides of her neck.
