The Strangling of the Swan

The first time I saw her, she was bright white against the layered greens of estuary, floating on the northwest side of where the river bends sharp. Her whiteness was unmistakable. I thought a leucitic goose at first and looked around for a late autumn flock. I crawled down a narrow deer trail to the water’s edge and made my way up behind a wall of cattails. I could hear my own breathing and felt a beastliness in my shoulders, my eyes narrowing. She was the only thing moving on the water. To my left, a great blue heron stood frozen hopeful in the shallows, a leg pulled up in anticipation. White alder and willow along the east banks, a few Cypress bent low by centuries of wind. She was rising and falling over the laps of water, that slow pull in and out made by the tides, now diluted of salt and wave.

I watched her patiently. Coots circled her, then retreated. As she took to different directions, she seemed effortless. I imagined her black legs and webbed feet, scaled and extending under the water, reaching out to move her body across the dark blue. A secret undulation beneath her curve.

I walked home, lost in wildered thought. This watershed had not born a surprise of this nature outside of seasonal changes witnessed my first year here. I arrived with my girls as babes to ease the memory of their mother, even though I couldn't shut my eyes without seeing her pale skin. I brought the world of the estuary up around their necks like a blanket at bedtime. Raised them to understand the morning croaks of the ravens, a sky held clock. To know that the great horned owls are the first to lay eggs in spring, that migrations mark autumn while mushrooms mark the falling of a tree. I had seen a great many things I could not dream of; egret rookeries ambushed by eagles, a three-legged deer swimming to the island during low tide, tracks vanishing along the mudflats and a feather left behind. But I had never seen a swan.

My eldest of twin daughters was baking bread, silently moving through the kitchen, dusted flour handprints on her hips. Her smaller sister, at the fire, chatting to me as the light from my screen reflected off my face, the brightest light in our cabin. My eyes never meeting hers, I knew the pauses to uh-huh through. I contorted my face to make it seem as if my work was critical to our very survival, that conversation was an imposition, hoping she would notice. The rabbit hole was taking up more and more of my senses until I couldn’t hear her at all. Mute swans had long necks, an orange beak. That wasn’t it. Her beak was black and slender, her feathers like fur along her neck.

That night I lay in bed, feeling put upon by this creature so alone on the river. The abandonment that was drawn through her looped windpipe agitated me. I wondered who she was, and how we got there, me behind the cattails and her floating on and away from me. Did she drop down from her drift or did they lift off without her? She seemed uniquely vulnerable and yet calm, as if she were meant to be alone. But I knew that wasn’t true. I am not sure if I went to sleep that night or just became more awake with daybreak.

There is a breath that exists between the moment I watch my daughters ride away on the school bus and the moment that I turn around to walk home. It’s a release and a gathering all at once, where relief makes way for despair. Sometimes I don’t turn, and I find something mocking about the yellow of the school bus with the big black lettering, the children waving, prompting me towards solitude.

For a month, I made it my routine to stop and watch the swan before I returned home. I think she knew I was watching her. I didn’t have to hide. I sat on the muddy bank and openly gazed at her. Mostly, she tended to her wings. Once, I saw her plunge her neck into the water and come up with her mouth full. She looked right at me as she swallowed, the thick wet rubber of frog body descending down her throat. We did not blink. I have to tell you, I was the first one to advert my eyes. Once I did, she pulled one wing out, stretched it slowly towards me, then folded it along her body as she turned in the water, floating away.

I decided to tell the girls about the swan. They would love her, of course. We talked about bringing her home, introducing her to our pond. All the baked bread that we couldn’t eat would be fed to her by hand. Our walls would be draped with her form on paper, starting with crayons, graduating to acrylics. Sometimes, we imagined, the swan would enter our home through the sliding glass doors, and as we sat facing the fire, she would extend her wings out in greeting before settling down by the basket of firewood. We felt a collective want for her.

The next morning, I heard her before I saw her. One call, deep and guttural, low and extended across the water. I had a net looped into my belt, a knife in my pocket in case she became entangled.

Walking across the estuary is slower than you would expect. Maybe you have had a dream where you are running slowly from impeding death, or you can recall those summer days where it was all legs and bathing suit bound crotches underwater at the community pool, and you would try walking across the deep end. This was slower. The pull of the river and the algae slicked mud extended fingers around my ankles. My arms were of little use, I tried to keep them steady as I approached the swan.

To be next to her in the water was to feel her size above me. I could see the thickness of her legs, how the black of her eyes gave way to the black beak. Her wings were intoxicatingly white, all preconceived and likely wrong notions of purity in front of my face. As I approached, she lifted her wings, the crook giving way to an angel like display of feathers. A swooshing sound in my face. Her warning.

If I am being honest, I think I always knew I wanted to kill the swan. I can’t tell you it was because she was so beautiful. You would think that, kind of like that poem where Bukowski dips his head into the flower and has to come back the next day to hack the damn thing down. But, that’s not what it was. I would have kept her forever if she was only beautiful. It was her un-clippable wings. I felt an undoing in my shoulders.

I dove down, submerged, eyes wide open in the river. Silver fish exploded from my feet in every direction. A silence deepened in my ears as I saw her egg-shaped body roll back, her wing tips frantically pushing at the water. With one hand I grabbed a leg, the other extended in front of me as I shot up.

I was an inverse bolt of lightning from the depths of the sea.

Take a moment to view me from the cattails. A man walking through water, diving down, rising up like a tiger, his thick paw encircling her neck.

View me from the eye of the raven, above. My shark form and then the sound of water cutting open against her wing beats. Swan hiss filling the sky.

Feel the connection between the palm of my hand and the strangeness of her long neck. Feeling at once the bones, the tubing, the sound of throat between my fingers.

I thought of my daughters and what they deserved. As I pulled the net from my belt, I could hear them asking me question after question. Their needs were pushing up into my chest, barreling me forward, my eyes closed as she took my shoulder in her beak.

In her resistance I felt my grip tighten.

My body extended like a cross. Star like droplets everywhere. An egg rolled from the swan into the river and cracked, my daughters were born. They screamed the cry of babies, soft fat bodies. Heat from their birth seeped in the four directions, small hands grasping at clouds, their mouths open, searching for breasts.

Shadows crossed the water. Looking up, it was not clouds, nor breasts, but a thousand swans, black feet tucked tight, necks extended. One overlapped the other, like intricate origami paper falling from the sky. Lower and lower the ballet flew until they were upon me. The sound of the beating was rageful, their beaks laid upon my flesh.

I felt the lifting off like the pulling out of a tooth or the weeding of a plant. The estuary had me by the ankles, the swans had me by the shoulder, neck, ear. We flew up higher and higher till the water snapped back, releasing me. My daughters below, floating each in half an eggshell. A small road, a yellow bus. The expanse of cattails, swaying, the heron paused. My home, the empty pond, smaller and smaller as we gained height. We passed the raven, the river spilling into the ocean becoming a miniature diorama. The cut of land against ocean extending north and south, the continent bending. We passed my want for the bird, my knife falling from my pocket into the clouds below. I closed my eyes, seeing my wife, and pulled her image around my neck, like a blanket.

Kelly Gray (she/her) resides in Northern California amongst the tallest and quietest trees in the world, deep in fire country. She's been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her debut book of poetry, 'Instructions for an Animal Body,' is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in the summer of 2021. Kelly's writing has most recently been published in The Atticus Review, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, The Nervous Breakdown, and elsewhere. You can read more of her work at writekgray.com.

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