Every night she'd imagine them, bodies and wings arched vertical,
alighting on some deserted coast a hundred miles away. Once
landed - the sun swallowed up by night - their bodies would change,
their feathers would give way to flesh - pale,
ivory skin, like the back of a swan's wing. Wild salt winds would whip
against the shore, driving her brothers to
shelter from the storms. There they huddled out the night, translating
a long-accustomed language of
earthly honks into a grammar of words and phrases, shaping their fable
into fact: boys, not birds; men, not swans.
Sometimes she wondered what good her toil would ever spin. How could
fabric of coarse nettles ever warm such
incarnations? How could her solemn silence ever give speech to the long
sharp bills of muted beasts? Her fingers had grown
gnarled, her voicebox rusted. As she was driven to the pyre, the whole
city turned out to watch. She sat, bending and binding with iron
needles, the final sleeve of the final shirt straining towards a cuff.
The rest she had draped across her arms and shoulders,
enrobed in leaves and twine. They bound her to the stake. As the faggots
caught alight, she felt the jagged nettle smooth outward into wings; the
trumpeters called and she raised her bill to the sky. They'd come for her -
the broken spell - the girl fell to ash, the bird rose - a perfect swan song.
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