The White Cygnet
CW/TW: Connotations of suicide and self-harm. Explicit depiction of violent death in animals. Everyone thinks that I'm dead. I don't know why. I'm not dead.
It doesn't change the fact that every time I meet someone for the first time since my 'death', they are surprised to find that I'm alive; breathing, veins and a working brain. They touch my wrists and feel my pulse with a look of horror at my blinking face. I got used to it, eventually.
What I couldn't get used to was the thought that I must've been dead at some point. For the world to all believe the same thing at the same time, it must've been true. But I don't remember dying. Nobody reported on my death in the newspaper so it can't have been in any way spectacular or theatrical. The only things that were written about me was the fact that I was miraculously still alive again somehow and a footnote obituary. When I ask people why they think I'm dead, they never know how or why I died or when I came back. My mother doesn't know or doesn't want to say.
I went back to my bedroom and nothing looked familiar. There was a shoebox underneath my bed filled with fingernails and picked scabs. All the decor was orange and white. I hate orange because I hate all things that are orange; pumpkins, carrots, oranges. I don't know who put this here. It would never have been someone like me. There was a picture of a band that I didn't like and me with a boy that I didn't recognize. The boy was in a heart-shaped frame. The other boy was definitely me. It couldn't be argued. I was looking at my face.
It was ugly. I had blemishes around my forehead, an up-turned nose, pointed ear-lobes and ungainly hair that stuck out in disparate patterns, uncombed. I was smiling in the picture too. I had crooked teeth and one missing on my left side. I felt my tongue press up against where that teeth would be and it was in fact, missing. When did I lose that?
On the middle of the windowsill was a small wooden statue of a bird. I don't know much about birds but it was white with blue on the wings, long legs and a long and narrow beak. It sat perched with one leg cocked like a flamingo atop a small, white and square base. The base read "Cigogne Blanche".
I didn't like the way it was looking at me. I felt watched. It knew something about me but wouldn't say, even though it was just a small wooden statue of a bird with no life inside it whatsoever. Despite this, I was slow to pick it up and feel it. One could see from a great distance that it was poorly painted whittled wood even if the black dots for eyes weren't a dead giveaway. I couldn't bear to take my eyes off of it.
Then, it spoke to me.
"I was there when you died." It said. The bird spoke with a croaking whisper like it had smoked a lot when it was younger. The mouth never moved; the sound was coming from inside the wooden bird's stomach as though it were a radio. I wanted to strive forward and take the beast apart and find the speaker inside.
"Don't move another inch." The White Cygnet croaked. "It comes to us all."
"What does?" I ask it in return. The bird's carved skull moved it's head closer. It's black holes furrowed and legs bent, I was at it's mercy. The White Cygnet flew from it's stand and attempted to stand on my head. The foul, crusty talons splintered my scalp and pierced my skin. I took a tumble and fell backwards on an unfamiliar hardwood floor. The Cygnet was sat with a heavy grip on the spongey flesh in my belly.
"The realization that you were once unrecognizable from your former self. No-one knows you anymore. You don't know you anymore. Therein lies the rebirth. It's just a question if you can handle the trauma, the emergence of yourself again but only this time, you are alive enough to remember being born. No womb is incasing you so no one is making you do it. You have to be the one to do it.
"This time, you have to crawl out of your jail cell, shed your skin and become a new person and, like childbirth, those who fail die trying. People are going to remember you again if your existence is enough for them. It seems cruel but if your run of human endeavor on the Helix is not enough to create a registered conscience in the great nucleus of mankind then you do not exist.
"I watched your death slowly in this bedroom and your parents already had plans to make it a spare bedroom. Did you know that?" The White Cygnet stopped to scratch the side of it's face. The added pressure of the single clawed foot on my sternum drew blood but it carried on talking.
"You died because you weren't drinking water. Your kidneys failed and you weren't brave enough to tell your parents or you just didn't care enough about your life to easily rectify it and so, it got worse. Do you feel that?" The claw wriggled inside the now open wound. "It doesn't feel like pain, does it? Because you don't care. Pain is good for us; it reminds us that we're alive. We can at least feel."
The White Cygnet squeezed my nose with it's beak and it was not wooden. It drew blood from the bridge of my nose and broke it.
"Do something about it." I couldn't. In a quick jolt, the Cygnet stabbed at my eye with it's beak and I saw red. Blood filled my vision in my non-lazy eye. There was no thought in my brain. Just impulse.
I grabbed the animal by its throat and snapped it's neck. I threw it against the orange paint on my wall until it's wings stopped flailing. I watched it flop down on the skirting board with loose feathers wafting down shortly afterwards. I rubbed my eyes.
Once my vision returned, my chest seemingly with no more injuries anywhere, I got up and looked at the mess that I had made.
But there was no dead bird.
Instead what lay leaning up against my wall was the rotted carcass of a young adult man with long, scraggly hair, thin and black rectangular glasses and a wiry beard. The man's face had got a greenish blue from his ailments. His stomach had exploded and maggots were living in it. Cuts were on his wrists and legs like a tally chart. He wore a hospital gown that had holes in where, poking through, were blue electromagnetic stickers I barely recognized him. Barely.
I buried The White Cygnet in the garden, next to the corpse of the last man I once was.