Thoughts on Odile of Swan Lake?
Sometimes, you come home for an extended Christmas vacation—thank god for two vacation days a month—and your father has turned a bunch of the local community college girls into swans. That’s just how life is. You try to be understanding, really; it’s not like you don’t have a couple shitty dates tucked away in your back garden. (They make an unholy noise whenever the wind is high, but they also eat the spider mites, so.)
During the day, you feed the swans-who-are-technically-girls whole wheat bread, because that’s what the internet told you was best for swans. (Cultivated grains, right?) At night, you lend them your high school sweatshirts and old pajama pants, and blow up every air mattress you can beg or borrow from friends. Your father glares at them whenever they try to sit on the sofa, snarling to be quiet during Late Night. One of them, the slender brunette, cries silently.
Afterwards, the girls whisper to one another, and your father retreats to the back patio to smoke a cigar. After the first night—after Odette, who goes by Etta, clutches your sleeve and whispers, can you get us out of here?—you go out to join him.
“What exactly was your plan here, dad?” you ask, and Rothbart, the poster child for single-father assholery, grunts and goes on smoking.
You get up at four the next morning, in order to make the swans a human breakfast while they’ll still appreciate it. “Thank you,” Etta says when you hand her a plate of runny eggs, almost-burnt toast. She’s pretty, in a small-town coed sort of way. In the hazy, artificial light of the kitchen, her eyelashes are fine and pale against her cheeks, and it makes you think of something grown in the dark, a flower that will never bloom.
“Yeah, well,” you say, giving Etta an extra slice of bacon. “Merry Christmas.”
You call your boss the twenty-sixth, and tell him that your father’s had some health issues, you’re going to need FMLA. He tells you not to worry about it, just make sure to let HR know.
Outside the window, the swans are huddled together on the half-frozen pond in your backyard, their heads bent together like lovers. You can’t help admiring the elegant curve of those long, white necks, how lovely they are, set against the grey slate of the sky and the shadows of the skeletal trees. They’re trembling—you didn’t even know swans could get cold.
You tell your boss you’ll keep him updated.
The missing posters are all over town, once you know to look. Pretty, white—Rothbart’s gotten stupid and started breaking his own rules—Midwestern girls. Cornsilk hair, braces-trained smiles. Some of their photographs show them in cheerleader outfits, band uniforms. Another stupid, sloppy detail.
“Isn’t it sad?” Mary Anne, who was your friend and hated you in the same breath, simpers. “All those girls, just up and vanished.”
“Sad,” you echo. “Do the police have any leads?”
They don’t, you know. No one has leads on girls that turn into swans, any more than they have leads on men who turn into toads, or wolves, or birds, or frogs, or ravens. It’s the only reason your family has lasted as long as it has—being careful, always careful, and making sure that when a curse stuck, it stuck. Every morning since you came home, you’ve found Kelly Loshanko standing in your front yard, her nostrils flaring; she’s starting to show her age, and you’re still surprised she’s managed to last this many deer hunting seasons. You’ve heard rumors there are still families in Grand Rapids suffering from the curse your great-grandmother laid down on their bloodline, because they offended her. Or because she wanted to, or simply because she could—your great-grandmother was never one for explaining herself.
(You sometimes think about having that much power, all the things you could use it for. It would be a new world.)
Mary Anne is talking about her husband, who’s been spending “too much time on the internet.” You make sympathetic noises, and think about how unlikely it is that Etta ever finds a man to love her who has never loved before.
