Swanfolk by Kristin Omarsdottir

Author:Kristin Omarsdottir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

In the Winter Garden

The nights got shorter and the mornings repeated themselves save that it got brighter earlier: I awoke—06:20, checked my wristwatch for confirmation, got out of bed, looked for my glasses, swept aside the curtains, tore the seal between day and night: the mountain appeared before me like a truck stuck in its tracks. I compared the light with the morning glimmer of the week past and the one before that and the one before that and took a cat bath, or a shower; drank the coffee that I had accustomed myself to drinking in the mornings, drank it by a shining blue steel sink that exterminated all possibility of mold in the kitchen; watched from my kitchen window as the hard rain changed into disoriented snowflakes, which quickly found their bearings and drove down, then lost their bearings and turned into drizzle, a mist that grew thinner and thinner while I repeated myself and repeated myself, having long since given up searching for my archetype or trying to cast a new mold.

I arrived punctually to work each day, greeted the security guard couple in the ministry foyer, worked in my corner on my report on stand-up comedy on the city’s stages during winter 20XX–20XX, took coffee and lunch breaks in the kitchenette, chatted, listened to other people’s conversations, chatted more and listened to more wonderful chatter and kept myself and kept myself and kept myself within the prescribed limits. In the afternoon I walked along the ocean, never went beyond the city limits to the green lake, came home early and cooked dinner.

Dinner.

Dinner.

The contents of the egg that the swanfolk had sent us, or me, at the Special Unit, grew and flourished inside a bulletproof warming box in the laboratory of the state’s pathology department, under security cameras, covered in monitors. The first ultrasound revealed a creature with a bird’s lower half and webbed feet, and a human torso, arms, and head. Its heartbeat resembled that of a human. Further ultrasounds were unable to confirm the sex of the broodling. Employees on round-the-clock shifts monitored its healthy development. Cardiologists regularly examined its charts and listened to its heartbeat.

Late

on a Wednesday,

April 20

if I remember correctly, on the birthday of a German mass murderer, as someone had undoubtedly pointed out in the kitchenette, less than two weeks after the egg arrived, Selma and I arranged to meet in the Winter Garden, which was within walking distance of my house, about a thirty-minute journey at normal walking speed. The garden was meant for owners to let their dogs run around unbridled and was known informally as the Dog Park. For the past thirteen days the sun had been held backstage by endless tangles of clouds, but it was shining just then and higher aloft than before, and wouldn’t be setting until roughly an hour after dinner.

Rex, who followed me from home, disappeared through the park gate. I positioned myself next to a white trash can on coarse gravel and waited

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