The Cinder Lake Listener

The first time I saw the bird, I was seven. It stood at the edge of the water, black as a hole in the world, its neck curved like a question. The lake itself was a wide, slow eye in the middle of the park, half-swallowed by reeds and eucalyptus. My father called it a swan, but the swans in the picture books were white. This one was a stain. It watched us with an unblinking red eye as my mother spread the picnic blanket under the pines. ‘Don’t feed it,’ she said. ‘It’s not like the ducks.’ I didn’t. But I felt it watching all through lunch, a pressure at the back of my neck.

We came to Cinder Lake almost every weekend that summer. The park was a green tangle of paths and picnic tables, with a playground that creaked in the wind, its swings hanging like gallows. The lake sat in the middle, round and deep, fed by a stream that dribbled in from the north. The rangers had given up on keeping the geese away; they’d built a small wooden pier that jutted into the water, and the black swan would often stand at the end of it, preening or just staring at its own reflection. It was the only swan there. No one knew where it came from. My mother said it was probably abandoned, but even then I doubted that. It moved like it owned the place.

The swan was a fixture for ten years. We moved into a house on the other side of the park when I was eleven, and I’d ride my bike there after school. I’d sit on the pier and watch it drift, its wake a slim arrow across the water. It never made a sound. Not once. Other birds squawked, geese honked, but the swan’s black body cut through the water like a shadow on glass, silent. The other kids threw stones at it, but it never reacted. It just moved away, slow, deliberate, as if it had all the time in the world. And it did. It was there when I graduated, there when I left for college, still there when I came back to visit, older, greyer in the neck.

Then I moved away for good. Twenty-five years. I came back for my father’s funeral, and on a whim, I walked to the lake. The park had changed. The playground had been replaced with plastic modular equipment, the picnic tables were new, and there was a sign for a dog-walking area. But the lake was still there, the same water, the same reeds. And the swan was still there. It was old now, its feathers a matted, dusty black, its neck bent at an awkward angle, but it stood on the pier, facing me. It looked at me, and I looked at it. And for the first time, I heard it. Not a honk or a hiss. It was a sound like a pebble dropped into a deep well, a single, soft ‘plink’ that seemed to echo inside my skull. I felt something settle in my chest, a cold, heavy weight.

I walked away, but that night I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing the plink, over and over, like a drip in a cave. The next day, I returned. The swan was at the same spot. It watched me approach, and when I was close enough, it spread its wings. They were enormous, spanning the entire width of the pier, and underneath, its body was covered in a fine, grey down. It made that sound again, and this time I understood it as a summons. I stepped onto the pier. The wooden boards creaked. The swan turned and glided into the water, moving toward the center of the lake. It stopped and looked back at me. I followed, wading into the cold, murky water. It was deeper than it looked. The bottom was soft and silty, and I sank up to my knees.

The swan led me to a spot where the reeds grew thick, and there, hidden in a hollow of mud, was a nest. Inside the nest were three eggs, black as coal, each the size of a fist. The swan nudged them with its beak, then looked at me with that red eye. And I understood: it wasn’t advertising who it was. It was asking me to take one. To take it away. I reached down, my fingers brushing the shell, warm to the touch, pulsing like a heart. I pulled back. I shook my head. The swan’s eye narrowed. It made that sound again, but this time it was sharper, a crack, like the first break of ice. And then it dove, disappearing under the black water.

I waited. I waited for it to resurface. It didn’t. The lake was still. I waded back, my legs numb, and sat on the pier, staring at the water. I waited for an hour. The water remained unbroken. And then, in the distance, at the far end of the lake, something rose. It wasn’t the swan. It was a shape, tall and thin, like a man made of grease and shadow, with wings that dripped water. It stood there for a moment, looking at me, and then it walked into the trees and was gone.

I never saw the swan again. The lake was empty after that. The park rangers said the bird had finally died; they found no body, only a single black feather on the pier. But I knew. I knew what it really was. And I didn’t take it. But it had already marked me. Now, every night, I hear that sound, that plink, inside my head. It’s faint, like a drop in a dark well, and it’s getting louder. And sometimes, when I look at the surface of my glass of water, I see two red eyes staring back at me. I’ve started leaving the lights on. I’ve started listening for the wings at the window. But what frightens me most is not the swan, or what it became. It’s the fact that I know, with absolute certainty, that the nest is waiting. And it knows my name.