Slipstream allegory/fable
Nobody really knows how or why a bevy of swans was settled behind a once grand victim of slow decay and failed gentrification called the Lakeside Arms Apartments. There was no lake but there was an ugly little pond that bred more mosquitoes and other annoyances than provided a nice view. Everyone still insisted on calling it a lake for all time. The place held a brief title as the harbinger of progressive racial harmony, it was in the ‘tween of a lower middle-class white neighborhood and its Black counterpart. It was gentrification spelled, h o p e and it failed.
Most people in town forgot about the place. It changed owners, became a quasi-abandoned eyesore for a bit in the 1980s and then, some wealthy person decided to awaken it. Really, after the updates and paint it was pretty if superficial. Sometime during the promotions for the new and shiny Lakeside Arms, someone brought the swans. A young couple moving in paused to admire them, “oh honey look at them. They are so beautiful.”
Someone shot a photo; it was the last promotional photo for years. A pretty young blonde woman on the arm of a handsome blond man, both looking raptly at the swans. It was the best moment, the last moment when the Lakeside Arms lived up to her name and the idea behind her as a bridge between communities. Not three months later, things began to decline.
“Tarasha, you get away from them damn swans.” Tarasha Kent was 6 years old when she and her mother moved into the Lakeside Arms. She was immediately and irrevocably attracted to the swans. “But Mama look at them. They are so beautiful. Oh, what if one of them is Odette?” Mama looked down at her then over at the swans, “maybe honey. There are princesses everywhere. Come on, we gotta finish putting our stuff away.”
Tarasha liked living at The Arms. The building was ornate if unkempt. She liked to sit by the lake and watch the swans, she insisted on being allowed to feed them. They liked carrots the best. Around her, the neighborhood went slowly bad. Gangs, drug use, she saw the poverty spread like the algae in the pond. Things got scary sometimes. Tarasha was shy, not quite bullied but not really left alone. Everyone knew her as the weird bird girl but, most of the neighbors just shook their heads and left her to her birds.
“Ay girl.” The young man walking towards her smiled, Tarasha tried to but didn’t quite make it. “Hi Easy. How are you?” A few of the guys around just loved Tarasha with her little mousy baby voice and how weird and shy she was. “I’m a’ight. You straight?” She smiled and ducked her head, “yeah. Chillin’ with the kids.” Easy had been out boosting and presented her with a big bag of salad, “here for the kids.” Her shy happy smile made Easy feel good in a way life rarely afforded him. “Thanks, Easy.”
The kids. The bevy of swans led by an enormous couple had entrenched themselves into the lake and surrounding land. They feared nothing, no mowers, no rowdy drunks, no cats and no other usurper of their territory. They were of bird mind, the mind that tells sparrows to turn shadowy wheels in the sky and bird mind that gives corvids voices. The swans were on the surface a collection of couples who happened to live in the same area but, when crossed they were of vicious bird mind.
Tarasha was the only human they tolerated in their space. She was small and harmless, quiet. She offered carrot slices and bits of corn and lettuce, and they would take her tribute. She cooed over their babies, they strutted, and she complimented them. In summer, they would sit with her in the tall grass and listen to her little voice, they enjoyed her yammering and stories.
“Look at your neck today, Sarah. You look so nice. I bet Malcolm is gonna go crazy for you later.” The human child’s constant patter amused the swans. She had no feathers but, she was to the bird mind accepted as the ugly weird bird. One of them, a spectacular male with a bad attitude to match his strut, came to love her. He would settle next to her and listen to her strange little voice; he tucked his head against her cheek and when her naked arm crossed his body, he enjoyed her caresses. Tarasha was his.
Lakeside Arms was at the time declining, broken windows, a fire, roaches and bed bugs were the least of the problems. The rear parking lot had been claimed by one faction and the front side another. Their war escalated from chest pounding to fights and finally of course the shootings. Tarasha’s mother talked a great deal about leaving. She was as trapped as the rest of them in their cycle of dying. Like most everyone else, leaving was an ugly dream that would never come true.
Tarasha’s favorite gander Trent was the one who liked to cuddle her. She liked to read to him, he didn’t mind. Some days, when she sat quiet and anxious, he would spread his wings and bugle until she laughed or smiled. He liked her voice and her soft laughs, observers tutted about her feeding them but really, they only ate the food she brought because the bevy and Trent, loved her.
Bird mind, connection from when to nest to guardianship of the bevy put all of them on alert. They knew before the humans understood that the territory was precious and valued beyond the squabbling drug dealers and men trying to hold onto their machismo in desperate displays of aggression, change was coming. They knew the day the man came with the hardhat and clipboards. Trent spent a good part of his day strutting, wings spread to protect his bevy.
Several of the younger males raised up from the bracken and weeds to watch. They were not quite old enough to have charge of anything but, bird mind led them to their aggression. The young ones hissed and showed their serrated tongues. Trent and Sarah and Malcolm were so proud of the cygnets that year, they were brave and bold, happy to protect their home.
On a rainy day in the Spring after a long weekend of violence, noise and chaos Tarasha visited the bevy for the last time. The swans knew, like most animals they understood the strange malaise around her. She wasn’t injured but, something about her presence, her usually bright almost bird presence was dim. “Trent, hi sweetie pie. You want some carrots?” Trent, for all his size and dominance, was gentle with her.
The others in the bevy paddled in the water but he settled in front of her on the ground and took the slices of sweet carrot from her fingertips. Through his eyes, her brown face spoke of time and seasons spent imprisoned by a life without wings. If bird mind could conceive of pity, he would have pitied the poor human. Bird mind wished for wings for Tarasha, bird mind understood the tragedy of her inability to fly away.
When the rain got too heavy Tarasha went inside. The entire bevy paused to watch her walk across the field and parking lot. A man walking home from the store stopped on the other side of the pond, his mouth pulled down in an instinctual fear grimace as he watched them. The huge birds gathered there on the bank of the lake to watch. Their stillness made the man’s balls retract slightly and his guts to bubble.
The man couldn’t move. His locs were soaked, the bag with his tall boys in it was sloshing in his hand but he could not feel his body enough to go on about his way. Every atavistic instinct in his body told him if he moved, they would strike. He became a prey animal, an antelope on the savannah during the rainy season. The bevy turned as one, a thing made of blurry shades of white, menace and low hissing. He felt his lower lip quiver, his asshole did the same and he dropped his bag of beers and ran for his life. Tears he didn’t feel mingled with rain on his cheeks, and he ran the whole way home.
Stories about the swans had been around the neighborhood for years. In the little Baptist church, the ladies would whisper about them being demons, spies sent by ole Split Foot himself to sow strife in their community. One of the guys that hung out all day at the liquor store said the birds wore tags to help the whites track everybody. People laughed but didn’t entirely doubt it. The bevy understood their place in the scheme of things. It was their place; they tolerated the humans.
Things around the Lakeside Arms were deteriorating rapidly. A week with two double homicides at either end of the block, someone burned down the “coming soon” skeleton of a supposed mixed-use sign of gentrified apocalypse. Everyone was on edge. People holed up in their apartments, the hallways were misty with a cloud of various kinds of prohibited smoke. Even the neighborhood drug addicts who were the squabbling indicators of the general mood of the hood took to hiding out in what nooks they could find.
They were absent. And the ones who were around, did their skulking and procuring in stealth. They didn’t beg for change at the liquor store, nor did they drop in at the church for free coffee and donuts and to be clucked at by Aunties. The owner of the liquor store, a stout grandfatherly Sikh stood in front of his window, arms wrapped around himself just watching the strangeness unfold. Even he felt uneasy, even his most enjoyed regulars seemed taut and too quiet.
The bevy had no use for small increments of time. They were the only thing in the neighborhood that remained calm, as calm as swans ever are and on their regular schedule. The world, no the neighborhood around them, changed. The rain got gentler, and the sun came out. Flowers bloomed along the murky lake and more cygnets hatched.
“Hey bird, where Tarasha at?” Easy stood at a respectful distance and spoke softly to the nearest swan. He wasn’t in the mood to be chased or hissed at so he spoke in the soft tone Tarasha had told him to use when speaking to her birds. He felt their regard and froze. All of them except the fuzzy babies turned to look at him, none hissed or honked or flew at him they just watched. He understood all at once the phrase he’d heard Tarasha use once.
“I think the reason people are so afraid of birds is this thing called an atavistic fear. It is like, in our DNA. Like how most people get freaked out by snakes and spiders and stuff. Something inside of us remembers when we were prey. And birds are frickin’ dinosaurs, so it is understandable.”
He felt fear in his belly, it clawed at his bowels, and he understood. He’d had guns pulled on him, a crackhead tried to stab him during a deal, he’d been chased by police, hell he’d tried to stab his stepfather when he was 12. He thought he was fearless, he thought he was hard. He was wrong. As the birds stared at him, he wasn’t sure if he was going to piss himself or start crying or both.
Pause, the birds watched the man with his sad eyes and unpause they went on about their business. He backed away from them, had he bird mind he would have known where Tarasha was but, it didn’t matter to the bevy. They knew but bird mind did not go towards or into human mind. Humans had no flock; they could do no group wheels in the sky so of course they would not hear what bird mind knew. The bevy watched when they saw Tarasha’s mother, her face drawn, and her gait slow go by. She would halfheartedly toss handfuls of carrots, they noticed she cut them the same way Tarasha did and it pleased them.
It wasn’t the same. Someone remarked that the swans seemed pretty chill all things considered. They were not chasing people into the parking lot regularly nor was Trent tearing up signage. They reduced their territory and congregated on the far side of the lake where the brush was thick and wild and reeking.
Being swans, while wonderful and full of adventure, presented a few problems. Unlike dogs and a certain caliber of cat, the swans did not know how to communicate with humans. They had things to show but no mind to tell. They waited for the humans in the uniforms and riding in the loud cars with lights to come. They did but never close enough to the swans for them to tell their secret.
The bevy got meaner. They kept tight to their territory and woe to the man or creature who thought to trespass. They chased and swooped, wings spread and sounding like the very hounds of hell because bird mind, their mind wanted to tell, they wanted the other humans to know and yet, they did not. So, the swans attacked at every turn. They wanted because Trent wanted. Trent taught that generation of cygnets to flap and strike without mercy.
No one came into their territory to look for Tarasha. The uniformed men came and went, the same who came to take people away in irons did not get close enough to look. Time passed. The cold season came and went, more cygnets were born. Malcolm lost his mate Sarah to old age. Trent, when his own malaise settled over him and he knew, like the bevy knew it was time he swam across the lake to a thicket of dense brush and waddled inside to die.
Years later the Lakeside Arms was an abandoned shell of a thing. It had been almost opulent once and after a bad year of violence closed finally. It was the failed dream of gentrifiers who could never quite take hold in the neighborhood. It became a place of ghosts. Even the bevy moved on for the most part. That part of the neighborhood died quietly; the liquor store closed. The church moved to a new neighborhood and for a few years, taut silence reigned.
A construction crew found them. Half buried and skeletal in the grass. The remains of a small woman with her hands folded on her chest and the bones of what turned out to be a swan nestled in her lap. Her mother was long gone. The swans were long gone. Even Easy was gone. No one knew their names. One of the men in the crew found himself weeping and clutching the cross he wore around his neck.
Another of the men swore later that he heard the low strange hiss of an enraged swan, felt the brush of wide wings and the sharp bite of a beak. He ran not from the bones but from the angry swan. He misunderstood of course; human mind could not conceive of bird mind. Trent, or the mark of him left on the world still held the mark of what Tarasha left on the world. He remembered her name and her touch, her soft little voice and her resting place, was his resting place. In death, bird mind and human mind mattered no more. They would remain at Lakeside arms, together forever.
Finally, Tarasha had what she envied about the birds. She and Trent feared nothing, no mowers, no rowdy drunks, no cats and no other usurper of their territory. They were of bird mind, the mind that tells sparrows to turn shadowy wheels in the sky and all manner of flocking. Bird mind. Spirit mind. Flock. Mate.
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