short fiction · 2026-10-27

Cygnet

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The cygnet does not know it carries a swan inside its down. It paddles the pond's edge, grey and gangling, neck too long for grace, feet too large for the water's skin. The heron watches. The dragonfly stitches air above. Neither tells it what the season holds: the slow unfurling, the white that waits beneath each feather like a secret kept from the keeper. It only eats. It only grows. The potential is not in the knowing — it is in the waiting that does not know it waits.