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 reed-fringed margin, grey and gangling, neck kinked at an angle that will straighten only when the water teaches it. The heron watches from its dead branch — patient, unimpressed. Three weeks. Twenty days of growing into the name it already holds. The potential is not in the becoming. It is in the waiting, the daily return to this same stretch of brown water where nothing reflects the white it will be.