Swan Song
by Georgene Smith Goodin
Her work has appeared in numerous publications, and has won the “Mash Stories” flash fiction competition. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the cartoonist Robert Goodin.
Follow her on Twitter, @gsmithgoodin.
We Lacantors were as endangered as the Latin language we’d taken our name from; Laca for lake and cantor for singer. Unless we recruited another, we would lack quorum for our solstice ceremony and the extinction of our kind would follow.
When we learned the junior high orchestra had scheduled a Memorial Day concert at the bandstand along the shore, we could not believe our good fortune. Of course, a chorale would have better suited our purposes, but who were we to scoff at our only opportunity? Beggars can’t be choosers.
We polished the mollusk shells for days before threading their opalescence onto a reed to make the necessary necklace. We selected Clarice to do the recruitment and swam with her to the shallows under the dock. Our eyes followed as she heaved herself on a flat rock and slithered across it, splaying her body on its surface.
We lingered, hidden among the pilings, watching as the moonlight shimmied along her scales. We watched until the sun rose; we could see her scales had dried into an emerald and crimson gossamer dress, that her feet had emerged and her head had assumed its human shape, with fiery red curls stretched by their own weight into long, skinny esses.
We watched her first tentative steps, collectively wincing because our own experiences had taught us the pain of these transitions. Only when we were certain her legs had garnered enough strength did we hastily swim off to avoid being glimpsed by the early morning joggers or, worse, snared by the fishermen who favored live bait. The popping sound of hooked cray fish had long been a siren song for us and we’d lost two of our number in that manner in just the past winter alone.
When the sun had set and the sky had winked the last slivers of pink and gold from its face, we reconvened under the dock. Clarice reported that it had not been hard to get Lena to wear the shells. To the contrary, Lena had been charmed at first sight by the necklace and reached to touch it before catching herself.
“It’s so beautiful,” Lena had said. “May I try it on?”
If Lena had felt the necklace cast its spell, she’d shown no surprise. She’d followed Clarice willingly to the dock and when Clarice led her to the water, she showed more concern for her violin case than her own inability to swim. Clarice assured her the case was strong and the water would not penetrate it, although she herself harbored doubts.
Lena told Clarice that no one in her mother’s family was musical, so it had puzzled Lena when her mother pushed her towards the violin. Whenever she inquired as to motive, and she inquired many times, her mother had simply replied, “They told me you had to play.” No amount of prodding could extract the identity of the mysterious “they,” but her mother’s evasiveness had made Lena treasure the violin all the more. Secretly, she hoped her music was somehow connected to her father.
We swam our circles around Lena. It was her first changeover and the joining of her legs and the coating of scales took far longer than any of us thought it should. She turned snow white instead of the normal red and green. There was a whisper in our minds that this did not bode well and we quickly banished it by telling ourselves we were elders now, our memories had faded. Surely all new arrivals had been white at first, perhaps a testament to their purity? We could not bring ourselves to acknowledge that Lena might not be a good candidate. The solstice was almost upon us. We could not afford to fail.
We had never taught a newcomer to swim before, not that we could recall. They’d always seemed to arrive knowing and Lena’s pathetic flailing struck us as another poor omen. We floundered on how to instill in her an ability that was second-nature to us and finally, in desperation, we pushed her along to our cave like dolphins rescuing a sailor from a shipwreck.
We worried someone would come looking for Lena, but she assured us it was unlikely. In her own words, Lena was an “oops,” father unknown. She often went AWOL without her mother noticing. She had no friends, either. Lena had joined the orchestra in the hope of finding a place she fit in, but her playing was so elegant, so sophisticated, it left the other students dumbstruck. In typical adolescent fashion, they made a great show of ignoring what they could not understand.
We lost precious weeks trying to teach Lena the skills all Lacantors require, but her vocal cords could not vibrate as needed and although we succeeded at coaxing Lena’s body to float, we could only elicit the most pathetic paddling along the water’s surface. Deep dives and long, underwater glides, a hallmark of all Lacantors, were not forthcoming. Late one night, when the full moon puddled like mercury upon the lake’s surface, we hauled ourselves upon the rocks at our cave’s entrance.
“Oh, I have failed,” Clarice keened.
None clamored to correct her.
“Perhaps we should take her back?” the youngest of us suggested.
Before the rest could respond that such a thing had never been done, a voice boomed, “No!” from out of our cave, rattling its stalactites. Mercifully, none fell.
We had not realized Lena was still awake. The afternoon’s lessons had exhausted us; surely the efforts should have brought her to slumber?
“I may not be able to sing,” Lena said, “and I shall certainly never swim. But music is my heart and surely a love of song is enough to be a Lacantor?”
We glanced among ourselves. No one wanted to admit our backs were to the proverbial wall, our hours few. Surely Lena’s desire and willingness should count for something?
“Lena does mean ‘alluring,’” Clarice offered up tentatively.
“And light,” another of us suggested.
“And is it not also a river in Russia? Surely being named for a body of water is an asset?”
“Bring me my case,” Lena commanded, sensing the tide had turned in her favor.
We brought the violin from the outcropping where we had stashed it. She tuned it carefully. When the strings had reached a tension that satisfied her, she drew the bow across them with a grace we had not previously seen her exhibit. The melody that emerged could only be described as other-worldly. Without meaning to, we hummed along as if our mothers had sung us this song in our cradles.
The splash in the water startled all but Lena. We glanced among ourselves, counting each other as if in fear one had disappeared. Upon arriving at our correct number, we cast our eyes upon the water and saw there schools of our long-gone sisters rushing towards our cave; the Lacantors we thought forever lost were returning to us in droves. All that had been required to bring their resurrection had been the proper song.
When the last note died away, we begged Lena to play again. We swam our circles around her, certain that she truly was meant to be one of us. We closed our eyes and raised our voices into the chorus that for centuries had defined Lacantors and bound us to one another. So immersed were we in our song that we failed to notice Lena was no longer playing.
When we reopened our eyes, we saw the void in the center of our circle. The weight of our communal grief threatened to sink us all.
It was Clarice who noticed the swan swimming towards the center of the lake. And although it dodged the glints of moonlight on the surface, we could all see the opalescence of the mollusk shells sagging against the arch of its neck.
© Swan Song by Georgene Smith Goodin. 2023. All rights reserved.
