Not everyone knew that Lina Hadadi’s mother was a swan, or that she had hatched from a porcelain egg as a baby and grew into a girl. She appeared to be mostly human when we were children, save for a few feathers that grew on the back of her neck, and webbed toes that she hid in shoes. She was my best friend. 

Lina lived in the lake near my childhood home. After school, we would run there and strip naked, our prepubescent bodies pasty-white in the afternoon sun. There were often visitors there who threw raisin bread into the water, which we fought with the swans for. Sometimes, we would be pecked, but it was all in good humor. Many of them were Lina’s cousins and siblings, after all. When we’d get tired of swimming, we’d ride on the backs of the adult swans. They would ferry us from one end of the lake to the other until we fell asleep, and then lay us gently on the grass. 

Lina was an avid reader, just like me. Whenever we played at my house, we would act out scenes from stories we had read. Lina’s favorite story to play was Swan Lake. She would be Odette, and I would be Prince Seigfried. We would never end the story the way it did in the play. Usually, we just changed the prince into a swan at the end, and had him live happily ever after with his princess. Once, we bird-pecked on the lips and burst into a puddle of giggles. 

And then, Lina would go back home to the lake, my mother wrapping her a plate of leftovers to eat later. Sometimes, she slept over at my house, and we shared my twin bed and glow-in-the-dark fairy duvet, talking until the early hours of the morning. There were times she invited me for sleepovers at the lake, but my mother never allowed it. Besides that, we lived in each other’s homes as if they were our own. 

But as we entered the seventh grade, Lina began to change. Symmetrical black strokes appeared on her body, and her eyes became a little more red, her teeth sharper. I was going through my own changes too; my breasts began to grow and so did the hair on my body. Acne speckled my forehead and soon after, I woke up to blood that stained my favorite pajama pants. When I wanted to go to our favorite pizza place after school, Lina preferred to just snack on raisin bread at the lake. 

By the time high school came around, many people had begun to avoid her because she was so different from them. One day in the cafeteria, Jill Philby called Lina a freak of nature while we were eating lunch. Lina chased her around with half-human, half-bird screaming, pecking her arms and neck until they were black and blue. She was only suspended for a week, but she stopped going to school after that. Somehow, it was a relief. I didn’t want to be known as the swan-freak’s friend. 

Privately, I would still visit Lina on the lake. We’d sit under the old willow tree and I’d tell her about the books I was reading, since she didn’t read anymore, but still loved the stories. She’d ask me sometimes to go swimming with her, but I would lie and say I was too busy. Really, I just didn’t want to swim in swan shit water. 

We held onto each other in this way for a while. Ninth grade turned into tenth grade, and as I became more of a woman, Lina became more of a swan. The day I knew we no longer understood each other was when we were sitting under the willow tree. When she spoke, only garbled honking came out, and when I spoke, only words came out. We sat there in silence for a while before she stood up and smiled sadly. She ruffled her beautiful, iridescent feathers before flying back into the lake. I walked back to my house, where she no longer belonged.

Maia Zelkha is currently an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz studying history; she is passionate about poetry, literature, language, as well as the spiritual and surreal. Her work has previously been published in Blind Corner Literary Magazine and Ghost City Press.