Vareena of Swans

Vareena of Swans

Vareena was a swan woman

married to a dove man.

They had met in university,

and the first time he kissed her

she was found again,

buried under a thicket of web and thorn.

He used to touch her lip

the way he touched her nipples,

bruised her with softness,

while she stared with saucer eyes into his.

The first time she danced for him

they were in a sunsetting forest,

when the trees were bare

and she was very cold,

without any stockings under her skirt.

She shivered,

the dove man pulled her deep within his chest,

a butterfly embracing a flower,

kissed her shoulder,

her neck,

“you smell good,” he said,

lips wetted on her skin.

Vareena was so happy,

gently moved away from his embrace,

“I want to dance!” She cried.

For Vareena might have studied Business,

but she truly was a dancer,

not by profession

or classes,

she just was,

the way a cat is a hunter.

“Okay,” he said,

smiling and eyes steady on his swan woman.

She drew out her arm in length

with a curve where the elbow was,

and he took her hand,

bowed,

drew close to her.

Then she bounded away,

slipped from his touch,

came close again and arched her back,

a swan’s curve in her spine.

He placed a hand under her

though she didn’t need it,

A great elm’s skirted branches washed them in shadows,

obscured their figures.

She was a swan in a woman’s body

and when she danced

her dove man’s eyes blazed

and he loved her then.

Vareena could see the love in his eyes,

feel the burn of his touch.

Vareena and Tom did not dance together anymore.

She taught a beginner’s dance class to 8 year olds

in a studio downtown.

The floors were old and dented

and the mirror had paint marks and thumbprints,

but Vareena didn’t mind.

She just wanted to dance.

The children were not so good,

no sense of foot or limb,

but she had hope for them all,

said to her husband, “they’re my little swanlings.”

In class she clapped her hands,

bellowed, “dance like you’re about to die girls!”

Then ran across the room,

her arms alight with wings

that sliced the air like morning light.

The children never took their eyes off her

for they thought see she was beautiful.

One day when Tom and Vareena were seated for dinner,

the lights very low,

mushroom gravy and buttermilk-fleshed potatoes at their elbows,

it was snowing,

the kind of snow that fell like slow tears.

Vareena gazed out the window.

“Do you remember when you proposed to me?

It was snowing, just like this.”

Only it wasn’t just like this, she thought.

He looked very tired now,

an old man in smooth flesh.

“Yes I remember,” he said,

piercing a potato.

And Vareena wanted to ask,

“do you remember the time we danced

and we were the snow?”

But she was scared to hear that he didn’t remember.

The look on his face was distant and Vareena

felt very sad by this.

They ate in silence the rest of the meal.

Vareena’s was friend with one of her student’s moms,

Kitty Nowak,

her husband was distant too.

They sat outside the studio along the wall

on a thin bench,

the winter air heavy with cold.

Kitty took a long inhale from her cigarette,

exhaled a plume of smoke angled away from Vareena’s face.

“All the girls in this town look like the factories.

Smoking, producing, dirty.

You belong on a lake or something.”

Vareena laughed lowly,

tired from her late class.

“Maybe, but so what?”

Kitty smiled,

“you’re too good for this town!

You’re better than a ballerina,

you teach those girls to spin with their eyes wide open,

to be passionate,

to never be afraid.

I don’t want you to be afraid

because your husband is shit at loving you.”

Vareena squirmed,

“I’m not afraid. Afraid of what?”

Kitty sigh loudly,

“Not being enough.

Be on a stage,

be the prima ballerina,

you’re too good not to.

Capiche?”

Vareena nodded.

When she went home to bed that night she felt a little burst of wings

unfold in her heart,

she could barely sleep,

thought all night of bare feet and dancing on a lake,

water soft as silk sheets.

The following day Vareena went to the woods

for a walk.

She took a path that wrapped around the pond,

the snow had melted since yesterday

and made all the dead leaves slippery under her boots.

In the middle of the pond

she saw a swan black as ebony,

still as an icicle.

She thought this to be strange sighting for the season.

The swan was so beautiful,

so enormous

that Vareena wished very much for the swan to come closer.

The swan suddenly arose from the lake,

water running off his feathers,

its wingspan two black-blossomed roses,

flew over the pond

right two Vareena’s feet.

She did not move,

saw in his eyes her own

sadness reflected back at her.

“Such sad eyes,” she murmured to him,

not knowing if perhaps the foregeiness of a swan

eye made her interpret them as sad;

the human need to feel herself

entwined within the natural world.

Then the swan spoke and it was as if

swans had always spoke,

and Vareena had always understood swan.

“What is it you wish for?”

The swan asked.

Vareena thought,

“I wish for the freedom of my youth,

to dance with my husband again.”

She crouched down,

“I can’t give you what you can give yourself,” he said.

Her eyes watered,

“then make me a swan!

Let me be keeper of this pond.”

The swan bowed most gracefully,

“as you wish.”

Within a moment Vareena’s arms began to feel lighter,

her bones thinner,

shimmering black feathers laced themselves together

to create wings and plumage across her body,

her neck lengthened and feathered,

her nose grew hard and long,

a red beak in front of her.

Her feet flattened while her legs shrunk.

She was a swan.

Her clothes lay in a pile beside her.

She looked to the swan,

“Thank you.

What is your name?”

He admired her new form,

“my name is Vasily.”

“Well then, Vasily,

you have made me the happiest woman

on earth!

Now I can dance on the lake all day,

no husband to attend to!”

Vasily’s eyes looked even sadder,

“you are not a woman anymore,

you are a swan

and you must always remember that.”

Vareena spent her new days as a swan

doing just as she said.

She danced along the water’s surface,

gathered the wind in her wings,

the frost on her feathers.

Vasily watched her,

always with those same sad eyes,

not saying much at all.

Vareena was so astonishing a dancer

that soon other woodswalkers began to take notice.

They pointed with delight

and took photos.

Then word got out

of the beautiful swan dancer in the woods

and soon dozens of people were tramping

through the forest to see her.

Vareena loved the crowds,

they made her spin even more furiously

arch her neck even sharper

and finally lift up onto the water’s surface

as if on pointe.

“She’s simply dazzling!” Said one woman

who watched

hand in her husband’s hand.

This woman was Kitty,

and she came almost every day to watch the swan.

Now some time must be put aside to

speak of Tom,

for he had just lost his wife

and the police had found only her clothes

by the side of the pond.

But that was it.

And when the police captain looked at Tom with a shrug in his eyes,

pity in his voice and said,

“we can’t find anything,

but most of the time if we find clothes,

in the woods,

it’s usually some sort of-

Tom raised his hand,

“I know,

I don’t need to hear it.”

Tom did not like to think of Vareena tied up in someone’s basement,

in the trunk of an old Volvo,

or being touched by anyone else’s hands.

He loved her,

and he hadn’t said it enough.

He knew this.

He loved her and now she was gone.

Sleep became an old memory,

for he never found it

laying awake at night

staring at the door,

as if Vareena were to appear

with her arms wide open for a hug

for his arms around her,

“my very own fur coat,”

she once told him.

The night he proposed to her it was snowing.

They were outside taking a walk

with tall conifers above them,

furred in snow.

They had just finished their exams

and were filled with a temporary ecstasy

of feeling free.

He looked at her while she was laughing,

some joke about a professor,

and asked, “will you marry me?”

She had her knitted scarf tied very firmly

around her neck,

the dip of her chin

and her cheeks were dark crimson under the lamplight.

He thought she looked very beautiful like this.

Vareena nodded,

perhaps a little hesitant.

“Yes, yes I will.”

Then she giggled, “but will you marry me?”

He laughed, “but of course.”

How happy he had been that night.

Stupidly happy he thought now,

stupid for thinking that happiness would always last.

He could not remember the last time she laughed

because of the something he said or did.

She laughed with her sister on the phone,

books she read,

but he felt very far away from that laughter.

But Tom was tired.

Work at the office was long

and answering emails

had become the majority of his work days.

His colleagues were tired too,

drank lots of sugar-spiced coffee,

talked about their kid’s flu,

their next vacation in Cancun.

It was all so predictable to Tom.

The best part of his day was when he went to bed,

peeked over at Vareena’s sleeping face

to watch the onset of dreams flutter her eyelids

for he liked to see her so peaceful

when sometimes she’d look at him across the dinner table

with the saddest eyes.

Those eyes made him feel helpless.

When spring finally came,

the land slowly started to change from

slush and mud to mud and daffodils,

snowbells and periwinkle crocuses.

A fever thawed the buckwheat fields,

the straw grass and all the birch and linden trees

which began to bud.

By now Vareena was a little tired of the forest,

of the pond

and while she still danced,

there was less energy in her.

One day while they were silent and still on the water,

reflections of pine and alder above them

Vareena asked Vasily, “How is it you watch me

every day,

saying nothing?”

If swans could shrug, Vasily’s eyes did the motion for him,

“you are a very good dancer,

but I think you know that.

What else would you like me to say?”

Vareena stopped,

for she did not know.

All she knew was the wanted

to feel as beautiful as the tender burst

of spring that erupted around her,

as hot as wet, summer days when the bees buzzed heavy.

She wanted to be noticed.

She had thought being a swan would give that to her,

and it had,

for a time,

but perhaps she wanted to be noticed in her human skin as well.

There finally came day when Vareena’s husband came to the woods.

He had heard of the swan dancer by the old mill pond,

and wanted to see it for himself.

He wasn’t sure what took him so long

to shake him from the winter of his mind

to finally see the swan,

but at least he was here now.

When he first saw Vareena,

her black feathers waxy and soft as tulip petals,

he was sure she was lady floating there on the lake,

a lady in a black dress.

He blinked his eyes,

but there was just a swan.

He wondered why she was not dancing.

Vareena was very deep in her thoughts.

She was thinking of Tom,

of their cozy apartment by the river,

the willow she used to sit under on and read books.

She thought of maple syrup soaked French toast

on Sundays,

the salmon flesh of spring strawberries,

her favorite black cashmere sweater with

the wings of gold-beadwork on the arms.

Human things.

She thought of her and Tom’s last kiss.

A real kiss,

the kind that burns cigarettes.

They had made love on a frozen night,

when she got home,

sweaty from a dance class.

She took a shower

and Tom quietly came in,

wrapped his big arms around her drizzled body

and kissed her shoulders

while he moved his hands down her pelvis,

saying nothing,

only the sound of shower rain

and wet kisses.

Then she turned around,

her eyes steady on his beating-heart ones.

She spit out the water from her mouth,

clung to his lips

as if to a ripe raspberry still on the bush.

She wanted that kiss,

those kisses,

again.

And that’s when she saw him,

standing with a hand to his forehead,

capping the sun.

Her immediate reaction was to shout to him,

Tom I’m here! Tom!

But then she remembered her swan form,

her feathers, beak and hollow bones.

He did not know her now.

She was a stranger,

an animal.

“But perhaps, I could dance for him,”

she murmured, excited,

agitated.

She blossomed her wings,

bowed her neck,

broke the still water.

She danced as if her heart were breaking,

because it was,

to the vision of him on riverbank,

his dove-man heart folded very softly

within him,

and she wanted to pull it out,

dance all over it,

make it bleed,

beat and skip.

She felt as passionate

as that 20 something girl in the woods,

dancing with her boyfriend for the first time

beneath the elm.

He watched very intently,

a deep love stirring from his freshly awakened heart.

“That is not a swan,” he said,

knew it instantly to be his wife.

Vareena danced that wildly,

luscious as clove spice

with toes that seemed to skim and kiss the air.

That was his Vareena.

He moved closer.

Then he kicked off his sandals,

waded into the river’s edge,

further and further

until his shirt ballooned like a jellyfish from his body.

“Vareena!” He called, frantic now,

splashing,

moving limbs rapidly.

The swan kept dancing,

he could feel the water droplets

propelled from her wings on his face.

As she danced

Vareena realized with the most intense,

burning sadness that she did not want to be a swan anymore.

She wanted to be a woman.

She wanted to be a dance instructor.

She wanted to be a wife.

She wanted to be a performer.

So she kept dancing,

spun and spun

until all the trees, sky and earth

became one.

When she stopped she fell into the water,

exhausted,

ready to collapse into the hard thud of her own heart-fall.

Then smooth skin gripped her body,

pulled her head to the surface.

“Vareena!” A voice said.

And she understood.

Tom was cradling her limp neck

while he cried out her name.

She wanted to cry with him,

I’m a swan now! I’ve cursed the both of us!

Then he kiss her neck

with hard lips.

Vareena felt her body grow heavy,

feathers smooth over into skin,

limbs lengthen,

long, raven hair grow from her head.

She was a woman again

looking into her lover’s eyes.

How deliciously ripe she felt!

Ready to burst into flower.

She held a sharp awareness

for her legs,

excited to stand on solid ground once again

so her thighs could feel the push of earth against muscle.

“I knew it was you!

I knew it was you!” Tom gasped,

still holding her naked body,

though he didn’t need to

because Vareena could hold herself up just fine.

From the corner of the pond

a black swan looked upon the scene

with sad eyes.

If only his love had come back to him,

then perhaps he would be human again,

perhaps he would dance again.