By Douglas Wright

Bent reeds. The flatulent haze of late-spring swamp gasses. The rata-tat-tat of school bus air brakes echoing out over the pond like riot rounds. Yolk dried into a yellow alligator skin, glued to stalks swaying in the breeze.

Brian eyed the crime scene, hating every muddy boot print those jerks—Peter, Steve and Tom—had stamped into the earth. He dreaded the thought of finding the mother dead in between the swamp grass and reeds.

Another duck, across the pond somewhere, called out: a single solitary quack ringing out and echoing through Brian’s thoughts.

It was unfair, it was awful, it hurt.

They’d found his spot – the one place where the bars hung a little less heavily, the one place where uniforms and gangs and cliques didn’t show, the one place he could doodle on his sketchpad and just feel. That is until their boots crashed through the underbrush and tossed Brian’s things and attacked the duck he’d found guarding her eggs. He’d attempted to defend her, with his words and his body, but what were they against power; even when he was in the right, sometimes might just wins. He’d run away hearing her cries ring out and stop and get replaced by the dull sound of stones thrown against broken flesh.

Now kneeling, moisture wicking across the patched knees of his pants, Brian picked up his torn drawing of the mother duck, her epitaph. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He wanted to smash their faces, fill their lockers with curdled milk or, he smirked, with dog shit.

Standing, thoughts a storm, his eyes caught the sight of something. Peeling back reeds and leaves, his heart swelled. Blue and green, it wasn’t just some half shell smeared with yolk and chunks of a partially formed duckling. This was whole. Heart pounding, he reached for it but stopped short, wondering whether the mother would come back, whether she was alive, whether the boots would return and stomp out the last egg.

Brian swallowed and made up his mind.

*

The last bus of the school year had departed with a hiss and a belch and Brian had spent the following weeks unbound and free, barefoot and dirty. These days passed in that odd way summer days do, each moment dragging without the rush of school while the whole of the months evaporated as quickly as morning fog over a pond.

The egg, heated with water bottles and eventually a stolen heat lamp had been, as contraband hidden from the warden, stuffed under his bed. Until one rainy June morning, when the chirps turned to crackling, when the protective shell turned to a prison and when the egg turned into a duckling.

Blanketed under the morning’s honeyed light dripping through the blinds, with her body wet and wriggling in his palm, he whispered, ‘I’ll call you Dawn.’

*

It didn’t take long for the smell of chicken feed and banana peels, indiscriminately mixed with duck shit, to become an issue. Knowing what his mom would say, Brian built an enclosure of chicken wire and pallets ‘borrowed’ from neighbouring gardens. He nestled it in the forgotten weeds behind the trailer park far from the barbed wire and CCTV. Here, he and Dawn could while away the long days, him with his sketches and her chasing insects.

Brian could have stayed there forever. He could have scribbled away drawings of Dawn’s antics till he was old and bent, until the freedom of his young body gave way to the prison of achy joints and milky eyes. But Dawn’s body was changing faster than his own. As the days dragged, as she grew, as her legs stretched, she began bottoming out in the kiddie pool Brian had ‘found’ on the curb.

‘Yuk.’ He gagged as the previous day’s collective duck shits slid out onto the weeds. With her teenage zeal and Brian’s own annoyance at the mucking of her pool, he decided it was time she was introduced to her real home.

At the pond’s edge, she needed little goading; her bundle of awkward feathers dove into the murky water. Brian’s eyes went wide as she shot out a good twenty feet away from him. A snapping turtle can’t get her out there, he told himself. He stood there relishing the sight of her grace, as the mosquitoes ate him, for what seemed hours; it was probably only thirty minutes before she tired of the exercise and glided back over.

On their way back to her enclosure, Dawn, dragging behind, took to flight – an awkward, halting exercise in falling, but doing so slowly. Brian watched with horror, as he imagined her hurting herself, but Dawn only flew a quick little taxi around her cage before she ungracefully came to a stop. Brian smiled and said goodnight, not sure if he should feel proud or scared.

*

As they do, summers end. The endless hours, equal parts freedom and boredom gave way to the shackles of morning rushes, boring bus rides and the tedium of algebra. Dawn was upset the first week, her own freedoms curtailed in keeping with Brian’s, but he made sure he was up early enough to get her food and water. Nights, too, were harder. He got into the habit of opening Dawn’s cage when he studied. And, like any teen, she tested the boundaries, foraging farther and farther afield, interrupting his Geography homework by forcing him to play warden.

All the early mornings and late evenings out by the marsh left him tired but, enjoying the momentum of a pet duck and a mother that had splurged on an ice cream after seeing his high marks, he counted himself happy. Still, there was a heaviness in his heart, an understanding at the impermanence of things. The grades would slump, his mother’s smile would fade and Dawn, well, he didn’t want to think about that. For Dawn’s part, her feathers were full and clean, the awkward teenage moult behind her. Her chirps were now full-throated quacks, her gait sashaying left and right as her broad webbed feet slapped against the earth. She nearly sparkled in her unbridled call to life.

*

Brian was sweating in the yellowing light of Indian summer, a book in hand, wondering how to winterise the enclosure when he heard them.

‘Is this your fort, retard?’ Peter stomped in, broad shoulders exposed and peach fuzz catching the light.

Heart in his throat, Brian squeaked, ‘What are doing here?’

The posse shoved Brian to the side as they surrounded the enclosure, staining his textbook with grass and duck shit.

‘Leave her alone,’ he called out, hating how small his voice sounded.

Tapping at the cage, they guffawed as Dawn began quacking in distress, shuffling from one side to the other.

‘You got a thing for birds?’ Peter laughed after smashing through a rotted pallet with his boot.

‘I said stop!’ Brian yelled.

Peter turned to face the threat. ‘Or what?’

Brian had been in many a fight – in, not won. This fight was no different.

He swung.

They dodged.

He was shoved.

Brian’s head bounced off hard-packed earth, the light dimming as their vicious laughs and Dawn’s quacks of fright rang out – muffled, as if from a great distance.

His words came slow. He could almost see them leaving his mouth, watching their vibrations wiggle through the air.

They continued to laugh, one holding Dawn by a leg, upside-down, the others tossing pebbles and rocks at her flapping wings. Steve saw him rousing and sat on his chest, muttering curses at his prisoner.

A stone was tossed, clipping Dawn’s head, and a bead of blood fell. He saw in that drop of blood the nest, the ducklings’ aborted bodies littering the reeds, himself crying, running, ashamed. Without grace or plan Brian spasmed and flailed his limbs until something approaching a fist met the side of Steve’s face and unseated him.

Back on his feet, Brian ran into Peter’s backside, tumbling them both into Dawn’s cage and toppling it, nails and hardware cloth slicing them up. He didn’t stop to think or gauge his wounds or consider the extra foot of muscle and mean-spiritedness beneath him.

He just started swinging.

‘Leave her alone,’ he chanted, laying into Peter’s face. ‘Leave her alone!’ He felt his fists slide off, lubricated in the spring of blood boiling out of Peter’s nose.

‘Leave her alone!’ he screamed, as Peter’s friends pulled him off. Brian fought them off too, wild and unyielding, with the formless rage of a parent wildly swinging for their child.

He stopped when he saw something brown float up and take wing, climbing over the broken cage and bent tree and mouldering trailer park.

Dawn stretched her wings, quacking her goodbye and thanks.

Brian smiled, through dirt and blood-stained teeth, as she joined the ranks of other juveniles, a haphazard ‘V’ freely heading south.

About the Author

Douglas Wright writes from the edge of the Maine woods. He seeks his truth in words, often in horror, sci-fi and literary pieces. His works have been published online and off, most recently in the Echoes in the Fog anthology by 12 Willows Press. Visit his website here, and find him on BlueSky at @douglaswrightiii.com.