Ice covers the lake
Swans sing of what they’ve forgotten—
Silent wings remember.
On a brittle December morning, Yuki stood at the edge of the frozen lake. The air felt sharp, like the edge of a paper freshly torn, and the snow under her boots crackled softly. In the distance, two swans flew low over the water, their wings slicing the pale winter light. She watched them, transfixed, as they moved in perfect unison, like dancers following an invisible thread.
Yuki had come to the lake every winter since she could remember, drawn by something she couldn’t name. She wasn’t the sort of person who believed in omens or ghosts. But there was a weight in the air here, a kind of gravitational pull, as if something important had happened long ago and the echo of it still hung in the frozen reeds.
The swans flew in a slow arc, circling the lake as if searching for something lost. Then, without warning, one of them let out a low, mournful cry. It wasn’t a sound Yuki had ever heard before—not quite bird, not quite human. The sound folded into the winter air, spreading out across the lake in waves. She felt it in her chest, as if the cry had carved out a hollow space there and filled it with snow.
“You heard it too, didn’t you?”
The voice startled her. She turned and saw an old man standing a few feet away, bundled in a dark coat that hung loose around his frame. His face was pale and deeply lined, like a map of forgotten places.
“The swan’s song,” he said, nodding toward the lake. “Not many people can hear it.”
Yuki hesitated, unsure if she should answer. “It sounded… sad,” she said finally.
The man chuckled softly, a dry, papery sound. “That’s because it is. They only sing like that in winter, you know. When they remember.”
“Remember what?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he gazed out at the swans, now gliding silently over the water. “There’s a story about this lake,” he said after a while. “A strange one. Do you want to hear it?”
Yuki nodded, though she wasn’t sure why.
“They say that long ago, this was a place where people came to forget. The lake would take your memories, all of them, and bury them beneath the ice. Some people came willingly, hoping to escape grief or regret. Others were brought here against their will, their memories stolen as punishment for something they’d done. Either way, the lake kept their secrets.
“But memory is a stubborn thing. It doesn’t just disappear. It sinks, yes, but it doesn’t die. And in the winter, when the lake freezes over, those lost memories rise to the surface. That’s what the swans are singing about. They’re the ones who guard the memories, you see. They carry them in their wings, their feathers, their song. But the burden is heavy. Too heavy. So every winter, they cry out. Not to us, but to each other. To say: *I remember too.*”
The man fell silent. Yuki stared at the swans, her breath fogging in the cold air. The idea was absurd, of course. Swans as guardians of forgotten memories? And yet, the longer she watched them, the more she felt that there was something beneath their wings, something vast and unseen, like the dark waters beneath the ice.
When she turned back, the man was gone. There were no footprints in the snow where he had stood.
For weeks afterward, Yuki couldn’t stop thinking about the swans and their song. She returned to the lake every day, but the man never reappeared, and the swans remained silent. Still, she felt as if the lake had left something inside her, a quiet ache she couldn’t name.
Late one night, she dreamed of flying over the lake, her body weightless and cold. She could hear the swans crying below her, their voices weaving together in a language she almost understood. When she woke, her pillow was damp, and her throat ached, as if she had been singing in her sleep.
It wasn’t sadness, exactly, that stayed with her after that. It was more like a memory of sadness, something faint and indistinct, like the outline of a figure walking away through falling snow.
And every winter after, when she heard the distant cry of the swans, she would pause, her breath catching in her chest, and wonder what it was they were trying to say.
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