Free A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham

leg?
    The toymaker ran out of lead.
    It seemed kind of stupid. How the soldier fell in love with the ballerina because he thought she had one leg, too.
    He could see only one of her legs. The other was raised up behind her.
    But wouldn’t he have known that? Hadn’t he ever seen a ballerina before?
    Maybe he hadn’t. Or maybe it was wishful thinking. If you had just one leg, wouldn’t you want to meet other people like you?
    It doesn’t make sense.
    What doesn’t?
    The soldier falls out a window, some bad boys put him in a boat made of newspaper, and he sails down a storm drain.
    That seems like it makes sense, to me.
    But then he gets swallowed by a fish and the fish is bought by the same family’s cook and when she cuts it open, the soldier’s inside.
    Why didn’t you like that?
    Uh, because it was stupid?
    It was about destiny. Do you know what “destiny” means?
    Yes.
    The soldier and the ballerina couldn’t be kept apart. That’s destiny.
    I know what it means. It’s still stupid.
    Maybe we could think of another word …
    Then the little boy threw the soldier into the fireplace. For no reason. After the soldier came back, in the fish. The boy threw him into the fire.
    A demon put a spell on the boy.
    There’s no such thing as demons.
    Agreed. All right, let’s say he didn’t like it that the soldier was different.
    You always say “different” when there’s something wrong with somebody.
    I’m not crazy about a phrase like “something wrong with somebody.”
    And then. You know what’s really stupid? That the ballerina blows into the fireplace, too.
    Could we talk about what “destiny” actually means?
    The ballerina had both legs. The ballerina was up there on a shelf. The ballerina wasn’t “different.”
    But she loved somebody who was.
    What’s the big deal, about being different? You make it sound like some kind of prize.
    *   *   *
    The marriage takes its turn on their twentieth anniversary, when the boat catches fire.
    It occurs during the first vacation they’ve taken as a couple since the kids were born. Trevor is a freshman at Haverford, Beth is a junior in high school—they’re pretty much grown up by now. And, according to the real estate agent, with the kitchen so meticulously redone, they could get a fortune for the house.
    All their reasons are evaporating on them. They’re taking the sort of save-the-marriage vacation that generally means the marriage is already lost.
    The chartered sailboat, with its ten passengers and three-man crew, explodes in flames just off the Dalmatian Coast. They’ll learn later about the drunken deckhand, the Zippo, the leak in a propane tank.
    At one moment, they’re sunning on the deck. She’s noticed a cloud that looks like FDR’s profile and is pointing it out to him, thinking this is what happy couples do; hoping that the impersonation of happiness will evolve into the genuine article. It helps, it seems to help, that they’re spending two weeks in close quarters with eleven strangers; that they heard Eva Balderston say to her sister Carrie, “What a lovely couple,” as they got up from dinner last night; that there are believers.
    He’s trying to make out FDR’s profile in the cloud. She’s trying not to mind that he can’t seem to see it, when it’s so obviously right there. She’s striving not to think about all he fails to notice in the world. He’s fighting off his own burgeoning panic over letting her down again. He’s about to say, “Oh, yeah, right, that’s amazing,” when in fact he sees only ordinary clouds …
    The next moment, she’s in the water. She knows there’s been thunder, she knows there’s been hot and blinding brilliance, but that reaches her as memory. She immediately inhabits a new impossibility, and for a