Meditations on the Swan by Josie Peterson

Derek Σωκράτ CC




Meditations on the Swan

“And it's moving its slow thighs
Across the desert sands
Through dark indignant
Reeling falcons”       -      Joni Mitchell & William Butler Yeats, “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” 
 

          I was once 18 and an owl hit me. I was moving out, speeding down highway 35 late at night with most of my belongings. My mom was mid-mental breakdown after her mother died. Over a convoluted misunderstanding between her and my oldest brother, who lived next door, she lumped me in with his callousness. “GET OUT!” she screamed. I really don’t remember much of how it went. I just know she had never looked at me that way before, and it angered and scared me.
          Fuck you, I said, grabbed a bag of my things, and called friends until someone picked up. And that was that. I had a new place to live. 
          She called me later to tell me she was sorry, to ask me to come back. I said no.
         On the drive I was hit with the feeling that I was leaving something I could never return to. A fledgling falling off the branch, lucky if a kind soul would find me and pick me back up before I get stepped on or eaten. Even luckier if I just figure out this flying shit by myself.
       This thought was quickly interrupted by a collision of feathers, two giant speckled wing flaps, then nothing but a dark starry night. Stunned, but not stunned enough to stay put, I let go of the brake and kept driving.



          (I was once euphorically hormonal, and probably a little hypomanic, two years ago, when I began writing this essay. The ideas formed on my walk across campus. I was menstruating, but I wasn’t sad; I was emotional, contemplative. I had a crush to think about who turned out to be a great kisser. It was springtime. Birdsong echoed around me. I can remember the walk now, the ecstasy.)



         At nine or ten, my cousin Autumn had explained to me what a period was, much to my mom’s dismay. My mom wanted to keep me innocent as long as possible. I’d lie in bed dreading that day when I would look down at my panties and see red, so much so that it became an apparition, a flaming ghoul sitting on my shoulder laughing at me until it came. 
          On a warm afternoon, I sat with my family in our white lawn chairs watching the dogs play against the backdrop of the mountains. My mom mentioned her period. My dad asked me, “Have you got that yet, love?” He was awkward and knew nothing about my young life and inner world. I looked down and said no. I didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t want anyone to know when it came. Zero personal space, sharing a queen-sized bed with my whole family, including my dad and brother, I was afraid of the embarrassment and blood and pain I saw come out of my mother, how she sometimes became that beast I was so afraid of, with no room to cry out.   



          (13 years of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare on my birthday when I hunched over and saw brown, not red. I inspected my panties to make sure it was real. I called for my mom, and she appeared.)



          My dad suffered. He was an alcoholic who couldn’t afford booze, a smoker who stood outside of Main Street Market asking people for their cigarette butts, and, most of all, lonely. We left him for most of the day every day to go care for my mom’s mother in town. He never came with us. I’m not really sure why. It may have been because my uncle didn’t want him on his property. I remember one Christmas my dad briefly considered going to Gramma’s for dinner, but he didn’t. Maybe he was afraid. 
         He had been a preacher before things fell apart. He talked to himself in public. He woke us up in the early morning, ranting loudly, vacuuming, blasting the TV. He didn’t cook. He only ate leftovers that my mom brought home. He hoarded newspapers and coffee cans. Some nights when he was extra riled up, he and my mom fought into the morning, throwing things at each other, screaming about nothing. The next day, we usually pretended it didn’t happen. 
          Outside our living room window was a panorama of the Mission Mountains atop the Flathead River, placed as if hung perfectly on the wall of our small life. Outside were fields to play in and hills to climb and dogs and cats and cows. Outside was a car dump, rows and rows of metal. Outside was home, too. It is difficult to talk about how it is to be so proud and also so ashamed of the place you love so dearly.
          He’s tied up in my home-story, but he was a burden to me. When we moved out, he stayed out at that house with all of our pets, and I mourned every day for the fact that I couldn’t be in my home, that I had to be in this other, outer world, without walls, without my view, that he—not him, but his chaotic presence, with our occasional visits—ruled the plot of earth I knew I belonged in. 



          (I once had a roommate who watered her plants with her menstrual blood.)



          Once when I was 23, just days after my dad died in his armchair after refusing to visit a doctor for years for what was probably cancer, I was making the eight hour drive back to Utah where I went to college and now live. My mom called me. “Taco’s dead.”
          I can count on my hands the amount of times I’ve heard my mom cry. This was one of them.
        Taco was a bird, I don’t remember what kind, maybe a starling, that she had found injured and nursed back to life two or three years prior. I never got it, why she wouldn't let him go once he was better. She would always say he imprinted on her, that he wouldn’t survive the wild. When I stared at him through his little cage that stood about three feet tall, I felt sorry for him, but I still didn’t get it. Let him go, I thought. He isn’t meant to be in there. 
          Now, he was dead, and my opinions didn’t matter. I promised her I would come back in September to bury Taco and sprinkle my dad‘s ashes up in the Swan. 



          (One time a man kissed me so carnivorously with his garlic breath that I wanted to throw up. Later, as he walked me to my car, he stuck his hand in my back pocket and said, “it’s okay if I do this, right?”)



          “When I’m thirteen, I feel like people will treat me more like an adult,” one of us said. Me, my twin brother, and Autumn all nodded in agreement as we discussed important matters on the picnic table beside the lake.
          She was my close friend and character foil, always steps ahead. During the summers she spent with us in Montana, she talked openly and proudly about her cycle, all the things she knew about sex, and all the provocative things she understood that I didn’t, like city life in Portland or the Theory of Evolution. Her first period was at 11, two years before mine. When we would change in the spare room at our grandma's house, she would drop her pants and leave her soiled pad out in the open while we went swimming in the lake. I tried to avoid its gaze. 
         She and I looked alike, long blonde hair and blue eyes, both a mix of our mothers. But she had curly hair and didn’t seem scared of growing up like I did. She seemed to welcome it. I imagine she might have been a little afraid, but she kept her confidence, always pointing her slender chin upright like the eagles perched outside.
          Autumn was like a second daughter to my mom, who brought her out of her shell. She arrived every summer cold and detached from living with a mentally ill and abusive mother, but mine hatched her, slowly, each year. So she became warmer, happier, brighter, and always beautiful. 
        Autumn’s mother is a tall, round, red-faced woman whose face gets even redder when she isn’t in total control of a situation. We sometimes compared her bi-polarity to my dad’s, but I was never afraid of him. His anger was pretty benign. Watching her get worked up was like watching a balloon filled with poison filling with air and about to pop. 
          During the years I didn’t see Autumn, part of middle school and high school, she had left her mother and moved in with a foster family. I didn’t talk to her again until we were 18, the summer before college, when our grandmother lay dying in a nursing home, and she flew out to visit. She wanted to see her grandma, and all of the adults were more than useless in helping us bring her home. Her mother offered to fly her, only with conditions that Autumn would not meet. My other aunts and uncles either didn’t have enough money or didn’t have enough empathy, so I bought half of her ticket. 
          She looked different. She had a stud on each side of her nose and a ring on her septum. She had a large, strange tattoo of a bee on her forearm and she wore these tight cheetah-print pants and a tiny cropped tank top. She was as beautiful as when we were kids. 
         Three years later, Autumn was found in a Seattle park with her head blown off. The trail of blood behind her led to a car where a young man named Bryson Morgan was passed out with a gun in his hand, the car door birthing a blood-dimmed tide when induced by the cops. 
          He only got thirty years, but we got a new landmark to bury birds in. 



          (As I write this, blood oozes out of me onto the white pad stuck to my underwear tucked in my crotch which is tucked under my black duvet cover in my warm, comfortable bedroom, and I am doing nothing with it. Blood is a kind of silence, and silence is necessary to live a creative life. Silence is nothing. Necessity is out of nothing.)



         Two months after my dad died, I showed up to my mom’s house hungover and pale. She glared at me disappointedly. Me, Laura, my mother, and Laura’s little brother Chris piled into her Expedition and drove up to the Swan Mountains, about an hour from our home. 
          When we got there, she presented the body for burial: Wrapped in a napkin and thawing, Taco had been well preserved and was now anointed with her tears. She gave us each a little bit of my dad’s ashes to spread in the small mountainside cemetery scattered with homemade gravesites, a nearby one garnished with a prayer flag and a colorful elephant statue. 
         Autumn’s grave became a rainbow, too, quickly filling up with pumpkins, flowers, cans of Negro Modelo, an old man’s ashes, and the body of a beloved bird. In an attempt to emotionally regulate my withdrawn brain, I grabbed a blanket and laid down in the trees past the grave. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel my mother shaking her head at my ambivalence. I dumped my dad’s ashes into the bushes, reveling in the brief quiet of that moment when the speaker playing her grieving playlist paused. 



          (But then: the spiritus mundi shouts itself into a world above us, almost unbearable, whose logic begs to be not grasped, but crushed and sprinkled over the ground.)



          Laura once pulled over to watch mere feathers loosed upon the world. “I was driving around with my goose that day,” she said, when she saw seven ducklings and mother, flattened. One disoriented survivor. A neighbor, Bill Jenson, who calls himself “Mr. Good Looking,” helped her retrieve the final standing duck. 
          Laura is tall and beautiful with long brown hair and a selfless disposition. She is my sister by choice. The goose in her passenger seat was named Babygirl, who hatched under an incubation light that Laura had carefully tended to, the only hatchling from that batch. She remained at Laura’s heel. 
          She named the wild duck Wild Bill. One day, Wild Bill started twitching and twisting like she needed an exorcism. The vet prescribed a vitamin shot to give her once a day. She slowly lost control of her legs, so we had to do physical therapy, holding her up, putting a hand below the webbed feet, and gently pushing them up and down to maintain circulation. 
          They may have gotten into something poisonous or caught some disease from other birds, or just didn’t have the nutrients to develop. Both Wild Bill and Babygirl met the same fate, and were buried in the yard.
         Laura loved those birds. I like to think they loved her. But something about the feel of reptilian eyes on mine and sinewy feet in my palms told me that birds don’t love in the way people do, and exposed me to a type of wildness that I am not sure I possess: one that, instead of holding on, attaching, aching, only flashes light and lets go.



          (Today, I made a map of all the people, birds, and subthemes in this essay. It consists, in red ballpoint pen, of 18 circles all connected by lines, with three black vertical lines pointing certain words to a “main” word. The shape of the whole thing looks like a veiny human heart to me, minus the vein that sticks up out of the left side. 
          My friend said it looks (kind of) like a rose.) 



          In a final act of total control, Autumn’s mother drove her body, alone, from Seattle to Montana. Autumn had tested positive for covid, so for the day-long drive, she lived in a cold metal box. At the gravesite, my oldest brother unscrewed and opened the box and placed her in a wooden one. 
         They buried her in the Swan Mountains, located in Western Montana, on the other side of the Mission Mountains, my mountains. I didn’t hike, hunt, or fish at the Swan growing up. Those weren’t my grounds. I don’t think they were Autumn’s, either. 
          Still, she lay in a hole, her face toward the sky, my mother’s hands and her mother’s hands examining her dead, naked body that they once cradled, and my ghost there, too, furious that she was stripped of her privacy. Laura refused to look. 
          My mom, brothers, Laura, Laura’s mom, and her other brother, Mike, all went. I stayed away. My brother used an excavator to dig the grave, I think. I heard her head was shaved and that my youngest brother got so drunk afterwards that he threw up in a restaurant bathroom.
          Laura’s brothers are both tender-hearted like she is, as much as boys can be. Chris and Mike. They were both older than us, teenagers when we were kids, and I remember Autumn thinking they were cute and trying to flirt with them. They helped bury her, the men doing their thing while the women did theirs, all trying to feign control where there is none. 



          (Text from Laura, around 3/2022
          I just found another dead goose today, they have the softest bodies, they’re like clouds.)



          Two years later, Mike was in a motorcycle accident that left him brain dead, and while the family deliberated about what to do, I was a bridesmaid at my friend’s wedding, until I got the call. But I stayed in a different state because I couldn’t miss work and didn’t have the money to fly home, living on the outskirts of Laura’s worst nightmare.
          I will tell you about Mike by telling you about his funeral. A neighbor’s backyard; trucks lining the grass in rows and rows, some of them jacked up, some old and beaten, some both; my family, Laura’s family, friends from all over the community, children running and screaming and playing with fireworks; Mike and Laura’s mom, Susan, with her thick walking stick and pink bandana thudding around, both confused and totally lucid, crying out for her boy who was gone; Mike’s curly-headed son, a round-faced infant oblivious that he was a deep source of comfort and pain; a while for people to get up and say a few words; me, getting up to read a poem about peaches and describing the time when I needed help with my car and all Mike did was turn the ignition, and I was embarrassed but hopeful, and now blubbering like an idiot baby, and I felt I didn’t deserve to be so sad, because I am just a little sister who is always away. 
          The porch became a stage, and later on in the night, when all of the millennials had had enough to drink, they began singing screamo songs with a karaoke machine someone had brought, and I stayed for the show.  



          (I once had a nightmare where predation entered me: I was forced to get breast implants and I woke up from the surgery crying.)



          Once, I was playing with my nephew in the backyard when something fell out of the tree, and in seconds one of the five dogs had it in his mouth. I lunged, pried it out, and held it in my hands: a baby bird. 
          I yelled for my middle brother Donald, who was having beers with his wife’s uncle and walking the property. My nephew Landon was prancing around the yard, echoing baby baby baby baby over and over. I showed Donald the bird and asked what I should do with it. He said, give it to the dogs. 
          When I objected, he pointed to a grove of trees a few hundred yards away, where sunbeams cracked through the pine trees and the air was free of dog- and child- and man-noises. Both close and far away. A soft body, a tiny heart beating. I ventured away and chose a branch to place her on. When I released my hands, she sat, a statue. I basked in her light for a moment. Then I turned back toward Landon, trying hard, against my very nature, not to wonder if the mother would figure out where she was, or if she’d even know where to look.



          (My twin brother has called most of the women in our life a cunt, more than once, me included. He learned the word from my father.)



          Autumn once (or twice) messaged me asking for money. She usually paid me back at least part of it. One of the last messages I received from her, she said she might need to resort to selling herself. I was a little skeptical, because I knew she had a substance abuse problem, so I thought she might have been lying. And I was really broke at the time. I can’t remember if I sent her the money. Would it have made a difference? Would she have survived if I’d missed rent or picked up a few shifts?
          I ran into my uncle’s wife in my hometown, shortly after Autumn’s death. “At least she’s not suffering anymore,” she said. She lives where my grandma used to live, where my mom grew up, where Autumn used to play. I will probably never go there again.
         Our grandmother’s house rests on Flathead Lake in front of a dock with a tall, dead tree beside it. Hollow. An eagle's nest always rested on the very top of the tree, sometimes a second one on a lower branch. The eagles would perch, surveying the waves for prey, and my mother would take pictures of them. 
 


          (A text from my mother, with a photo, November 5th, 2025, 9:50 pm 
Moon just peeked out due north towards Canada and the swan mountain range. Check out my yellow cactus with the pink blush.. I think Laura got me that one, it's loaded with buds.)



          Growing up, I'm not sure I knew where the Swan mountains were. I have the worst sense of direction of anyone I know, and, besides, all I knew was what I saw out of the car window in the 20 miles between home and grandma’s house: post office, Super One, the UPS Store, the library, the Missions, the lake, our aunt’s house, with occasional deviations to neighboring towns when somebody had a doctor’s appointment or we had to go to the Super Walmart or Costco an hour and a half away. I hardly drove east toward the Swan, even when I could drive myself. 
          But then something happens that forces you to orient yourself, to see your place against the others, to lose the center. To learn where the blood goes. 



          (I now write in a purple journal that I bought at TJ Maxx. On the cover is a swan of sparkly plastic beads with a pink bow tied around her neck. The top of today’s entry 1/6/26: 

           Women facing predators, SCREAMING) 

​

​

Josie Peterson grew up in Northwest Montana, the place that gave her voice. She currently lives in Utah and hopes to attend graduate school soon. She has a black cat named Walter, named after the famous TV anti-hero as well as the American poet.





Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

donate