We decided to walk to the canal. You were running late, so I picked up beers from the corner store and cooled them in the freezer. When you arrived I put them in a tote bag and went downstairs where you were locking your bike in the courtyard. We walked to my spot on the canal, a patch of grass underneath the concrete hospital with orange curtains. The swans on this side of the canal gather there, mostly gliding or flapping or flying along the water, but sometimes padding onto the banks when kids show up with bread. At night they sleep on the water with their necks swiveled backwards and their heads tucked into the down of their backs. We heard that in the winter, when the water freezes, firefighters remove the swans, but no one seemed to know exactly where they’d go.

We lived in different cities, but before, when we lived in the same one, we slept together once. You told me that we couldn’t sleep together again because you had a girlfriend in the city where you now lived. I told you, to dispel the awkwardness, about a swan who swims the canal with a broken leg. He contorts his leg to such an angle that it lays across his back, a grey webbed foot sticking out like a starfish through the feathers of his resting wings. You seemed doubtful that a swan with a broken leg could swim, but then we saw him, gliding past one-footed, breaking the smooth surface of the dark green water and leaving silent ripples in his wake. Later I learned that his leg wasn't broken, the foot thing is just a normal method of thermoregulation, and the swan I’d been seeing was probably many different swans.


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