By A.V. Shepherd

I grew up thinking geese were swans. Not because I was a slow child, but because that’s what my mother had told me. Just as the haughty Hyacinth Bucket insists her surname be pronounced ‘bouquet,’ my mother would find all sorts of inventive ways to keep up appearances. Including, it turned out, willing our avian neighbors to be posher than they were. 

I was thirteen years old when a friend set me straight one day after school. We flung chunks of the sandwiches our mothers had lovingly packed for us into our local pond, while we instead nibbled on chocolate bars stolen from the corner shop. “That swan’s lookin’ at me weird,” I commented, unknowingly. After she had finished laughing, my friend broke the news to me that the birds pecking at the rejected bread were not, in fact, property of the queen, but instead the far less regal goose. 

The elocution lessons my mum had been subjected to meant that when she answered the telephone, her vowel sounds would elongate and her voice would soften, only to return to her Northern lilt upon replacing the receiver. Twenty years after mocking her for her audio pantomime, I catch myself doing the same amongst my fellow sociologists at university. Back straight, hands folded neatly on the table, I hear the middle-class tones rolling off my tongue and wonder what my mate from high school would think if she could hear me. 

“It took me six years to get my current parking space, you know.” The woman next to me in our annual cross-departmental meeting bores me with a story about how she moved through the ranks to where she is today. “It really was awful having to walk all the way from the Hessman building every day.” I nod absentmindedly, struggling to care about how close she can park her car to her building. My gaze is fixed on a smear of lipstick on her teeth, and I decide not to tell her. 

“What department do you work in?” Lipstick asks me. I envy how self-assured she seems, and yet I loathe her for it. “I mean, these twenty-year-olds with music degrees expecting to earn 40,000 a year—give me a break!” 

Her laughter jars, escalating the drumming in my head from countless nights of teeth grinding. I trace my tongue over the chip in my molar that appeared yesterday. She babbles on, and I continue to nod, hating myself but hating her more. I make a mental note to call the dentist, even though I resent the power he holds, his sterile-smelling hands filling my mouth while all I can see are bright lights and his bobbing mustache as he tells me what he’s going to do after he has already done it. 

Whenever I feel out of place, as I always do in these meetings, I can hear my mother’s words, perhaps a delusion, perhaps an inside joke that I’d taken at face value. “The swans have come all the way from Buckingham Palace to see you,” she’d explain whenever we’d stumble upon a gaggle, smoothing her hair down lest the breeze knocked her styled bob out of place. “Because you’re special.” 

In my weekly counseling sessions, I bitch about my mother and the multiple ways in which she lied to me as a child. I remember my counselor’s tentative suggestion that we dislike in others what we dislike in ourselves. 

I look down at my chipped nail polish, surrounding skin gnawed from hours of anxious grant writing, as the woman witters on undeterred by my disinterest. I wonder if my mother’s lies had been preparing me for this world or protecting me from it. I clench my hands in my lap feeling far from special—a common goose next to a vicious swan.