The Elusive Language of Ducks Read Online Free PDF

puppy, such was the intensity of joy as he snuggled into her. She was a dandelion leaf salad, the sun on his fluff after a bath, she was a paddock wriggling with worms, she was a wing, she was a mother duck.
    I thought you would never come back, he whimpered. He told her how cats had slunk towards the cage, their whiskery noses investigating. How it had rained — the first time he had experienced water that hadn’t been presented to him in a dish or a basin. Today it had fallen from the sky, and she hadn’t been there. He dug his beak under her hair, delving into the skin of her neck. She sat down on the steps of the deck, and he laid his neck upon her stomach, burying his head into the crook of her arm, and finally the chirruping settled, and in the silence, in his silence, she thought she could feel his heart vibrating against her arm.
    And she thought of his anxiety and isolation all the day long, and wondered whether there would be issues in the future over his adoption.

FILLING UP HER LIFE
    As the days passed, the duckling’s shape pushed out further into the form of a duck. It looked as though a thumb had pressed its beak outwards. Its body was stronger and also longer, its neck snaking out from its body. It was a balloon being blown up in the night by a masterful street artist. One day, she thought, its tail might be tied into a knot and the duck released to float away into the sky, to join all the other fluffy white balloons that skidded high across the wide summer blue.
    The woman wondered what would happen to the duck when he grew up. She visualised him filling up all the spaces she had to offer. She imagined going down to the bathroom one morning, to where he slept on straw in the large plastic box, only to find that the duck was a square thing occupying every corner of the box.

Chapter 3

VISITATIONS FROM THE OVERNIGHT EDUCATOR
    And with every new day it seemed that he had learnt things overnight about being a duck.
    The woman took him down to the tiny pond in the garden, surrounded by trees and lilies and tall reeds. Two life-size ducks — one a decoy and one a concrete sculpture — cluttered up the pond, along with a slimy plastic lily-pad, a plaster-of-Paris frog, an ugly spouting fountain, and a weathered wooden bridge. Pieces of driftwood sat at the edge. Several orange goldfish lurked in the shadows. It was a once-crafted pond, abandoned.
    When the duck was still a pom-pom he floated on the water, wildly paddling his little legs until he started to sink. He’d then panic back into the hands of the woman, with his transparent fluff sticking to his naked pimply skin.
    Now that he was bigger, he plodded around the edge, flicking his head under the water before wiping it over his back. The woman, sitting on the bridge, watched him as he lifted his body upright and flapped his winglets. Then he took himself across to the other side of the pond where there was a mini beach of stones. Standing in a patch of sunlight, he poked his beak into his downy breast, as if exploring new terrain, searching for a clue to his duckness.
    It was a new development for him to be apart from her while they were together. They were separated by a muddy puddle of water. They were separated by a vast expanse of pond, where she as a woman and he as a duck were different beings. He stood up tall again, fluffing up, flapping. Every day he did this now.
    The mysterious overnight educator had informed him that he would fly, and
every day
he checked to see whether this was the day.

LAYING OUT THE FOUNDATIONS
    The woman looked at his stumpy wings fluttering uselessly. The design plan of his day-to-day evolution was impeccable. Even if he
could
fly now, it would be perilous for him, crashing into the walls of the world and careening into the mouths of cats and dogs and rats. Once he flew, where would he go? And how would he know to stop? She thought of thistle-down floating high in the sky and imagined that it was