🦢 The Time I Tried to Be a Swan in a Very Small Pond (and Almost Drowned My Husband in Glitter)

🦢 The Time I Tried to Be a Swan in a Very Small Pond (and Almost Drowned My Husband in Glitter)

I’ve always felt a certain kinship with the swan. Not the elegant, gliding-across-a-lake-in-a-Masterpiece-Theater-special kind, oh no. I relate more to the vaguely aggressive, slightly unhinged-looking swan who hisses at children and thinks it’s being majestic while secretly plotting the demise of a perfectly nice duck.

It was my turn to host the annual neighborhood “Spring Fling” dinner party. The theme, which I had suggested in a fit of delusion one year during a particularly stressful Costco trip involving a fight over the last jar of organic dill pickles, was “Bring Your Inner Spirit Animal to Life.” I blame the sodium levels in my blood, honestly.

My husband, Victor—bless his perpetually deadpan, Do Not Touch Anything soul—had chosen to dress as a Stoic Garden Gnome.

"It is an excellent choice," he’d explained, carefully placing a tiny, plaster fishing rod in the pocket of his denim overalls. "It requires minimal movement, which is essential for maintaining a sense of inner peace. Also, I already owned the hat."

Victor is the kind of man who finds joy in the absence of noise and the methodical organization of canned goods. My inner spirit animal, conversely, is a five-alarm fire in a craft store.

And so, my decision. I would be a Giant, Sparkling Swan.

Because, really, who wants to be a meek little sparrow when you can be a creature of mythical, slightly terrifying beauty? Also, the costume kit arrived while I was having a spectacular argument with the cat, Beyoncé (yes, the Beyoncé, though the feline version is much less talented and much more prone to passive-aggressive vomiting), about why she insisted on batting my house keys under the refrigerator, and in a moment of pure, glorious spite, I just clicked "Buy Now."

The box that arrived was the size of a small refrigerator and smelled faintly of desperation and feathers plucked from a taxidermied pigeon. I opened it to find a veritable mountain of white tulle, a beak-like mask that looked suspiciously like a toilet plunger dipped in egg yolk, and enough loose, iridescent glitter to permanently stain the entire Eastern Seaboard.

This is where the true terror began, because you know how they say glitter is the herpes of the craft world? They are liars. Glitter is the plague. It is an omniscient, malevolent entity that propagates through space and time with ruthless efficiency.

I spent an entire afternoon in the garage, hunched over the swan carcass, occasionally pausing to send Victor a blurry photo of my glitter-covered face with the caption, "I am becoming one with my plumage." He responded with a single word: "No."

The actual costume consisted of a leotard (already a mistake, because gravity has been decidedly unkind to me since the dawn of the millennium) and a truly astonishing, butt-heavy bustle of tulle and feathers. The wings—and this is key—were attached via a complex system of elastic straps that required the spatial reasoning skills of a NASA engineer to fasten.

Finally, dinner party hour. I stood in the hallway, looking like a deranged ballerina who’d been attacked by a pillow factory. The massive wingspan meant I had to tilt sideways to pass through the doorway.

"You look," Victor said, pausing mid-stoic-gnome pose to adjust his miniature wheelbarrow (which was carrying pretzels), "like you are preparing to audition for the avant-garde version of Swan Lake where the main character is battling a crippling sense of regret."

"It's called commitment, Victor," I huffed, accidentally knocking over a small table holding my grandmother's porcelain clown collection. (Side note: Grandma loved clowns. I did not. It was a victory for both of us.)

The guests began to arrive.

My neighbor, Carol, who always smells faintly of dryer sheets and passive judgment, came as a majestic, slightly-too-realistic Bald Eagle. She spent the whole night discussing her property values and staring at my wings with an expression of thinly veiled pity.

Then there was Ted, a perfectly nice man from three doors down, who was apparently an Anxious Manatee. He just wore a grey hoodie, sat in the corner, and occasionally squeaked apologetically when someone asked him to pass the cheese. I felt an immediate bond with him.

But the real star of the show, for me, was a quiet accountant named Dennis. Dennis showed up in a painstakingly constructed, life-sized suit of a Vintage 1980s Arcade Game: Pac-Man. The costume was boxy, yellow, and had a working LED screen on the front that flashed the word "INSERT COIN."

I tried to greet him, but the Swan wings were not designed for close-quarters cocktail conversation. I lunged forward, managed to catch one wingtip on the corner of the fireplace mantel, and then ricocheted backward, sending a puff of glitter directly into Victor’s face.

He blinked, once. His gnome beard—which was actually just a square of synthetic fur I’d bought at Hobby Lobby—was now dusted with a constellation of sparkly white.

"The integrity of my gnome-ness," he whispered, his voice dangerously low, "has been compromised by your shimmering avian impulse control problem."

"It’s just glitter! It’ll wash out!" I squeaked, which, as any sentient adult knows, is the biggest lie you can tell next to "I only looked at my phone for a second."

I retreated to the kitchen, which was my safe space, my sanctuary, my pre-game therapy room. I grabbed a glass of wine, but then realized I couldn't lift the glass to my mouth because the giant swan beak-mask, which had a tiny air hole for breathing, did not have a corresponding wine-consumption hole.

I tried to carefully slide the mask up, but it was snagged on a rogue feather. This led to a desperate, one-sided wrestling match between myself and my headwear, which ended with me tearing the beak half-off and making a sound that I can only describe as a disgruntled pterodactyl fighting a wet bath towel.

The main event was dinner, which required me to sit.

You cannot gracefully sit in a giant, butt-heavy swan costume. It is a biological impossibility, like trying to fold a fitted sheet or getting a straight answer from a politician.

I had to essentially perch on the very edge of my dining chair, leaning forward like a very confused gargoyle. My wings, however, had minds of their own. They kept flapping slightly when I shifted my weight, and the sound was a terrifying shwoosh-shwoosh-shwoosh that made Carol the Eagle eye me suspiciously, probably thinking I was engaging in some sort of unauthorized aerial maneuver that would inevitably depress her home value.

The soup course was served—a perfectly lovely butternut squash bisque, which I had slaved over for all of three minutes, thanks to the magic of Trader Joe's.

I leaned forward to take a cautious spoonful, remembering the no-wine-hole-in-the-mask problem. My plan was to delicately maneuver the spoon up through the beak-hole.

It did not work.

Instead, I managed to smear a generous dollop of orange soup across the front of my pristine white plumage, right over my sternum. I looked down. It looked exactly like a highly questionable, bird-related internal injury. I looked up to see Victor, the Stoic Gnome, just staring into his soup bowl, presumably communicating telepathically with the fungi in his garden. He refused to acknowledge the carnage.

"Oh, dear," Carol the Eagle chirped, her voice dripping with the kind of false concern that makes you want to spontaneously combust. "Did you… did you perhaps hit a low-flying pigeon on your way in, darling?"

I considered a swift, winged attack, but then I remembered my impulse control issues are why I am in therapy and why I bought the costume in the first place, so I just let out a desperate, theatrical sigh.

"I think," I announced, trying to keep the tears of frustration out of my voice, "that my swan is actually an unemployed swan. One that has been recently fired from a community theater production and is drinking heavily."

Dennis the Pac-Man, bless his blocky heart, rotated his costume slightly to face me. The LED screen flashed: WAKA WAKA WAKA.

It was a sign. A sign that I needed to embrace the chaos.

The rest of the night was a blur of feathery mishaps and questionable decisions. I tried to dance with the Anxious Manatee, which resulted in a near-miss with the crystal punch bowl and a new layer of glitter on the poor man's hoodie. I used the discarded beak-mask as a puppet to tell inappropriate jokes about my own life, which, strangely, went over better than the real me.

At one point, I found Victor in the backyard, sitting completely still under a patio light, the synthetic white gnome beard glowing faintly.

I lumbered over, my wings dragging over the perfectly manicured lawn, leaving a shimmering, chaotic trail.

"Victor," I whispered, kneeling down, which was a terrible mistake because the tulle bustle immediately rode up and tried to choke me.

He finally looked at me, his eyes perfectly flat. The glitter on his beard seemed to catch the moonlight.

"I have made a discovery," he said, not moving.

"Is it about the inherent beauty of the awkward waterfowl?" I gasped, trying to untangle myself from my own tail feathers.

"No," he stated. "It’s about the fact that I have found traces of your glitter on the inside of my left nostril. I believe it is migrating to my brain. I am going to have to label this an invasion."

I burst out laughing, a horrible, choking, swan-meets-drunk-human sound. I realized that this whole night—the self-inflicted costume wounds, the butternut-squash-bisque-induced shame, the glitter-fueled existential crisis—was peak me.

"Just imagine," I wheezed, "if my spirit animal had been a sparkling narwhal. You'd have a tusk through your trachea right now."

Victor finally cracked. The sides of his mouth twitched up, just a fraction.

"I hate you," he said, but it was the soft, familiar hate that means I love the ridiculous garbage fire you are, and I am mostly okay with the fact that I will find glitter in the lint trap for the next four years.

"I know," I said, finally tearing the swan-leotard off over my head right there on the lawn, leaving a heap of white fluff that looked like a very expensive bird had spontaneously exploded. I was in my sweatpants and a T-shirt that read, I Came. I Saw. I Had Anxiety.

I picked up the enormous, abandoned Pac-Man costume. "Come on, Victor," I said, slinging the Pac-Man over my shoulder. "Let's go watch a nature documentary about penguins and talk about your compromised gnome integrity."

He stood up, brushed the last of the glitter off his hat, and then very deliberately kicked the fallen swan beak under a rosebush. "Only if we can agree on one thing."

"Anything," I promised.

"Next year," he said, adjusting the tiny fishing rod in his pocket, "you are going as a Moss-Covered Boulder. No accessories. No movement. And for the love of God, no shimmer."

I looked at the Pac-Man costume, then at the glitter trail leading to the door, then back at my perfectly stoic, long-suffering husband.

"I think I can manage 'Boulder'," I conceded. "But only if I can wear Crocs."

He sighed—a truly profound, end-of-all-hope sigh.

"You are my cross to bear," he murmured, gently steering me toward the kitchen, away from the glittering, feathery crime scene on the lawn.

(Word count approximately 1,500 words, give or take a few thousand rogue glitter particles.)

Would you like me to write a short, one-paragraph snippet of the sequel where the "Moss-Covered Boulder" costume goes horribly, horribly wrong?