17. Swallow (燕子)
Part 1 – Arrival
When we landed at Melbourne Airport, the sky looked bruised. The plane sank through a bank of cloud, and beneath it the city spread out in pale veins of light, a tangle of wires and tin. From the window, it looked half-finished, like something still learning its own name. My mother whispered a prayer as we landed. Her hands shook. She kept all our papers in a blue plastic folder pressed tightly to her chest, as if it were her ribs, as if everything we owned could be folded flat and carried through customs.
Outside the airport, the air was cold and wet, the wind tasting faintly of metal. My mother said, hái hǎo. “Not so bad.” I didn’t know what she was comparing it to: the humid weight of Guangzhou summers, or the silence of leaving.
The bus from the airport moved through streets washed clean by rain. The glass fogged quickly, turning the signs and shopfronts into blurred ghosts. I tried to count the times my mother sighed before giving up.
Our new apartment was small. Its walls thin enough to hear the neighbours breathe. The carpet was a dull brown that swallowed sound and the ceiling wore stains like old maps.
When morning came, I noticed a nest tucked under the eaves of the roof – two small birds perched there, their feathers slick and black.
My mother looked up. “Yànzi,” she said. “Swallows. They always come back.”
I nodded, not understanding how something so small and fragile could know where home was.
* * *
“We will be fine”. My mother said this often, as if the words could build a wall around us. She worked late cleaning offices. She came back smelling of lemon and disinfectant. I left her food in the fridge for when she was too tired to cook. Sometimes she ate standing up, her hair still wet from the shower, her eyes lost somewhere else.
In bed, I listened to the soft cries of the chicks as I fell asleep, a kind of music I didn’t know I needed.
One night, I dreamed I was standing in a field of wind. Hundreds of swallows circled above me, their wings flickering like dark light. They called my name – not the one I’d adopted here, but the one my mother used when I was small. Xiǎo Yǔ. Little rain. When I woke, my pillow was damp. I told myself that it was sweat.
* * *
School was an ocean I had forgotten how to swim in. Every word carried an undertow. When the teacher called my name, I forgot how to answer. The class laughed. Not cruelly, but enough to bruise.
At lunch, I would sit by the window, watching the footy field shimmer in the heat. Spencer sat a few desks away. He had the easy confidence of someone who belonged. He’d spin his pencil, feigning surprise each time it fell. “Oops,” he’d say, and laugh – a soft, spilling sound, like water over stones.
One afternoon he turned to me and said, “You don’t talk much, huh?”
I shook my head.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You look like you’re thinking about something better.”
That night, I drew two swallows on a single line of wire. Their heads turned toward each other. My mother saw the sketch.
“Beautiful,” she said, then paused. “Why two?”
“They travel together,” I said.
She looked at me long enough for the air to grow tight between us. Then she said, “Not everything that travels together stays together.”
Her voice was quiet but sharp, like a thread pulled through cloth.
Part 2 – Flight
The world was changing and I was too, though I didn’t yet know how. Spring came quickly and the jacarandas burst in violet clouds that clung to pavements. The gulls that had been distant silhouettes in winter now wheeled over the dock. I could feel it in my chest – a hollow full of everything left behind. My mother said this country had seasons that could never decide what they wanted to be. I thought that people were like that too.
At school, the classrooms smelled of glue and the chemical bite of black markers. I moved through the corridors like a shadow. Words got tangled in my throat, and I learned to quickly swallow them before anyone could notice. Some of the kids stared at me, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with nothing at all.
It was Spencer who first broke the quiet. He started sitting next to me, a carful distance apart, and talked about things I didn’t understand – films, music, the smell of summer. He said he liked it when the air felt ‘alive’ and I found this strange but beautiful. I stare deep into his green eyes. The world tilted for a second.
I learned the shape of silence, how it could hold more longing than words. His fingers smelled faintly of graphite and his laughter came soft and unhurried, a current I could lean against. I envied the ease with which he moved in the world.
“Draw something that remembers,” our art teacher said one morning.
Her words hovered above us, caught in the smell of turpentine. I didn’t know what she meant, but Spencer started sketching a line of trees bending in the wind. I watched his hand move, light and sure, and I felt something in me flutter. I picked up a brush and felt the stiff bristles tremble under my fingers. I painted two swallows on a wire. One leaned toward the other, wings brushing, their heads turned in quiet conversation.
Spencer glanced at my page and smiled, green eyes catching the light. “I knew you’d pick birds,” he said.
“They’re beautiful,” I whispered.
He nodded as if he understood something that didn’t need explanation.
At lunch, he shared half of his Vegemite sandwich with me, crusts bitten jaggedly, bread too dry. After the first bite I wasn’t hungry at all.
He asked what I missed from home.
I said, “Soups. And the noise.”
“Noise?”
“When everyone talks at the same time. The city hums inside your chest. You can’t hear yourself think.”
He laughed softly. “People don’t talk much here. Maybe that’s why we get along.”
* * *
In the evenings, the apartment smelled of garlic and the faint sourness of rice wine. My mother moved through the rooms quietly, but her presence was constant, a low hum of care: the fridge stocked, clothes folded, hands always busy, always steady. I watched her sometimes and thought about how she had carried our lives across the sea in that blue folder, how she had folded herself into each day so that nothing would break.
The swallows under the roof became my own invisible clock, marking the hours, the days, the shifting light. At night I listened to their soft, urgent cries through the thin ceiling, letting the sound gather in my chest. I drew them in my notebook, over and over, each line a feather, a wing, a pulse of longing.
* * *
Spencer became the only constant, though he didn’t know it. He began walking home with me from school, pretending it was chance but never leaving it to randomness. I hung to every word he said, careful not to reveal how every gesture tore me open.
One afternoon, the sun was low, cutting the street in gold, and he reached over to brush a leaf from my hair. His fingers grazed my ear. I froze, chest tightening, and for a moment the wind seemed to pause, the city holding its breath. He didn’t notice. Or maybe he did.
That night, I drew two more swallows on a single wire. Their wings touched, heads tilted toward each other, the line between them taut with unspoken intent. My mother was silent. She had one of her old photo albums open on her lap. I hadn’t seen it since we left. The photos looked older than they should. My father stood in some of them, his face blurred by age or sunlight.
She didn’t look up. “He liked the birds,” she said.
“Bà?” Dad?
“Yes.” Her eyes stayed on the page. “Every spring he would point at the sky and say, ‘They’re back. It’s like they never left.’”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t remember him that way.
She closed the album and said softly, “Don’t forget where you came from, Xiǎo Yǔ. Even when this place feels easy.”
It didn’t feel easy at all.
* * *
The next weekend, Spencer invited me to his house. His home smelled of warm bread and sea air. Posters covered the walls. His small window looked out over the water, where gulls wheeled and skimmed low, sharp as shadows. He picked up a guitar, strumming chords that felt trembled, unfinished.
“I’m trying to write a song,” he said.
“About what?” I asked.
“It’s silly. I’ve never really felt I belonged here. You know, with the other guys, all the footy and stuff. Sometimes I want to escape.”
“As in leaving here?” I asked.
“Sort of. Or maybe finding somewhere new.”
The wind lifted strands of his hair, and for a moment, the world shrank to the room, the strings, and the silent weight of the air between us. I wanted to tell him everything. That every laugh, every glance, every word he spoke had a pull I could not resist.
“We could write it together,” I offered, eyes lifted to his for a heartbeat too long.
Spencer’s face softened, careful, and then he strummed another cord.
“We should,” he said quietly.
“You are late,” my mother said when I arrived home. She had been kneading dough, flour dusting her arms like snow. Sunlight cut across her hands in sharp lines. She looked at me steadily.
“I was with a friend.”
“With the boy?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
She nodded slowly. “I need to talk to you,” she said. I sat, fingers tight against my knees, heart hammering. “About… love.”
The words were simple, but the air between us thickened. I wanted to tell her everything, but my voice, heavy with fear and longing, would not move.
“You are young,” she said finally. “This world… it will hurt you. Wind can tear wings, even when the sky looks gentle. You must be careful.”
I nodded, swallowing tears I could feel pooling like salt. She returned to the dough, her hands folding and pressing, methodical and calm. Her care was a quiet ache of its own: protective, impossible, full of warnings she could not speak aloud. Outside, the first stars appeared. The swallows had gone quiet for the night.
For the rest of the evening, my mother was quiet. She did not speak of Spencer or school. She spoke of other things: the seasons, the smell of rain on concrete, the way the docks looked from a distance. Her silence held me. A reminder that care could exist even when words could not.
And still, that night, I dreamed of the swallows. Hundreds of them, circling above me, wings flickering like dark flames. Their calls were not in a language I understood, but they knew me, knew my name. I was Xiǎo Yǔ again, little rain, the boy who had crossed an ocean without knowing why.
The next day, Spencer was quieter than usual. His hand did not brush the leaves from my hair as it had before.
Part 3 – Descent
Summer arrived heavy with light. The air was thick with the scent of salt and sun-baked asphalt. The jacarandas had shed their petals, leaving streets littered in bruised violet. But the sky was empty. The swallows had gone north, chasing the seasons, leaving nothing but silence and a broken nest that had fallen from the leaves. Their absence pressed against my ribs. I clutched a feather I had found on my windowsill, black-edged blue, a reminder of something small choosing to be near me. I pressed it to my chest, letting its fragile weight anchor me.
* * *
One afternoon, Spencer met me at the gate. His bag was heavy on his shoulder, sun glinting in his hair. We walked in silence toward the beach. The tide was low, the sand firm beneath our shoes, wet and sticky. The air smelled of salt, kelp, and something else I could not name. The sky above the harbour was empty, pale, unbroken. Without them, the world felt hollow, and I carried that hollow with me.
We stopped where the tide licked at the sand, and I felt my hands tremble. The air moved around us, sharp, carrying the scent of seaweed and sunburned wood.
“I…” I began, voice small, unsure. I swallowed, pressed the feather in my pocket like a talisman, and met his eyes. “I like you.”
The words hung between us. My chest felt impossibly heavy, the emptiness of the sky mirrored in my lungs.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
My stomach fell. “You… don’t feel the same?”
“I like you as a friend,” he said. “I don’t feel that way.”
I felt something inside me fold its wings.
The wind blew across the sand, scattering tiny grains against my shoes. The waves were gentle, indifferent, brushing the shore as if nothing mattered.
I wanted to move, to run, to vanish into the water. To disappear from the ache that had grown in my chest for months. But I stayed still. I only nodded.
The walk home was silent. My mother was at the kitchen table when I returned. She did not ask where I had been. She only nodded toward the half-folded dumpling in her hand.
I went to my room and pressed my face to the glass. The tide was retreating, the sand pale and wet. Nothing stirred in the rafters.
I lay awake, listening to the hollow sound of my chest, imagining the bird in my pocket. My courage, my longing folded itself smaller and smaller until it was almost nothing.
* * *
The days stretched long and empty. At school, Spencer’s presence became measured, cautious. He still spoke to me, but every smile was smaller. He did not walk me home from school.
The harbour and rooftops seemed absent of life, and without the swallows overhead, the sky seemed impossibly vast and unbearably empty. For the first time, I understood the depth of longing, the hollowed ache that could not be soothed and only sharpened with each empty day.
At night I wrote about Spencer, about my mother, about the home I had left and the one I had yet to inhabit. Every line was a feather in my chest, fragile and trembling. Outside, the moon shone over the empty eaves. No swallows circled. I imagined myself among them, skimming the edges of the ocean. And I waited, knowing the ache of longing might never leave, that some things – people, moments, love – exist only in their absence.
Part 4 – Eclipse
Autumn arrived softly. The wind carried salt and dust from the sea. The days were shorter, the sky a pale grey that seemed to hover just above the rooftops. The swallows had not returned, and I felt it in my chest – a hollow, echoing space that no bird could fill.
I walked through the streets alone. At school, Spencer spoke to me less and less. I watched him walk past me with his friends, loud and boisterous, his hand brushing their shoulders. His absence pressed against the walls of my world. I imagined him elsewhere, laughing, smiling, alive in a way I could not touch.
At school, I tried to speak, tried to move in the world. But my words felt brittle, breaking before they were heard. The other children did not know what to do with me, and neither did I. My notebooks were full of swallows, of empty nests, of wings folded against invisible storms.
* * *
One evening, I returned home to find my mother sitting by the window. Her hands were still, resting in her lap. The photo album was open again. She looked at me without speaking, and I felt the air tremble between us.
I sat quietly. I did not know how to begin.
Finally, she said, “Xiǎo Yǔ, do you remember the first time you saw them?”
I nodded. The yànzi nest, the black-blue feathers, the way the birds had moved together. I wanted to tell her I remembered everything. I wanted to tell her about Spencer, about the ache in my chest, about the way my heart had learned to fly even when it was broken.
“I remember,” I said. My voice was small.
She nodded. “They return because they must. Not because it’s easy. Not because the sky is gentle. They return because it’s who they are.”
I understood, somehow. I thought of the swallows above the rooftops, of the way they had left and of the nest that had fallen. And I understood that some things, like people, cannot always return exactly as they were.
* * *
That night, I walked to the edge of the pier. The sea was dark, swollen with waves, and the wind lifted the edges of my hair. I drew a swallow in the sand with my finger, a small black-blue curve of hope and memory. I pressed my palm against it, feeling its cold grit, imagining that if I tried hard enough, I could hold on to something permanently.
The tide crept in slowly, washing away the lines. My chest tightened but I did not cry The swallow vanished, and I let it.
I thought of Spencer. I thought of my mother. I thought of the boy I had been and the boy I was becoming. The world was too large for some things to stay whole. But it was not too large for the heart to remember.
* * *
Days passed. Winter approached. I carried my notebook everywhere, filled with swallows in flight, nests broken and rebuilt, feathers pressed between the pages. I kept drawing, writing, living quietly in the spaces that others left behind.
Winter pressed close, but I kept watching the sky. Sometimes the wind sounded like wings. One morning, a single swallow returned. It circled the rooftops, dipping toward the windows, then vanished. I watched it, heart clenching and lifting at once.
I thought of all the things that had left me: friends, homes, quiet laughter, and the boy who had made my chest ache in a way I had never known. And I thought of the things that remained: the wind, the sea, the small acts of care my mother wove, and the traces of hope that lingered, even in absence.
* * *
I began to notice things I’d ignored before. The way the morning sunlight hit the kitchen table, the scent of garlic and chives rising from the pots, the quiet rhythm of my mother’s voice as she hummed while folding dumplings. The love I had felt, the pain I had carried, and the quiet ache of longing became feathers in my chest. Fragile but unbreakable.
* * *
On the last day before the term break, I climbed to the roof with my notebook. The wind tore at my hair and tugged at my sleeves. I sat on the edge, looking out at the empty sky. I opened the notebook and drew a single line: a swallow flying alone, wings lifted against the cold, heading somewhere I could not see.
I held the drawing to my chest and whispered a promise. I will return. Not the same. But I will fly.
And then I watched the clouds and imagined the swallows returning in the spring, and I knew that even if some things could never come back, some pieces of home, of love, of myself, could always find their way.
The sky was vast. The wind was sharp. And my heart, though bruised, felt light enough to lift.
I walked down the stairs slowly. The city smelled of salt and smoke. My mother was waiting at the door. She smiled, a small, careful smile. I did not reach for her hand. I did not need to. Outside, the world stretched on. The rooftops, the streets, the empty sky. Everything was waiting.
This piece was shortlisted for The Varnish Prize for Fiction 2025.
Chen Wang is a Melbourne-based medical student. He explores questions of migration, inheritance and how people learn to belong across places.