The Ugly Duckling

This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Not a word is cut, and nothing asks you to sign up. The first three pages carry the paintings they were given; the rest of the plates are in the app, where the book is read one page to a screen.

Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. He is laughed at and he is lonely. That is the point of the story, and it turns.

So he took to eating at the far end of the trough and sleeping at the end of the row. It was not that anyone was unkind for very long at a time. It was that every single day somebody said something, and the days went on adding up. One evening in September he walked to the low place in the fence and got over it and did not come back.

The marsh was better. Wild geese went over him twice a day in long wavering lines, calling to each other about somewhere else. He learned which reeds were good to sleep in and how to be perfectly still. He stayed there a month, and nobody at all told him what he looked like, and he found he did not mind the quiet as much as he had expected.

Then one afternoon a great flock came down the sky, white, with long necks held out straight in front of them, and they made a sound he had never heard and could not stop listening to. He did not know what they were. He did not know the word. He turned right round in the water watching them go, and something in his chest hurt for the rest of the day.

After that came the winter, and it was long. Snow came down on the reed bank without a sound and stayed. He swam in slow circles at night to keep one patch of water from closing over, because when it closed there would be nowhere to be. He got thin. He slept a great deal. He did not have any particular plans.

Late on he was found by a farmer and carried indoors in a coat, and put down by a stove among children and pots and a great deal of noise. It was warm. It was much too warm. He went into the milk pan, and then into the flour, and then out through the door somebody had left open, and lay down in the snow feeling better.

One morning the sun came up warm and he found he could lift his wings much further than before. He got up out of the reeds, high, without meaning to. Below him on bright water were three of the great white birds. He came down towards them thinking they would send him off, and put his head down low, and looked into the water while he waited.

The face in the water was theirs. Long neck, white all over, dark kind eyes. He was still working this out when they came round him, and one of them laid its neck along his neck. Some children came to the bank with bread and said the new one was the finest of the lot. He put his head under his wing. He had never once expected anything like this.

The end.