This story was okay. I didn't really see the point of the swans speculative element. Like Electric Paladin I was hoping for a different backstory. Most of all though, I just really didn't care what happened to any of them. They all felt more like forces of nature than real people. Delia meek and excessively passive and never seizing what she wants, Adela aggressive and always seizing what she wants, the doctor who claims to have a set of morals but abandons them at the first opportunity, and the roommate who is apparently there to just give some token conflict. I didn't want to root for any of them, and even if I did there was nothing in particular to root for them to do. She just had to get better, and it seemed to me that nobody really meant anybody else any harm, or wished to impede anyone else (except perhaps between Adela and Delia, but mostly they seemed to be coexisting well enough). I was waiting for some conflict, and for something to root for, but that never came.
Did anyone else wonder if the roommate was gay and in love with the doctor? I'm not sure exactly why I thought that. When he was trying to warn Adela off, I got that sense for no reason I've been able to pinpoint. He seemed like either a jealous ex-lover, or perhaps a jealous man with an unrequited crush. Maybe I was just reaching, looking for something to draw my attention.
The split personality here reminded me a lot of Detta Walker/Odetta Holmes in Stephen King's "The Drawing of the Three". In this particular case, though, I found it hard to remember which name applied to which of the personalities. I found it easier in King's work, I think because each had different last names and so I differentiated more based on the surname than the given name.
The swan thing was because of the traditional folk tale that was the basis for the piece. There's tons of versions, but basically it goes: man finds wounded swan/crane/whatever, man takes home and heals, then later a mysterious woman appears, stays to be domestic for a while but gradually grows miserable, and the man either tries to force her to stay with tragic consequences or allows her to leave and feels all sad.
Ah, I hadn't heard of the swan variation. I was more familliar with the Selkies (linked from the Swan Maiden page on Wikipedia), where it's a seal. Also, the semi-recent Podcastle story "Gone Daddy Gone" was based on the same legend as far as I can tell.
I remain a little sick of sexual assault/abuse as the go-to tragedy of fiction. Yeah, it's sad, bad, and makes me mad and it happens way too often... but I'm a little bored of it. I know lots of people who are all messed up from very serious life trauma, and only a few of them were sexually assaulted. And yet, in fiction, it seems like you can't go three steps without tripping over a rape survivor, a rape victim, or a rape in progress, even in stories that don't really need it.
This story, for example - did the Swans really need to have been sexually assaulted? I don't think so. I think that there are lots of kinds of abuse that could have shattered her mind the way sexual assalut did.
That makes me think of when I bought a copy of Glimmer Train in 2009, and a copy of Zoetrope to find out what magazines that styled themselves as "literary" were publishing. I wrote a review of it that had a list of things that were true of pretty much every story in the two magazines (a couple dozen stories and they were basically all variations of the same). I did find one story that I enjoyed in the group that broke the mold and actually managed to be enjoyable. Sadly, that story was something like 90 years old, F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", which wasn't particularly deep but was good for a chuckle. Of the list of things that all the other stories had in common:
7. The stories all had a tone and them of “Woe is me ain’t my life terrible”. It’s easy enough to find these stories on the news, do I really need to seek out fiction that does the same thing? And I really hope the proportion of protagonists who hate their lives isn’t proportional to real people who hate their lives, else we are all in a lot of trouble!
8. Not in every story, but maybe 1/4 to 1/2, pedophilia is an element, whether it’s explicit sex or just creepy looks from teenagers’ dads.