- The voice
- None — asleep she has no face at all
- Home
- The Sleepy LakeYou cannot see the other side
- Part of
- Sleep namesA character per sleep word, so the word is learnt without being taught.
- How home goes to sleep
- It goes to sleep when its reflection becomes a perfect mirror.
The story of The Nodding Swan
A swan asleep on water has no beginning and no end. She does not tuck her head under a wing — she folds the whole neck back along her own body, and the wing closes over the last of it, and what is left is one unbroken curve. No head. No bill. No eyes. Just a shape. She is the only one in the cast whose sleeping form has no face at all, which is why she works at any size, and why a two-year-old can draw her. She is black. Matte deep black-charcoal clay, faintly warm, never glossy and never feathered, a soft loaf that eats the light. That was not a style choice. A white swan at night is the brightest thing in the picture, and the brightest thing in the picture is supposed to be Tardy. There are white swans on the Sleepy Lake, two or three of them, far off and small and already still, and she is not one of them, and nobody ever mentions it. The one colour anywhere on her is her bill: dusty rose-red with a pale band near the tip. Which means her method is visible. She nods, once, slowly, and the head goes down along the back, and the red goes out. That is the whole of it — a Sleep Ladder in one gesture, with no eyelid to animate and nothing to explain. It happens once per film and it never comes back out. And then she drifts, asleep, very slowly across the picture, and there are always two of her: one on the water and one underneath it. If the reflection ever breaks, the Hush has failed at its job and the picture is wrong.
Friends
The Lady of the LakeThe other one on the lake, equally still, and neither has ever noticed the other.