the swan upping

The four friends assembled in a rough semi-circle around a laptop to watch a YouTube video of a swan being punched that a sort-of acquaintance had uploaded and was likely to become a sensation. The swan slumped from the shallow water and onto the boardwalk for bread and slightly opened and closed its beak as though this were in some way integral to it. It’s cold tongue curled upwards inside it like a dead leaf. Their sort-of acquaintance approached it and decked it without warning. It’s neck snapped sideways and it hissed as it went down. It didn’t attempt to flee or to stand up and just sat where it was, its head at a kind of broken angle at the top of the long neck. “Come on you cunt,” their sort-of acquaintance goaded. The four friends cheered, were clapping each other’s shoulders, thrusting lager cans upwards and to the heavens, uncontrollable with delight at the mindlessness of the act. “Up you get you cunt. Swan cunt.” The swan’s eyes were closed though it was unclear if it was dead. The video had already had some eight hundred views and this would only escalate. At its close one of the friends, wild with the excited idiocy of shared experience, leaned in and kissed one of the others because he thought it not only right but also necessary to do so. There was for a moment silence as their lips felt around but it was soon shattered by ridicule and threats and deep disgust. He laughed it off, said I thought you were a bird ha ha, them little hands ha ha, and gradually their reproach became good-humoured and they settled with fresh lagers and played the video again. He felt tremendous confusion like the weight of damp piled earth on his chest. In their minds they were already deleting him from their social networks.