When the call went out for a mutual aid campaign for Zani D I wasn’t sure I had anything I could contribute except some restacks. Turns out I had a pretty appropriate story sitting in the archive (defunct Wattpad account). I wrote this in 2012 while on an airplane, probably half-drinking and half-napping.
Presented without editing or revision from 2012 Vinny Reads.
The old man went down to the pond to feed the ducks.
It is the same pond he has gone to for years. The rod iron and wood worn in the shadow of his form on the slender bench beside the pond. He used white bread, as he had always used white bread. The ducks now are not the same ducks; not the same ducks as when he started as a much younger man. He was older than these ducks, as the bench was older than him, and the pond older still.
It started as a lark; an eccentricity of his youth. He’d walk through the park, break the heel of his lunch into pieces and toss it to the same ducks that congregated at the pond in those days. He met his wife at that same pond. A slender woman with a long neck and a fondness for all God’s lesser creatures.
Years later the Parks Department would erect a sign that read “Do Not Feed the Wild Animals.”
He asked if she minded if he sat beside her to feed the ducks. That first time he said nothing else. The second time he asked her name, and on from there it went. They would eat their lunches together and bring the remnants for the ducks, breaking the pieces into smaller, manageable chunks while they laughed and the ducks became secondary players. One day, she brought a bag of chips and the old man – a young man at the time – said “They won’t like those chips, they’re too salty.” She laughed in that carefree way she had when she was still young and emptied the bag into the air. They watched as the potato chips floated like leaves down into the water and along the bank, and as the ducks scrambled to devour them as fast as they fell.
It was almost forty years and three children to the day after that when she died. For as long as the old man – middle-aged at the time – held his job, he would walk by the pond and bless the ducks with the remainder of his lunch like a benevolent deity. As he grew older, he began to notice that these weren’t the same ducks he had always fed. Some were larger, some were smaller and some had different plumage. He fed them nonetheless and entertained fantasies that they were the sons and grandsons of the ducks he’d always fed. He had sons of his own in those days, and daughters, too. His eldest followed him into the trade business; the rest went their own way, but all made him proud.
When the old man became an old man and retired, his wife asked him to move, but the old man had never been very far from the house where he was born. The thought of moving filled him with unease. So they stayed in the over-large home where they had raised their children and lived out the rest of her days. His wife died when she was an old woman and he was an old man, but when he still had many days left to go on living.
During those days, he didn’t feed the ducks so much. When he did come back to the pond, hunched and gray, the ducks were there. They greeted him with their usual chatter and aloofness. They had always maintained the demeanor of teenagers; acting as if they had no need for a parent but always readily accepting any easily given charity that had no strings attached.
And so the old man gave the broken remnants that remained eagerly, if unsteadily, to the ducks. His eyes yielding to cataracts and his hands to arthritis. He could no longer make out the shifting ripples the ducks left upon the surface of the pond, nor could he stoop any longer to make ripples of his own.
I wish I were a duck. Driven by the certainty of instinct. To have the grace to know that when the seasons slip away that I must migrate and slip away with them.
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Such a bittersweet and lovely story! I hope I’m lucky enough to experience this one day but reading it is nice too :)
The image of the old man feeding the ducks at the end stung me. As drick said, bittersweet.