The Weight of Feathers

He wanted him to grow his own skin.

Cluck kissed the medal of Sara-la-Kali, and tucked the rosary into the pocket of his corduroys. He should have burned it with his grandfather’s clothes, but couldn’t. If he burned it, he would forget the feeling of the copper’s heat spreading through him. He would forget why he should wear his own clothes, and not another man’s. He would forget why he had burned Pépère’s suits, and he would want them back.



De malas costumbres nacen buenas leyes.

From bad customs are born good laws.

Lace kept her distance. She dressed in black anyway, the same dress she wore to her own grandfather’s funeral. She’d grown, so it was shorter now, ending three inches above her knees. It fit tight across her hips. But it was the only thing black she had with her in the motel room where feathers had rained down on everything.

She stood so the Corbeaus’ backs were to her. To anyone but them, she’d be a mourner who’d stepped away for a prayer or a cigarette.

Dew left the cemetery wet and green, lichen blooming over the stones. The drops caught the sun, scattering the light.

The morning was still cold enough to make her shiver. Cap sleeves exposed where wiring the feathers onto the wings had left her forearms scratched.

She almost didn’t recognize Cluck. He stood next to the open plot, hands at his sides. His jaw was still set, his face hard as the wood of his grandfather’s rosary beads. She’d gotten used to him in button-downs. Now he wore a dark red shirt, crew neck, not collared, and he stood out from all his family’s black suits.

The women, in black skirts down to their calves, looked over at him, but he did not turn his head, did not notice the glares. They must have taken it as disrespect, insolence. Worse, that he would dare to throw in their faces the color that stained his feathers.

If they knew him at all, they’d know better. His grandfather’s suits were the only ones he had, and maybe they reminded him too much of losing him. Maybe he couldn’t look at one of those suits long enough to put it on. Or he had, and that age-darkened mirror had cut into him, showing him how much he looked like a decades-old photograph of Alain Corbeau.

She stayed at the tree line, where the cemetery broke into the woods. She didn’t want Eugenie noticing her and asking why she was there.

She was there to pull Cluck to his feet and keep him there if he couldn’t stand. To make sure none of the pieces of him got lost if he broke. In case his mother, neat as a greenhouse tulip, failed to notice that he was not dust or cracked glass, and reached for a broom.

Lace would gather up those bits of him before they got swept up and thrown out. How he climbed trees as quick as a feral cat. The black salt smell of his hair and sweat. The way his wrecked hand moved over her body. How the sun and water dripped off his back, how warm it stayed even in the river.

A shadow cut through the pale sunlight. “Lace?” said her great-aunt’s voice.

Lace turned.

This Tía Lora was not the same as the Tía Lora Lace had left behind. She looked taken by a spirit, like a specter had spread through her limbs. It was a calm possession, not the thrashing rage of a vengeful ghost, but the deep-river stillness of Apanchanej, the water goddess who’d given the Paloma women their escamas.

Instead of her usual sweater and high-waisted skirt, Tía Lora wore a black dress, the cut plain and straight. It showed enough of her figure that she looked her age instead of Abuela’s. Her usual skirts started at the bottom of her rib cage and ended in the middle of her calves, making her seem the eldest among her sisters-in-law even when she was the youngest.