The Weight of Feathers

Alain Corbeau was the one man who could have told Tía Lora if she was right, and who might have wanted to see the fighting end as much as she did. He was the one Corbeau who, years ago, did not travel with his family’s show.

The mineral extraction work being done under the lake. Alain Corbeau had found the records that proved the lake swallowing the trees was an act neither of God nor of either family, but the fallout from the crumbling of a salt dome beneath the lake.

The plant’s owners had sunken a well into that salt dome. Shoddy work, and orders for more salt faster, made the wall of the well cave. Rock slipped down into the empty space, trapped air bubbled toward the surface, and the lake opened up. A sinkhole took out all those trees before the water settled. The river’s sudden roughness, the thing Lace’s family blamed on the Corbeaus’ magia negra, had been from the force and debris off the collapsed lake bed.

All of this an act of no one but the chemical plant’s owners, who’d covered it all up so well that the whole town thought it was a natural disaster, a tragedy no different than a lightning-strike fire.

But before Alain Corbeau could steal or copy the records that would prove what he and Lora knew, the plant managers had found out and fired him. Then he had nothing to show he was more than a madman with his theories.

Tía Lora didn’t have those records. Neither did Lace.

All she had was lying.

“Maybe you wanna talk about the sinkhole,” Lace said through the fence.

The shift in the man’s walk gave him away. He stopped in the middle of his stride, and turned around. His eyes got tight.

“You don’t know anything,” he said.

“And you don’t know how much of a pain in your ass I can be,” she said. “You really want to find out?”

The man’s face relaxed, but there was no more of that smirk, that ridicule. The man may not have believed her threat had any more weight than a string of paper dolls. But he knew the way to make it not matter. It was a small thing to let Luc Corbeau go.

He could make her go away, and he knew it.

Lace pushed herself off the fence. “Get him out.”



De lo perdido, lo que aparezca.

From what is lost, what comes back.

Her toothbrush cleared out the bitter taste of starflower leaves. But her stomach didn’t settle.

She thought of the Corbeaus in that rented Craftsman house. They carried with them so many years of lying Lace waited for the clapboards to split.

She put on the white wings Cluck had made her, tied the ribbons under her breasts, and waited in the blue and white trailer.

When Cluck opened the door, he didn’t look surprised to see her. He didn’t look happy either.

“What the hell did you do?” he asked.

She got up from the built-in bed.

He threw the trailer door shut. “You went to the plant?”

She set her hands on his upper arms, checking that he was all there. The red shirt and brown corduroys she’d never seen him in before that morning. His hair that looked neat at the funeral but uncombed now. The three fingers Dax had broken.

“These aren’t the kind of people you want to deal with.” He put his hands on the side of her face, the heat of his palm stinging her burn.

She didn’t stop him.

He gripped the back of her neck. “You know that, right?” He didn’t raise his voice. Today had hollowed him out too much. He didn’t have the sound left to yell.

“I don’t care.” She dug her hands into his back. “I wanted you out.”

He kissed her, hard. She kissed him back, almost biting his lip.

His hands found the feathers on her back. “What are you doing in these?”

She made him stand in front of the mirror, eyes closed, like he’d done to her. She tied to his body the things she’d made. Those hundreds of black and red feathers threaded to the empty wing frame, filling in the wire shapes until they were thick as crow’s plumage.

She fastened the red ties to his shoulders and across his chest.