The Weight of Feathers

The feeling of the ribbon against his shirt made him open his eyes.

She watched his face in the mirror, his eyes half-closing again, his mouth a little open. He took in the spread of black feathers. Red streaks wove through, like the petals of French marigolds on dark water.

She stood behind him, her fingers tracing the wingspan. “I borrowed the frame,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

He met her eyes in the mirror.

“I just tried to copy what you did on mine.” She moved between him and the mirror. “It’s nowhere near as good as your work, and they’ll probably fall apart in about two days. But I had the feathers.”

He held her against the mirror, the hollow shafts of the white peacock feathers pressing into her back. His breath fell hot on her mouth. “Why?”

The night she stole the thread and ribbon and the wire frame, it was to get him back. But now she’d tied them to him so Tía Lora would know him, so she would not have to ask if this was the boy.

Lace hadn’t told Tía Lora she would do this, but her great-aunt would know. The boy in the black wings, brushed red, was the one Lora Paloma needed to tell the things she’d told Lace. Lace was afraid if her great-aunt had to ask, if she heard herself say the question—Is this him? Is this the boy?—she’d shrivel back into herself and never speak.

Lace held her hand to Cluck’s chest, so neither of them would close the space between their lips again. “There’s someone you need to see.”

She led him across the woods, both of them still wearing their wings, a shared sign to anyone who wanted to look that they would not let this go on. All these lies would not bleed into two more decades.

The motel hallway was empty. Tía Lora waited behind an unlocked door, fidgeting with a handful of thread and glass beads.

A flicker of recognition passed between her and Cluck.

Lace shut the door. Cluck and Tía Lora stood in the middle of the room, him looking a little down, her a little up.

Tía Lora lifted a hand to his cheek, as though she could know him by the grain of his skin.

His wings made him so much bigger than Lace’s great-aunt. He loomed over her like an archangel. He must have felt it too. He untied the wings from his body, took them off, and laid them on the bed.

Lace knew she should leave them alone. But if she did not stay, did not needle her great-aunt into repeating the things she’d told her this morning, the truth would sink under the river silt, and never be found.

So Lace stood at the threshold, guarding the door, where Tía Lora could see her.

Tía Lora hesitated, and Lace gave her a nod, a look of go on, tell him. Lora Paloma had been silent so long. A few more minutes would be too much. She would wither like a crepe paper poppy.

Tía Lora set the glass beads on a nightstand and made Cluck sit on the edge of the bed. She sat next to him.

Cluck set his forearms on his knees, looking at the patterned carpet. Lace could not hear most of their words, especially her great-aunt’s soft, low voice. But she knew what Tía Lora was saying. She had said it all to Lace this morning. And now she told it to Cluck like he was small, and it was un cuento de hadas, some fairy story, dark and sharp.

Tía Lora had been with a man named Alain, a small romance rooted as much in shared loneliness as love, grown from their shared search for the truth about the salt under the lake and the sinkhole that took the trees. They still did not know what to do with what they knew but could not prove when Lora found out she was pregnant.