The Weight of Feathers

She was no more related to him than she was to any other Corbeau. But if her family had let Tía Lora keep him, he would have been a Paloma, the only one who neither had Paloma blood nor had married into the family. Lace would have grown up sharing school lessons with him, talking him into swimming, making fun of him if she ever caught him pulling out the feathers under his hair.

But even with the Paloma name, those feathers would have stopped her family from claiming him as theirs, the same as the streaks of red and his left-handedness left him a little outside the Corbeaus.

“Well, there’s a silver lining, huh?” he said.

She could feel him grasping at it, looking for a way to make this funny. This was the best he could do. He was reaching for the joke, and his hands found this because it hurt less than anything else. This was how he broke things into pieces small enough to hold.

She got in front of him and stopped him. “You sure you wanna do this now?” she asked. The Corbeaus must have still been in their mourning clothes.

“No, I don’t. I want to do this ten years ago. Hell, I’d settle for a week ago.” He scratched at his cheek, where his tears had dried into salt. “But now is the best I can get.”



Le loup retourne toujours au bois.

The wolf always goes back to the woods.

“Cluck?”

He heard Lace saying his name, but didn’t answer.

He understood now. It clicked into place like the last wire on a wing frame. It slashed at him, a knife grown dull from sitting in a drawer. It left a line of little scratches instead of a clean cut.

Pépère had been careful. He’d given Cluck the quiet space to use his left hand and climb trees higher than any in the show. He’d never fought his own daughter on the show’s schedule or not taking Cluck to church, because Nicole Corbeau knew the secret that could always get him to back down.

Pépère had felt like more than a grandfather because he was. He showed Cluck more patience than he showed his other grandchildren because Cluck was not one of them.

This was why Pépère let Cluck wear his old clothes even when he thought he shouldn’t, because they let him be something more to Cluck than what his children had decided.

“Cluck.” She held his arm to stop him. “I need to know you can hear me.”

“I can hear you,” he said, and kept walking.

She went with him.

He didn’t like looking at her. Every time he saw the dark stain of the wound on her cheek, he remembered that the plant hadn’t just sealed her dress to her body that night. They hadn’t just killed Pépère with the things they’d sent into the air. They’d caused the accident that killed a Corbeau who’d just learned to walk the highest branches.

They’d turned the Corbeaus and the Palomas from rivals to enemies.

These were the things they’d done that his grandfather would never tell him. And he thought of all of them when he saw Lace.

But she was his witness, the girl who would speak for Lora Paloma when Lora Paloma would not cross the woods to speak for herself. If they wanted to hurt Lace, they would have to kill him.

“Why the hell did my grandfather go along with this?” he asked.

“Because he didn’t want you growing up with everyone thinking you were born because he raped your mother,” Lace said.

“I wouldn’t have thought that.”

Now Pépère would never know that the lie wasn’t Lora Paloma’s. She had been the one to pull it back. But it had been too late. The Palomas’ lies had already rained over the whole town. Nothing Lora Paloma said could make them forget.

His family had kept him from knowing his father as his father, and the Palomas had kept him from knowing his mother at all.

There wasn’t enough of him to hate them all. He’d been able to hate the Palomas because he loved Pépère, even if he didn’t love the woman he’d thought was his mother and the man he’d thought was his brother. Now he didn’t have that love to push against, to give the hate direction. So the hate drifted, unanchored, trying to find a current. It turned over inside him, the edges catching his lungs and heart and stomach. He didn’t know how to hate unless he had something to love.

“Lace.”

“What?” she asked, and he realized he’d said her name out loud.