The Weight of Feathers

“Nothing.” He’d been thinking her name but hadn’t meant to speak it. “Sorry.”


Lace. He could love her. The Palomas had thrown her away too, and she would never be a Corbeau, no matter how many of their faces she painted. He couldn’t even make her one, because he wasn’t one. That he was both Corbeau and Paloma made him neither.

It didn’t matter if he had no Paloma blood. Lora had become a Paloma, taken the name, spent so many years among them they had become her family. The Corbeau and Paloma in him would not mix, like the almond oil and apple cider vinegar Clémentine put on her hair. She could shake the bottle, but the two liquids always pulled apart. He felt himself separating out, becoming two things in one body, one half of him Corbeau and the other Paloma. He was one of the half-leucistic peacocks his grandfather had shown him in books. A pale body patched with blue, a tail fan that was half-white and half-green.

He stopped and looked at Lace. “Go back,” he said. “Stay with…” He got caught on what to call the woman he had just met for the second time. Your great-aunt. Lora. My mother.

Before he could decide, Lace said, “No.”

He breathed out. “Please? I don’t want you over there. Not for this.”

“If you’re going, I’m coming with you.”

“They’re gonna blame you for telling me.” The white wings wouldn’t do her any favors either. Maybe none of his family spoke Spanish, but they knew what Paloma meant as well as Lace knew what Corbeau meant.

“I’m not going back unless you come with me,” she said.

He saw the wager in her eyes, her bet that if she refused to let him do this alone, she could get him to turn back.

“Then I guess you’re coming with me.” He kept going, and she kept up.

He’d stand between her and his family if he had to, his wings making him a feathered shield.

How many of them already knew? Pépère, now in the ground, the truth clutched against his chest with Mémère’s finest doily. Cluck’s mother, and her brother and sisters.

Did Dax? Did Eugenie and his other cousins? Had they wondered why Cluck looked so little like Dax or his mother and so much like old photographs of Pépère?

“My mother.” The word felt wrong in his mouth. “Her. Nicole. She doesn’t even like me.”

“No,” Lace said. “She doesn’t.”

That almost made him laugh. He liked that Lace wasn’t trying to make any of this soft.

“Then why would she agree to this?” he asked.

“Because your family told her to,” Lace said.

“She hates me. She could’ve said no.”

“Really?” Lace asked, the word so sharp Cluck felt it.

“Good point,” he said.

Lace knew better than anyone. Once her family came down on her for that feather on her arm, no one short of God himself could help her. In this way, the Corbeaus were no different from the Palomas. Nicole Corbeau’s word may have ruled now, but no one got to make Corbeau law without years of following them first.

What Cluck was hadn’t made Nicole Corbeau hate him. That he was at all had. It made his rage toward her both smaller and sharper.

Cluck laughed, the noise slight but sudden.

“What?” Lace asked.

“You know I’ve never seen my birth certificate?” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Nicole Corbeau had made sure of it. When he went to the DMV for his driver’s license, she had kept it for him, not even letting him hold it long enough to look. She’d told him he’d lose it. He’d taken it the same as he took every other time she rolled her eyes or turned her back. That he was stupid, bad, ugly.

He wanted his birth certificate, the original. He wanted to hold that slip of paper, read it.