The Weight of Feathers

Cluck turned his shoulder, getting free of Dax’s grip. He drove his fist into the side of Dax’s face, and Dax fell. His body hit the underbrush, and he blacked out.

This was just one hit returned out of a thousand Dax must have given Cluck. But it was perfect, and clean, and it belonged to Cluck. All those years of hiding in trees and crouching in corners, every bruise, split lip, broken finger that had held him down like a hundred little stones, now let go of him. She could see his back untensing, not fighting them anymore, until she thought the black and red of his wings would lift him off the ground if they caught the wind just right.

Lace dropped the branch and put her hands on the sides of Cluck’s face. “Are you okay?”

His palms slid over hers, warming the backs of her fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.”

A rush of voices drifted through the forest. Both their families were coming for them.

Cluck grabbed her hand and set it on the cottonwood. “Climb,” he said. One word, and she got herself up the first few branches. He followed her, their weight disturbing the boughs. Leaves fell, catching in their hair.

She stalled halfway up the tree, where they’d stopped the night he’d shown her how to climb. She set her back against the trunk. Her eyes flashed down, the ground so dark she couldn’t make out the undergrowth.

“We have to keep going.” He held her waist, easing her away from the trunk. There was strength in his palms, the assurance that whatever his family thought he was, he could own it, make it his. “I won’t let you fall.”

“I can’t,” she whispered back. “I’m not like you.”

He laughed softly. “I’m not like anybody.”

He offered his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up a bough at a time. Her arms and legs trembled, shaking the leaves on each branch she touched. The wings pulled on her shoulders. But she gave him her weight, and he kept her steady.

The two families, Paloma and Corbeau, ran from their sides of the woods and surrounded the tree. Cluck’s aunts and uncles. The woman Cluck once thought was his mother, slapping Dax’s cheek to wake him up. Eugenie. Lace’s cousins.

Cluck got her to sit down on a high bough, close to the trunk. “Don’t worry.” He sat next to her, keeping his hands on her. “We’re too far up. They can’t get to us.”

The wind made her shudder. If it caught their wings, it could knock them both from the tree like a nest.

What they both knew, what he wouldn’t say, was that they’d have to come down. And when their feet touched the undergrowth, everything they’d left on the ground would be waiting, worse for being given room to rage and spread.

The height stabbed into her. It pulsed through the dark. Cluck had brought her so high she thought she could brush her fingers against the moon. Its light reached down through the branches, showing their families’ faces.

Lace looked down enough to match the voices to the far-off figures.

“Let her go,” her uncles called up to Cluck, not begging. They reprimanded him like he was bothering a stray cat, telling him to leave it alone. Because he was a Corbeau, they thought they could scare him like they would a crow.

“Come down,” Cluck’s aunts and uncles and the older cousins said, gesturing with their hands as though he’d forgotten the way.

Dax got to his feet and lunged for the base of the tree, ready to go up after Cluck, not caring that he’d never learned to climb as high. He knew now what Lace was, that Cluck had brought a Paloma into their family, and he was ready to make Cluck pay for it.

But Nicole Corbeau dug her fingers into his arm and pulled him back. She whispered something Lace couldn’t hear. But Lace could guess. Some assurance that Cluck was not worth it. He has never belonged with us. Leave him to the Palomas. Let them do what they want with him.

“I’ll kill you, chucho,” Justin yelled up, his brothers echoing him. “Bring her down or I’ll kill you.”