The Weight of Feathers

Movement on the ground caught her eye. A woman’s shape wove between the trees. She reached the watchers, and her small, running steps stopped.

Tía Lora halted at the outside of the ring, lifting her chin and searching the tree. Her eyes found Cluck and Lace. A wince broke the line of her mouth, her lips waiting to say again the things she’d told her son. Eres perfecto y eres hermoso. Words she’d had to tell him now that he was a man, because the hate that lived in these woods had kept her from telling him when he was still a boy.

Those years had collected, heavy and unseen, on Lora Paloma’s shoulders. Lace took them in her hands, sharing their weight.

If Lace and Cluck came down from the cottonwood, they would lose more than afternoons in the river and nights in the trees. They would become a second Lora, another Alain. The stories would go on. Their families would strap the cuentos to their backs. The weight of them would crush their wings. Lace and Cluck would carry them into the next twenty years.

When their parents and aunts and uncles grew old, when the story of the Paloma widow and the gitano widower shrank to a few embers, Lace and Cluck would be the kindling and the kerosene. They would be the story passed down to Lace’s younger cousins, and the inheritance of the little girl with dishwater eyes and hair like Cluck’s.

The Corbeaus would say Lace Paloma seduced Cluck and then turned on him. He was lonely, and she flirted with him so she could do to him what Lora Paloma did to Alain. The Palomas would say Lucien Corbeau kidnapped Lace and forced her up into a tree. You know that scar she has on her arm? He burned it into her up there, right in front of us. We saw it. The stories would grow too big to fit in their rooms and the trunks of their cars.

Lace and Cluck couldn’t make these families, these like magnets, touch and settle. They couldn’t erase the nylon nets, the slicked branches, the broken arms. They couldn’t bury the things this town had said about Alain Corbeau along with him. They couldn’t prove that neither the Corbeaus nor the Palomas had made those trees vanish into the lake.

But she and Cluck could make sure everyone on the ground left with something closer to the truth.

Lace slid her hands onto either side of Cluck’s neck, and made him lean down to her. She kissed him so hard his breath caught in his chest.

He pulled away like she’d slapped him. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Making sure they know.” She set her open mouth on his.

This was all they had, these few minutes to prove that everything they did to each other, they both wanted. She felt Cluck registering it, understanding. They’d show everyone on the ground that they were willing to die at each other’s hands, risk the curses in each other’s fingers and lips.

He gave his mouth to hers, kissing her back. He grasped her hard enough that the fabric of her dress bunched in his hands. She moved her hands over him so quickly that when a feather brushed her fingers, she did not know if it had fallen from his hair or his wings. Her mouth found the things he’d always been but had not been allowed to be, everything in him that was dangerous and passionate.

They sparked against each other like flint. Inside that sparking, Lace heard a familiar breath in, the air spiced with a soft laugh. Neither were her own, but she knew them.

Tía Lora sighed and laughed. It rang through the air like an owl’s call. This was her returning the favor, her go on, her standing at the door and urging Lace on.

So Lace kissed Tía Lora’s son again. She kissed him harder, their mouths growing so sore they could barely move them, until they could only set their lips together, more touching than kissing.

Cluck held her, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder. He kept her so close she could look down without falling.