The Weight of Feathers

All those faces stared up at them, some with eyes wide. Abuela, Nicole Corbeau. Some smiling. Clémentine. Lace’s father, almost. Others just watching. Justin and his brothers, Lace’s mother.

The face she did not see was Tía Lora’s. She searched, and her eyes fell on where her great-aunt had stood.

Tía Lora was not there. In her place, a pillar of garnet-red feathers swirled and spun, even more than had floated from Lace’s suitcase. The moon shone off them like star rubies. Then the wind took them, pulling them away.

Both families watched them fly. They drifted and dispersed, like sprays of grapevine leaves in October. They rode the wind as high as the top of the cottonwood tree, bringing with them the echo of Lora Paloma’s sigh and laugh.

Cluck reached out his hand, letting one land on his palm. Lace closed his fingers over it. Another settled in his hair, the red catching in the black.

Each feather became ten more. They spread like a thousand red lacewings. They rose like every one was its own bird, full and winged. They turned the trees to autumn, all red-feathered boughs.

Cinnamon sweetened the air, the warm scent that lived on Lora Paloma’s shoulders.

The two families blinked up. Their eyes drifted back to Lace and Cluck.

She pressed her hands into him. He held her harder. The watchers on the ground half-closed their eyes, the shared cringe of seeing the second time a Paloma and a Corbeau touched.

Cluck and Lace stared back, made fearless by the blessing of a woman who had become a sky of red plumes. They clutched each other hard enough to bruise. Back off, their eyes told the watchers. We are not small enough that you can pull us where you want us to go.

It didn’t matter who thought they were brave and who thought they were too stupid to bother with. It added up to the same thing.

Abuela turned her back on them both and started walking, trying to hide her glances up at the red feathers.

Nicole Corbeau led Dax away from the cottonwood tree. Lace could see him dragging his fury behind him, a thing he’d killed and would eat raw. Whatever his mother’s words, he took them as freedom to hate Cluck, to blame him, without the sting of him being part of their family. They were rid of him now.

Nicole looked back only once, a single glance at the second son she’d never wanted.

Lace’s father left her with a last wink.

The four of them, Abuela and Barto Paloma, Nicole and Dax Corbeau, pulled the rest away. Both families backed toward their own sides, eyes still searching the sky for feathers. Palomas to the River Fork. Corbeaus to the old house.

Lace couldn’t hear what they were whispering. But now they were all witnesses to this thing she and Cluck had made them see. They would have to carry the truth, whether or not they spoke it. It would cling to them like the burrs off sticker grass. If they twisted it, it would pinch them back.



Vouloir, c’est pouvoir.

To want is to be able.

Cluck kept his arm tight around Lace’s waist. Even when all those red feathers had sailed into the highest branches, he didn’t let her go. He sat with his back to the trunk, Lace lying against him, the feathers of their wings interlacing like fingers. The wind hushed the owls, and they slept.

He’d slept in trees before, when he was small, hiding all night from Dax. But always alone, never with his arm around something it was up to him not to break.

He dreamed that his body was a red-winged blackbird’s, his skin all dark feathers except for two crimson shoulders. He felt raw and fearless, protective of the small place that was his, undaunted by any other winged thing.

The feel of an afterfeather woke him, the downy barbs brushing his jawline. It lifted up, tickling his cheek, and he opened his eyes. A constellation of Lora Paloma’s feathers whirled through the air, like coins thrown in water.

The red danced in and out of the cottonwood leaves. He hadn’t dreamt it. His mother had become a thousand of these small, jewel-bright things.