The Weight of Feathers

“Don’t lie to me.” Dax pulled him off the side of the trailer enough to slam him into it again.

Cluck held himself up, but didn’t fight. “I don’t know.” A metal seam pressed into his cheek.

“If you went to settle the score, you better tell me now.”

“What?” was all Cluck could get out.

“Don’t go near them.” Dax held him harder, wringing out the muscle at the back of his neck. “Got it?”

“Who?” Cluck turned his head.

The rage in Dax’s face shifted, the edges ground down.

He loosened his grip, dropped his hand. “You don’t know.”

The back of Cluck’s neck cooled.

“They’re in town,” Dax said. “That family.”

That family.

The Palomas were already here. They came back every year, never any guilt. Because of them, Clémentine’s oldest brother had lost his first wife twenty years ago. Cluck had heard stories about her, the woman with so much grace on the highest branches none of them could believe she had no fildefériste blood.

La magie noire the Palomas carried in their birthmarks had taken her.

The Palomas meant for every performer to die, drowned with those branches when the water flooded up onto its shores. All to steal the lake they thought belonged to them. It was only by the grace of God that the rest of the Corbeaus managed to swim against the pull of their own wings, scramble onto rocks, claw at the shore.

The Palomas lost one of their own too, a man who must have been at the lake to draw the water onto the land, la magie noire ready in his hands. But the Palomas still set up their show where the trees had been, on that man’s grave and the grave of a Corbeau.

Cluck’s family moved to the other side of the woods, as far as that stretch of forest would let them get from a family that danced where one of their own had died.

Cluck’s neck prickled to hot again. This was where the Palomas had ruined their grandfather. And every year they came back to rub it in.

“Does Pépère know?” Cluck asked.

“Since when is it my job to tell him?” Dax shoved him, this time to let him go. “You swear the fish didn’t do that to you?”

The fish. Dax didn’t like saying the name Paloma any more than Cluck did.

Cluck pulled on the hem of his shirt to smooth it. “It was some guys from around here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Another local told them off.” The girl in the red lipstick knew the man at the liquor store enough to give him the finger and get a laugh. And Cluck would have known a pack of Palomas. He would have seen la tromperie in their eyes. His mother called the Paloma girls les sorcières. They must have been, she said, to draw an audience when all they did was swim.

“What are they doing here this early?” Cluck asked.

“They know our schedule,” Dax said.

“We should’ve canceled the stop.”

The words drew their mother’s shadow toward the trailer. The idea must have summoned her, called her like a spirit.

She stood with arms crossed, thin elbows resting in her palms. “This family hasn’t canceled a stop since we came to this country.” She’d starched her linen shift dress so well the breeze didn’t move it. Her eyelashes looked sharp as chestnut spines. “Not for rain. Not for the earthquakes. Not even for snow, not that either of you would remember that year.”

It was what set them apart from the Palomas, who had to cancel their shows every time it rained. The drops disturbed the water too much to let the audience see them.

“Not another word about canceling shows, understood?” his mother asked.

Dax’s “Compris” and Cluck’s one nod satisfied her. She went back inside, slamming the kitchen door.

“Don’t go near them,” Dax told Cluck.

“I never have,” Cluck said under the screen door’s rattle.