The Weight of Feathers

Lace nodded.

“After the show you make yourself pretty and show your tail,” her grandmother said. “Let them take pictures of you.”

“What?” Lace asked. Only Abuela’s favorite mermaids draped themselves on rocks after the show. “Why?”

Abuela put her hands on Lace’s shoulders and pressed down, like she did to bless her when she was sick. “Una oveja que arrea a los lobos vale más que la lana,” she said.

The sound didn’t break the squish of fruit under the men’s hands.

A sheep that herds wolves is worth more than her wool.

This was a reward. This was for Justin and the bucket of hotel ice, for telling him to keep Rey and Oscar out of fights.

Abuela understood. She knew even better than Lace did that if Justin and Rey and Oscar hit whoever they wanted, soon the Palomas would get run out of town. Abuela treated as sacred the fights with the Corbeaus, all those bruises and the broken arms. But Abuela would not bless sending a local home with a black eye.

Lace would never have Martha’s shape, thin and jeweled as a violet eel, or Emilia’s wide, pageant-queen smile. But she had thick hair that fell to her waist, mermaid’s hair, and she was una ni?a buena. A good girl.

Her grandmother had decided this was enough.

“Gracias, Abuela,” Lace said, accepting the blessing.

Her grandmother crossed the afternoon shadows, the crepe myrtles and salt cedars casting the shapes of their leaves.

Lace’s great-aunt squeezed her shoulders, laughing like she’d remembered a joke. Each of her uncles picked her up and spun her once, for luck, “Para que nada cambie tu rumbo.” So nothing will turn you around. It was always their blessing to las sirenas, because the river’s depth was so dark a mermaid could forget which way to the surface.

An hour before the show, Lace layered on pink eye shadow, added a last coat of red lipstick, rubbed in more cream blush. At the sound of their uncles’ zampo?as, the mermaids swam in from their different spots along the lake and river, like creatures called from faraway grottos.

They held their breath and took their places in the underwater forest, made of trees the Corbeaus had sunk twenty years ago. This was Abuela’s greatest triumph, that every time they came to Almendro they used the stage the Corbeaus had built them, the grove the Corbeaus once called their own. Now audiences who sat on the ridge just above the shore could see down to the lake shelf, where the trees locked together into tangles of branches.

The mermaids treated those branches like a coral reef, settling into the hollows, perching on the edges of submerged boughs. They swam in pairs, then clusters, then each out in a different direction. They circled, then broke away. Their bodies formed the shapes of hearts or stars. They lined up so their tails made a rainbow.

No canned music. Just the reed pipes and the soft rush of the river emptying into the one side of the lake and flowing out the other. The applause came in bursts, like the mermaids were fireworks blooming into sparks.

They draped their bodies to look as though they were sunning themselves, even though they were underwater and the light had fallen enough to turn the edges of the lake copper. A few of them dove in and out of the lake like flying fish.

It was being under that Lace loved most. The lightness of her own body, the water trying to lift her toward the surface. The silhouettes of the underwater trees, like a forest on a fall night. How everything looked blurred like she was seeing it through stained glass. How water that had felt cold when she slid into the river now felt as warm as her own body. Even the sharp sting in her lungs as she swam out of view to take a breath.