The Weight of Feathers

Just as the audience began to believe they were spying on unknowing mermaids, las sirenas looked at them. They swam up to the rocks, hiding and flirting like water nymphs. The tourists caught those flashes of color on camera.

At the end of la danza de las sirenas, Lace and Martha posed on the steep bank, fanning their tails out on a rock. The trees filtered the last sun, and the sequins lit up like raw quartz. Los turistas left the low cliffs where they’d been watching and took the path down the slope, to the narrow stretch of beach.

A girl in jelly sandals the color of hibiscus flowers took a few steps toward Lace. Her eyes wavered between the shimmer of Lace’s fin and her painted face.

“Do you want to touch my tail?” Lace asked, like she was told to, in the voice she’d heard her older cousins use, soft as the whispers of river sprites.

The girl opened her small hand and stroked the fin, first hesitant as touching a snake, then surer, like petting a cat. To her, the soaked elastane and sequins might feel a little like a mermaid’s scales.

Their season’s receipts were at the mercy of children and their favorite cuentos de hadas. The Corbeaus called her family’s show kitschy, as artless and plastic as souvenir snow globes. Matías and his brothers had thrown punches when Corbeau men made fun of the bright colors, the glitter, the wide-eyed looks Abuela made the sirenas wear, as though dry land was magic they’d never imagined. But Lace’s mother told her that tourists probably couldn’t even take their children to the Corbeaus’ show. “They’re French,” she said. “I bet they take their clothes off halfway through.”

When the crowd thinned, and the families left, the mermaids watched Abuela. At her nod, they slid back into the water, smooth as knives. Martha swam toward her far corner of the lake, Lace back to her spot up the river. She kicked down to where the river’s current didn’t pull.

A shriek like a car alarm echoed through the water.

Lace startled, losing her rhythm, and the current swept her.

She spread her arms to swim, but her tail jerked her back.

Her fin fabric was caught. A colander had gotten the end of her tail.

Lace doubled her body over and felt at the fin. Her hands found not just river roots, but tangles of slick threads.

The nylon of a fishing net.

The Corbeaus. They hadn’t put a net in the water since what happened to Magdalena. But tonight they’d left one in the river for Lace and her cousins.

She pulled at her tail. The fin stayed. The net had balled and wrapped around her, holding her to the colander. She twisted and swam, but the roots and the net only gave enough to let her fight.

A string of bubbles slipped from Lace’s lips, the last air she had left. The dark water turned to stripes of light. Red like the Cheerwine in the liquor store refrigerator case. Green as lime soda. Electric blue like the Frostie bottles.

She’d been taught to protect her tail like it was as much part of her body as those little girls thought. But now its weight and its trailing fabric were killing her.

She braced for ripping the fabric to hurt, and tore the fin in half. The tail split up the side. She kicked out of the river roots. The empty tail dangled from the colander, leaving her naked except for the fake pearls of her costume top. She floated toward the surface like a bubble.

Her grandmother would wring her neck for leaving her tail, but not as hard as she would if Lace washed up dead. A mermaid drowned in the North Fork. What would that do to their ticket sales? Abuela would use every yerba buena in her suitcase to bring Lace back to life just so she could kill her again.

The net came with her, caught on her fingers. The threads, aqua as a swimming pool, almost glowed in the dark water, this awful thing like the one that nearly killed Lace’s cousin.

She shook the nylon threads off, and they sank back toward the river roots.

Lace surfaced to the noise of far-off screaming, and a long call like a tornado siren. Louder than her gasping. Louder than her coughing. Louder than her sucking the air from the dark.