The Weight of Feathers

Her half-drowned brain fizzed at the edges, making her hear things. She got her breath back and shook her head to clear it all.


But the screaming stayed. So did the siren’s yell. She rubbed her eyes and temples, circling her bare legs to tread. She pressed behind her ears to clear the water. But the noises kept on, joined by a thrumming through the ground. A whole town running at once.

She lifted her head to the sky, a shade of blue from dark.

A cloud swirled over Almendro, so thick it seemed made of liquid. It looked deeper as it moved, solid as water. Tilting her head up made her dizzy with wondering if it too held a current and tangles of roots, a mirrored river banding the sky.



Qui vivra verra.

He who lives will see.

It took Cluck ten seconds to get up the cottonwood. He didn’t even have to paint iodine solution on the soles of his feet the way his cousins did. Climbing had turned his rough as bark.

The moon looked wedged between the hills, yellow as tansy buttons. It got free and rose, paling. He could almost make out the ringing of distant glass chimes, the show’s only music.

Then sound broke the sky open. The moon shuddered. The siren’s first scream filled the dark, turning the stars to needles. It grew, spreading out from the plant like air thinning a balloon’s skin.

Cluck put his hand to the tree’s trunk and steadied himself. His heartbeat clicked in his ears. Another drill. By now, Almendro had gotten used to them. When Cluck’s grandfather worked as a safety engineer, the plant ran drills more than regulations mandated. Now they just blared the sirens to make the plant sound compliant, while telling employees to ignore the noise and keep working.

The ground wavered like a pond’s surface. The porcelain vines flickered with life, lit up with the chatter of small creatures. Sparrows flitted to their nests. He made out the dark shapes of wild rabbits and prairie voles darting into burrows. Squirrels scratched up trees. Two stray cats slipped into a hollow trunk, a gray fox into its den. They scrambled like wasps into a nest, sensing rain coming.

Cluck lifted his eyes to the moon. Wisps of white-gray cut across its gold, like curls of smoke off his grandfather’s cigarettes.

He looked over his shoulder. A ball of cirrus clouds rose from the chemical plant, a nest of white thread. He swore he felt the cloud reach out through the night, the threads tangling in his hair, cutting through his throat toward his lungs. The closest he’d ever come to le vertige. Not from height, but from the distance across Almendro’s sky.

The moon pulled back. The cloud spread out from the plant, a blanket unfurling. The siren throbbed between his temples.

Cluck half-climbed, half-jumped down.

He ran through the woods, calling his grandfather. “Pépère,” then “Alain,” then “Pépère” again.

Cluck ran down the hill. He found his mother sitting on a costume trunk, counting ticket receipts.

He caught his breath. “We have to stop the show.”

She looked up from her ledger, pencil paused.

“We have to stop the show now,” he said.

She shook her head and went back to her numbers.

He slammed the book.

She backhanded him. He knew that kind of slap, meant to knock sense into him as much as to reprimand. Suggesting they stop a show was little distance from cursing the family name. They’d gone on through sprained wrists, jammed shoulders, nosebleeds. If one fairy twisted her ankle, the rest kept on. The first night Margaux took off with a local, they put Violette in her place, like changing out a lightbulb.

Cluck turned his face to his mother again, his cheek hot.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

He lifted his hand, toward the siren’s swell. The glass chime sounds died under its rise. But even the audience ignored it. The sirens annoyed the residents of Almendro, but they were used to them. The tourists took their cues from the locals and figured no tornado or air raid was coming.