The Weight of Feathers

“Think, boy,” Pépère said.

He heard these words from his grandfather more than his own name. Pépère always asked him questions to make sure he stayed vif, sharp. What was the difference between primary and secondary remiges? What were the components of structural coloration? If Cluck didn’t give the answer as easily as the day of the week, he heard “Think, boy.”

But his grandfather was choosing now to quiz him?

Pépère walked a few paces behind the last audience members, a wary shepherd. “What do they make at the plant?”

Cluck went with him, his muscles tense with wanting to run. “I don’t remember.”

“You remember,” Pépère said.

There had to be somewhere Cluck needed to get. The mayor’s house? Not that he knew the address. The police station? Anyone who could do something about the strands of cloud tangling overhead. This town was deaf to those sirens.

“What do they make, boy?” his grandfather asked.

“Cyanoacrylate, okay?” Cluck shouted.

The feeling of the word stayed on his tongue. Cyanoacrylate. Those six syllables rooted his feet in the underbrush. The memory of Pépère crumpling newsprint crawled up Cluck’s back. A one-paragraph story in the paper. The worker who had never been given enough safety training to know not to wear cotton. The spray of chemical eating through the man’s jeans.

Cotton and cyanoacrylate. An exothermic reaction. It ran hot and quick.

The need to run, to do something about the truth in those sirens, came back to Cluck’s legs.

“Why didn’t you tell them?” he asked.

“You don’t set off a gun in a field and then try to herd sheep,” Pépère said. “It would have panicked them. It would have taken twice as long to get them to the filling station.”

Cluck looked where his grandfather looked. The cloud swam and twirled, the surface of a bubble a second before bursting. It would rain the same cyanoacrylate that had burned through a plant worker’s jeans.

“Get to the house,” Pépère said. “Now.”

“What about you?” Cluck asked.

His grandfather nodded, a lift and lowering of his chin meant to say, Yes, I’ll be there.

He wouldn’t. He would stay until everyone who’d come to see the show found shelter. This had been his work once.

Cluck’s cousins drained from the woods.

He hadn’t seen Eugenie. It gave him the feeling of stopping short just before a hillside. He noticed the lack of her, a missing pair of wings.

“Where’s Eugenie?” Cluck asked.

She never flaked on a show altogether like Margaux or Giselle, but a little too much Melon Ball wine and she couldn’t find the ground, forget the grove of cottonwoods and maples.

Pépère searched the wings. “She wasn’t with you?”

Cluck didn’t bother going back for his shoes. The wanting-to-run feeling broke, and he took off toward the stretch of woods Eugenie wandered when she got lost.

“Boy,” Pépère called after him. “Your shirt.”

Cluck heard those three syllables. They reached him. But they didn’t register.

He got halfway across the woods. Then the cloud condensed into beads and fell. The sky rained hot, sticky drops. He kept his head down, shielding his eyes. The rain seared his neck and arms. His back felt scraped, stung with vinegar. The pain augured into his chest.

His shirt gave off a low hiss. He looked down. The fabric let off steam.

The hiss went deeper, eating through his shirt.

Cotton. His pants, the ones his grandfather once wore, were flax linen, but Pépère’s dress shirt and Cluck’s own undershirt were cotton. They were burning him like an iron.

It was getting into his body. His skin would give up and vanish. The heat would singe his lungs and his rib cage.