The Weight of Feathers

“Silk,” she said, the word startled out of her. “Mémère’s.”


“Come on.” He pulled her with him, and they ran, the ground sticky under their feet. “Watch your eyes,” he said. Drops had fallen onto his cheeks and forehead. The fumes made him tear up.

The animals had all taken cover. No rustling in the underbrush. Only the steady rhythm of siren calls.

Eugenie stopped cold and slapped Cluck’s arm. “Look.”

About thirty yards off, a girl was curled under a tree, sparser than the one Eugenie had picked. Drops of the chemical rain trickled down.

The girl shielded her head with her arms.

Cluck knew the shape of her. He knew her hands. He’d seen her set them on her hips. He knew her hair, now frosted with chemicals.

And he knew with one look that her dress was made of cotton.

The rain would eat through her dress to her skin, and she would not know why. She was following the rules every teacher since kindergarten would have taught her. Cover your face. Protect your eyes. It held true for earthquakes, debris, hail, but not tonight. Because she was smart, and followed those rules, the rain would dissolve her.

Cluck held Eugenie’s elbows. “Get back to the house. Stay inside.” The rain on his palms cooled. He dropped his hands before they stuck to Eugenie.

“Cluck,” she said. Her pupils spread, the twin moons growing.

“Dammit, Eugenie.” He was shouting again. “Do it!”

She froze. She must have thought he didn’t know how to yell. But he wasn’t Alain Corbeau. When the sky started falling, he yelled.

She wasn’t hearing him. She only heard the panic in him. He saw it in her face. She picked up on his fear, tuned in to it like the static between radio frequencies, because she knew what fear looked like on him. She’d just never seen anyone but Dax put it there.

It threw her. He needed it not to throw her. Not now.

He grasped for something that would get to her.

“You need to make sure Noe and Mason get inside,” he said.

Georgette would have herded all the younger cousins into the house by now. But the names of Eugenie’s little brothers was all it took, and she ran.



Jugar con fuego es peligroso juego.

To play with a flame is a dangerous game.

The feeling of hands throbbed through Lace’s body.

“Don’t fight,” said a voice she couldn’t place. Those hands tore at the back collar of her dress. She cried out at the sound of ripping fabric. The back of her dress being torn from her felt like getting her body slit open.

She wrenched her head up, away from her shoulder. Heat stabbed through to her mouth. Her cheek evaporated like water on a dust road. There was nothing but pain spreading through her face.

Her hair tethered her, tangled in the weeds. She pulled, but it held her.

The boy from outside the liquor store held scraps of her dress in his hands. Her bra had gone with the fabric. Only a thin layer of nylon stuck to her breasts. The fake pearls had melted, the plastic stuck to the buttons on her dress.

She looked down at her body. The small movement seared her cheek. Shreds of her dress had stayed, burned to her breasts and stomach. Her body let off wisps of smoke, like steam off a lake on cold nights.

But there was no cold; she was all heat. Everything was. Her back and the riverbank. Her breasts and the underbrush. Her hips and the sycamores, all melting like the clocks in her father’s favorite paintings. Each losing drops until they were gone.

The boy from outside the liquor store didn’t have a shirt on. No undershirt either, just the silt brown of his chest.

What happened to your shirt? she tried to ask. The sound didn’t come. Her lips mouthed the words, but her throat didn’t help.

Had her cousins laid into him again?