The Weight of Feathers

The boy was talking at her, asking her things, beating her dress like it was alive.

She didn’t hear him. She watched a black feather drift from the back of his neck like a fallen piece of hair. The wind swirled it down to her arm, and it stuck. She jerked her elbow to shake it off, but it stayed. A single plume, the tip stiff with barbs, the lower half fluffy with down. Black, streaked red.

Pain spread through her cheek and neck. It burst open like a peony. The lights her father left for her flickered in their glass jars and went out.



El pez grande se come al chico.

The big fish eats the small one.

“Can you say your name?” the nurse asked. Lace knew the woman was a nurse without opening her eyes. She had all the nurse smells. Powdered latex gloves. Ballpoint pen ink. Unscented fabric softener.

The back of Lace’s scalp throbbed. She bit her tongue to keep from crying out.

“Do you remember why you’re here?” the nurse asked.

Lace’s lips scratched against each other. “The cotton candy,” she said. The cloud in the sky had looked so much like spun sugar. Waiting for a paper cone to whirl through. “Because of the cotton candy.”

She tried to curl onto her side, shifting her weight. The pain in her head rushed through her body. In the dark of her clenched-shut eyes, she saw it, the night twenty years ago. She may not have been there, but she’d heard the stories, all those trees sinking into the water. The lake swallowing the trunks whole.

No one in her family, not even the few of Lace’s uncles who saw it happen, knew how the Corbeaus had done it, except that however they did came from the strange power of their feathers. Their magia negra.

“What if they’re doing it again?” Lace asked, the sound barely enough to make the words.

“Shh,” the nurse said, soft as a faucet running in another room.

Lace and her cousins had never been allowed to talk about that night. What the Corbeaus did was like death; the women in her grandmother’s village would not speak of it because they believed the word muerte burned the lips.

“They could be out there doing it again,” Lace got out, but all she got back was more shh.

Lace had not been born twenty years ago to see what the Corbeaus had done. But she had heard the story. First when she was four, the day she picked up a crow feather off the ground, all the barbs perfect and pure black. When she came inside twirling it in her hand, her mother had grabbed it from her small fingers so hard Lace braced for her mother to slap her. Instead, her mother told her about the awful thing Lace had not yet been alive to see.

The Corbeaus had meant the accident twenty years ago to ruin the Palomas’ stretch of river, spoiling their stage and killing as many of them as they could. All at once the slow, steady current had grown turbulent, like there was a storm under the surface. Loose branches stabbed through the water. Sudden rapids tumbled in from the lake. The Corbeaus had wanted the sirenas trapped in the river’s root tangles like figurines in snow globes.

The mermaids had all escaped those waters, rough as a wild sea. And the Corbeaus’ own magia negra had turned on them. They did not love the water, so they could not control it. The lake rushed up onto its beaches, and the grove of shoreline trees where the Corbeaus held their own shows went into the water, pulled in quick as if the current had grabbed them by the roots.

Tía Lora’s husband was swept into the lake with those trees and drowned.

Lace opened her eyes, the lids heavy and swollen. The light made her forehead pulse, like having her hair pulled.

The nurse’s lilac eye shadow matched her scrubs. She wrote on her clipboard, the cap of her pen chewed like a licorice stick.

One corner of a ceiling panel lifted away from its frame, just enough to let in a black feather. Lace watched it dip and rise. It spun down and landed on the back of her hand. She brushed it away. It slipped off the sheet and through the guardrail.

But another fell.