The Weight of Feathers

“See?” she asked the nurse, but the nurse didn’t see.

Lace shook it off, but two more fell, then six more, then a dozen, until there was no more ceiling. Only a sky made of black feathers, brushed with the red of candy apples. Red glaze made of the same sugar as that cotton candy sky.

She screamed. Her screaming made another nurse appear, this one all blue. She came with a needle and a vial and a bag of water. Lace looked for the goldfish in the bag of water, but they’d forgotten the goldfish.

Lace said so. She told them they needed to bring back the bag of water and the candy apples and the cotton candy. Give it all back for a bag of water with a goldfish.

“Did you hear me?” Lace asked. “They forgot the fish. They didn’t give you the fish.”

But there was still no goldfish, and the feathers kept falling.

Drowsiness settled over her. Her weight fell against the bed. Her eyes shut without her shutting them, like a doll tipped backward.

Her pulse ticked under her skin, like a watch under tissue paper.

She was the fish, raw and sliced. The bag of water was for her.



Qui trop embrasse mal étreint.

Grasp all, lose all.

A nurse stopped in the doorway, hand on the frame. “You been here all night?”

“No,” Cluck said. Another nurse had sent him home around one in the morning, promising, “We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.” So he’d gone back to the trailer and changed his clothes. It took him fifteen minutes to get his pants off. Thanks to the adhesive, the linen took half the hair on his legs.

He’d come back with a milk bottle full of Indian paintbrush, bachelor buttons, a burst of wild roses. It had taken the better part of an hour to find flowers the adhesive hadn’t ruined, ones low enough to the ground that taller stalks had shielded them. On the walk back to the hospital, Cluck had almost stepped on a tourist’s Polaroid, left on the side of the road. The hot adhesive had burned through the film. Except for a corner of sky, the image never developed.

The nurse stepped into the room. “Visiting hours aren’t until eight, you know.”

“I can hide in the supply closet until then if you want,” he said.

She chuckled and joined him at the window. Cluck parted the blinds. It bothered him how much Almendro looked the same as it had yesterday. If he didn’t look too close, he couldn’t see the adhesive glossing the roof shingles like rubber cement, or the stray cats and dogs, their fur matted with it, or how it frosted cars and mailboxes like drying Elmer’s glue.

The difference was how the air felt, hot with the faint sense that the smallest noise would make everyone in this town flinch at once. The things that had changed were harder to see than the wilted plants and the tacky sidewalks. The ruptured mixing tank had left three plant workers dead, and a dozen others injured. Every family who relied on paychecks from the plant held their breath still in their lungs. And everyone else kept quiet, stunned by the noise and the rain, afraid to go outside.

None of it had to happen. None of it would have happened if the Palomas hadn’t ruined Pépère, cost him his job. Cluck’s grandfather was the only man pushing for the plant to run safer, and when they let him go, they dropped his safety procedures one by one in the name of efficiency. When the Palomas wrecked Pépère’s good name, they destroyed the credibility of all the work he’d done.

“Did you lose anybody?” Cluck asked the nurse.