The Weight of Feathers

She checked an IV line. “Nobody close.”


Cluck had heard the nurses talking about some workers’ wives, friends, a few others picketing at the fence, wanting answers. He didn’t have to ask why the plant workers weren’t there too. He could almost hear Almendro pulling at its own seams. Half the town would demand justice, an admission from the plant’s owners, and the other half would beg them to shut up. If the plant pulled out, there were no jobs. So the workers swallowed the last-minute shifts, the blowdown stacks that made the air sting their eyes, the non-regulation safety gear.

The nurse put her hair back with a rubber band that matched her scrubs. Her nails, that same light purple, clicked against her pen. He couldn’t imagine liking one color that much. Not even the red in his feathers. Especially not the red in his feathers.

“Try not to get me in trouble,” the nurse said, checking her watch on the way out.

The girl in the hospital bed ground her teeth in her sleep. The solvents they’d used to get the adhesive off her skin left her rawer.

Where she’d held her cheek against the sleeve of her dress, she now had a deep red burn in a blurred heart shape.

She’d probably never know that all of this was the Paloma family’s fault. She’d never know that it started twenty years ago, the night the lake had flooded onto its shores like a creek bed overflowing, and those trees sank straight down like hands had pulled them under. His mother said they disappeared under a surface so calm it must have been la magie noire, the same dark magic that gave the Palomas their scales.

The Palomas started some rumor that Cluck’s grandfather caused it, that it was some failed experiment, as if his engineering degree had taught him how to make a lake swallow trees. Cluck couldn’t prove they’d started it, but he knew. The rumors had tainted the rest of Almendro like fire blight, and Pépère had lost his job. Now he had to travel with the family, Cluck’s mother and aunts not caring that he might not want to come back to this town.

One day Cluck would go to school the way his grandfather had. He’d keep things like what happened to this girl from happening to anyone else.

Maybe his family would cut their run here short because of the accident. Maybe they’d move on, give this town space to stitch itself back together. They could move up their stop in Tuolumne County. They always got plenty of tourists there, and some of the best climbing trees Cluck had ever seen. Sturdy, well-spaced boughs. Full greenery that let the light through like tissue paper. In those branches, his cousins looked like oleander blossoms in a sea of leaves.

The girl stirred, making noises that could’ve been pain or waking up. He saw the shape of her moving in the windowpane.

“Tío Lisandro?” she asked. “Aren’t you dead?”

Any other morning, he might have laughed. Thanks to his grandfather’s clothes, he probably looked like an old black-and-white photograph in one of her family’s albums. A ghost come to life, complete with suspenders.

“Nope.” He turned around, hands in his pockets. He didn’t want her seeing his fingers. Pulling off his shirt and her dress had left them blistered and burned. Every time the nurse spotted him, she made him cover them in something greasy that smelled like a citronella candle. “Not dead. Not Lisandro either.”

But the girl wasn’t looking at him. She patted the bed around her.

He wondered when she’d notice her hair. Last night it fell to her lower back. Today it stopped just below her collarbone. The rest had been so tangled, so full of brush bits and cyanoacrylate, they’d had to cut it off.

He rubbed at the back of his neck. The falling adhesive had turned his skin raw, and now the starched collar of his grandfather’s old shirt made it worse.