The Weight of Feathers

She pulled at the loose fabric around her waist. “Where are my clothes?”


The strips of fabric that had once been her dress were long gone in a hospital waste bin. Her bra hadn’t made it either. It had some kind of plastic beading on it that melted like sugar.

“Hospital gown,” he said. “It’s cute. Got ducks on it.”

Her fingers found her IV. She pulled it from the inside of her elbow. The long needle flopped out, limp and bloody, and she climbed over the guardrail.

“Hey. You’re supposed to hit the button, not pull the thing out. Hit the button.” He put his hand on the rail.

She saw it before he could pull it back. He couldn’t tell if her stare was because of the blisters, or because of his third, fourth, and fifth fingers, always curled under.

He tried giving her the call button, but she was staring down at the hospital sheet. One of his feathers had fallen onto the bed, a brushstroke of red and black. Scratching at the back of his neck must have knocked it loose.

She looked up at him, eyes red from solvents and morphine, and registered that he wasn’t an orderly or a dead relative. She smelled like blood and acetone.

“What did you do to me, gitano?” she asked.

He dropped the call button. It hit the sheet and bounced.

Gitano. The Spanish was close enough to the French. Gitan. Gypsy.

She thought he’d done this to her, that the feather on the sheet meant he’d put a gitan curse on her. Her burns, her cut hair. She thought it was all him. He could tell from how she’d said the word.

This was why his family never let people see their feathers. If they hid them, they were just show performers. But if anyone saw them, they’d think what this girl thought, that they were full of dark magic.

She grabbed the water pitcher from the bedside table, holding it up like it wasn’t cheap plastic, but ceramic. Something she could break over his head. The spout splashed her hand and her hospital gown.

“Get out,” she said.

Cluck held up his hands, not caring what she thought of them, and backed out of the room.

Eugenie leaned against the hallway wall, painted the same dull salmon color as the water pitchers and emesis bins. She stood out, a brighter pink. She’d taken the cyanoacrylate worse than he had. Cluck was out in it longer, but Eugenie was paler. She’d been wandering each floor of the hospital, still in her ruined silk dress, looking like she’d taken too hot a bath. The frog who didn’t feel the water boiling.

She handed him a Styrofoam cup, and sipped from the one in her other hand. “From the cafeteria,” she said. “It’s awful, but I can’t stop drinking it.”

He followed her toward the stairwell.

A man in a suit caught his eye. He stood outside a patient’s room, looking in.

The suit was too nice for a hospital. For a funeral, maybe, but if whoever he wanted to see had gotten as far as the mortuary, he wouldn’t be here.

The suit was navy. No man in a town like Almendro paid their respects in anything but a plain black suit.

“Risk something,” Eugenie said, answering the question Cluck had almost spoken. “Risk assessment? Risk management? Something like that.”

Cluck turned his head.

“I heard him talking to one of the nurses,” she said. “I pretended I was waiting so I could get a look at his card.”

Cluck touched Eugenie’s shoulder, to tell her he’d be right back.

Eugenie grabbed his arm. Hard. He’d forgotten from when they were kids how her small fingers could dig in. When it was her and him against the bigger cousins, that grip always wore them down. She didn’t hit or kick, but she held on like a ferret, not letting go until whichever cousin she was on surrendered.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”