The Weight of Feathers

Risk managers were his grandfather’s opposite, a photographic negative to that undeveloped Polaroid. They found so many corners to cut, they turned everything to confetti.

“None of this had to happen,” Cluck said. The Styrofoam heating his palm made him want to throw coffee on the man’s silk tie. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”

Eugenie felt him pulling away, and held his arm harder. “We’re not worth anything to anyone here. We don’t even have names. We’re just les gitans, right?”

He cringed. She’d heard everything the girl said. And like him, she’d heard gitan when the girl said gitano.

Eugenie shook her head and shrugged. “So why bother?”



Si quieres tener enemigos, haz favores.

If you want to make enemies, do favors.

El gitano. She’d touched him, held ice to his bruises. The liquor store’s salt and sugar smells came back. They crept down to her stomach. She turned onto her side, fighting off the sick feeling.

Her cousins hadn’t known what he was either. If they’d been beating up a Corbeau, Justin would’ve told her, knowing Lace couldn’t have said a word. Fighting was the only way to touch a Corbeau without taking on their curse. His Corbeau blood was the thing about him Justin didn’t like, even if he couldn’t name it.

It was worse than her helping him up and putting ice to his temple. He’d gotten her out from under that tree, to here. How much touching had that taken?

But she knew now. That feather had told her.

A nurse in green scrubs tried to put her IV back.

“No,” Lace cried out, wrenching her arm from the woman’s grasp. “No, I don’t want it.”

She wasn’t letting them make her numb to how the Corbeau boy had touched her. How he’d left that net for her, even if he didn’t know she was the one he’d left it for. There was no other reason for him to be in that part of the woods. He’d set a trap for las sirenas and then saved her only because he didn’t know she was one of them.

“He did it,” she tried to tell the nurse, but the nurse didn’t listen. “It was him.”

The nurse got a better grip.

“I don’t want it.” Lace jerked her elbow away. Her forearm banged the bed rail.

The nurse dropped her arm. “Fine.”

So Lace lay there, needleless, seething at the knowledge that she had touched him, he had touched her, that her body had been against his.

The stick site prickled. The longer she had the needle out, the worse her skin stung. It shrieked with the burns and the stain of the gitano boy’s hands.

When she got so thirsty she couldn’t swallow, the nurse told her she needed to take the IV again, that she wasn’t ready to drink water.

Lace said no. After the nurse left, she drained the pitcher next to the bed. But then it was empty, and she was still thirsty. So she stumbled to the bathroom sink without turning on the light, and drank from the tap.

As soon as she swallowed, the water came up again, yellowed with stomach acid.

The nurse flicked on the light. The overhead fluorescent bleached her blond hair white. “You want it back in yet?”

Lace shook her head. Pain shot through the muscles above her jaw, and she threw up the last of the water.

“All right, girly,” the nurse said. “Have it your way.” She flipped the lamp off.

Lace ran water down the sink. The changes in light made her forehead throb.

The mirror showed a face reddened like a half-ripened apricot. The skin was tight in places, gathered like rippling water in others. The right cheek looked bloody as a garnet, but her fingers found it dry, rough as sandstone.

Her hospital gown gaped away from her body. The cotton billowed, showing her shoulders, her breasts, all the way to her thighs.