The Weight of Feathers

Her family might never see the blight the boy left on her. These burns veiled it. Abuela and her mother might never know if a Corbeau touching her had seared off her escamas. Lace wouldn’t look, but she knew. The rain had already burned them away.

A nurse, the blue one this time, pulled her away from the mirror. “Come on, honey.” She slipped the needle in, taped it down. Lace took it, and the fishless water made her sleepy, quiet, less likely to climb over the guardrail.

A square of fabric sat on the nightstand. Filmy, printed with roses, folded. The scarf she’d forgotten in the boy’s hands, when melting ice soaked it.

She balled it up and threw it. It fluttered to a chair and then slipped to the floor.

Her hand knocked a milk bottle she hadn’t noticed. It stood at the back of the nightstand, bursting with wildflowers. The dusk blue of bachelor buttons. The white and yellow roses that grew wild on the hillsides. Red blossoms like blooms of flame.

She must’ve looked even worse than she thought. Nobody in her family brought flowers to hospitals unless someone was dying or having a baby.

Her fingers worried the tape on her IV as she slept.

The purple nurse came back, woke her up, tried to get her to eat. Lace shook her head at the plate, because everything tasted like her dry lips.

The nurse ripped off the tape encircling Lace’s elbow. “Your friend went home?” she asked.

Lace tasted the grit of her own dry tongue. “He’s not my friend.”

“Oh, yeah? He ripped up a quarter acre of Spanish broom to get you free.”

And she’d kept her cousins from kicking his ass. It didn’t make them friends.

What curse had he left on her? What maldición were her burns hiding?

She’d throw ice cubes at the next nurse who tried to tell her “that boy saved your life.” They didn’t know anything about the Corbeaus. If they did, they’d never let them past the town lines.

The knowledge that his hands had been on her kept clawing through her skin. Maybe her family would leave her here, like starlings abandoning a nest, the sky blue of their eggs tainted by a child’s fingers.

Lace felt for the tips of her hair. They should have been at her waist. Instead, the ends bunched above her breasts. She was missing almost a foot of her hair.

The nurse drew a vial’s contents into a syringe.

“What is that?” Lace asked.

“You’ll thank me later,” the nurse said.

Lace squinted against the sun. It crawled up, a blind at a time, sharpening the light, and she slept.

She woke to her mother and Abuela whispering. But she couldn’t open her eyes, and they did not notice the twitch of her eyelashes.

“She’ll heal,” said her mother’s voice.

“I can’t put her back in the show,” Abuela said. “Not looking like this.”

“That’s what you’re thinking of?” Her mother huffed out a breath through her nose, like air wisping from a tire. “Whether you have your sirena?”

Abuela gripped a handful of Lace’s hair, the smell of her perfume warm off her wrist. Even the slight pulling tugged at Lace’s scalp, lighting up the roots.

“What will she do?” Abuela asked. “Wear a wig into the water?”

Pain fanned out through Lace’s head, and the voices flickered to nothing, like a bulb burning out.

Lace opened her eyes to her father’s hands leaving a clean dress folded on the bedside table. She recognized his hands without seeing his face, those calluses from soldering resistors at a maquiladora so he could save up enough money for school.

She tried to speak, tried to reach out to those hands. But her own hands were so heavy she could not lift them. He patted the dress, as though telling it not to go anywhere, kissed Lace’s hair, and then was gone.

She woke up scratching at her own skin, dreaming of rain. She dragged her fingers over her arms, trying to get the drops off. But it kept falling, and took her under.

The next time she opened her eyes, Tía Lora stood over her, mouthing a prayer. Her tongue flashed between her teeth, like soap in the ring of a bubble wand.