The Weight of Feathers

Her hands clutched a ball of pink cloth. Every time her fingers tightened or loosened their grip, the fabric shimmered like the inside of a conch shell.

Lace couldn’t move enough to cry, so the trembling stuck at the back of her throat. This poor woman. All she’d wanted was a child, and she’d lost two, each before they could be born. Both had slipped from her womb like water. Then the Corbeaus had killed her husband before they could try again. So Tía Lora made the younger Palomas her children. She taught Oscar to make foghorn sounds by blowing into empty soda bottles. She showed Reyna and Leti how to tweeze their eyebrows, not so much, so they wouldn’t look surprised the way their mother always did.

And Lace. She had taught Lace to sew, to bead. To make corn and hot water and sugar into atole that made her younger cousins sleep. To love dry lightning as much as candles in glass jars. “Because for one second, all that light, you see everything. Maybe you don’t know what you’ve seen, but you’ve seen it, and it goes with you.”



Los enemigos del hombre son los de su propia casa.

A man’s enemies are those of his own house.

The girl in the car’s side mirror looked both drowned and burned.

Lace raised her hand to her face. So did the girl. They both traced fingers over their foreheads and noses. Lips, and glue-stiff eyebrows. Left cheek, then right. The features were the same, shapes they both knew, but the feel had changed, some spots rough as salt, others smooth and raw.

She wanted to tell her father about the Corbeau boy touching her, so he could tell her it was alright, that after a week’s worth of showers she wouldn’t even remember. Her father never stood for superstitions. He had changed his last name only because his own meant something so hateful none of the Palomas would say it. He put little stock in las patra?as y los cuentos de viejas, the fairy stories and old wives’ tales that ruled this family. To Barto Paloma, the Corbeaus’ feathers and the Palomas’ scales were just aberrations in biology, no different than an algae bloom lighting up the ocean like opals.

But the shame of el gitano holding her in his arms, taking her from the woods, her body against his chest, pressed down on her. She couldn’t say it, not even to her father.

“Martha missed you,” her father said. “She says a couple nights in that room alone is enough.”

“A couple nights?” Lace asked. It had felt like a week, two.

Lace picked at a cut on her lower lip. So did the girl. The morphine wore off, and both Lace and the girl stared, each wondering how the other had gotten so ugly.

Her father parked the station wagon in the motel lot. Her family waited in the lobby. They all offered stiff hugs, hands only, space between their bodies. Except Tía Lora, who pulled her close and whispered, “You look beautiful, mija.” And Martha, la sirena anaranjada, who combed her hands through Lace’s hair and said, “Don’t worry, I kept the boys out of fights for you.” And Lace’s mother, who gripped her so hard pain pulsed through her body. “You’re fine,” her mother whispered. “You’re just fine.”

Lace’s younger cousins asked was it true that she’d gotten glued to the ground, and was it true that a ghost unstuck her. “People saw him,” Reyna and Leti’s little sister said. “But then he just disappeared,” Emilia’s five-year-old son said.

Lace shushed them, not wanting anyone to think too hard about how she’d gotten to the hospital.

When they thought she wasn’t looking, her uncles shook their heads at the lobby carpet. Her aunts dabbed at their lower eyelids, as though she’d died.

Their pity filled her arms and made her tired. She carried it back to her and Martha’s room, wavering under the weight.