The Weight of Feathers

Lace took off her dress and caught her reflection in the turned-off television. In the dark glass, she almost looked the same. Her mother’s nose, her father’s straight brow bone, her middle aunt’s sloped shoulders.

She turned. Even in the dim glass, her back looked covered with brandy rose petals, crushed and half-withered. But a handful of clean, pale coins still arced across her lower back. Las escamas. The scales that marked her as a mermaid.

She went to the bathroom mirror, turning her back to the glass. The birthmarks shined in the overhead light. Almost iridescent. The burning rain had left them raw and a little pink, but no scars crossed them.

They’d been spared, as though Apanchanej’s own fingers had shielded them. The rain should have burned her escamas as badly as her cheek. But they were still on her, whole and unmarred, proof that she would live and swim, reach her hands through the sheets of light that floated through the river, turn her body in the same spring as Abuela.

The air in the room felt cool and thick as water. It rushed around her, clothed her like kelp ribbons. She touched her hair to check if it was floating. She felt the weight of shells and river pearls holding her breasts. By refusing to be burned away, those escamas had written these things onto her body. They were new birthmarks, unseen but true.

Salt stung the wound on her cheek. She pressed the pads of her fingers to the tear’s path. The Corbeau boy had touched her. The rain had scalded her. But nothing in those drops or in his fingers could take the name Paloma from her.

She put her dress back on and threw the door open. She called for her mother and her father and Abuela and Tía Lora. Aunts, uncles, and cousins cracked their doors and peered out.

Apanchanej had given her a sign she would be healed. The garnet would fall from her cheek like flecks of mica. The crushed roses on her back and breasts would turn to skin again. She would swim. She would still be la sirena rosa.

“What is it, mija?” her mother asked, shaking painkillers from a bottle. Lace held her hand out to stop her.

Her fingers froze before they reached her mother’s. A dark wisp of a mark on her forearm made her still. A burn, deep and red as a crushed blackberry, fanned in the shape of a feather, the barbs as clear as scratches of ink.

She’d missed that feather. Maybe the reddening and swelling had hidden it. Or she’d dismissed it as dried blood. Or the burn on her cheek kept her staring into the mirror instead of looking down.

But she saw it now.

Her mother saw it too. The pills and bottle fell from her hand.

Lace’s aunts whispered prayers. Her cousins drew back, as though Lace had cut her hands on the thorns of la Virgen Morena’s roses. They all saw it, the messy, fluffy barbs seared into her arm.

The Corbeau boy’s feather had scarred her. It had fallen from him and branded her. Now she wore the mark of the family who’d killed Tía Lora’s husband. The net the Corbeau boy left for her would not let her go.

If the feather’s imprint had been light, the pearled skin of a healed scar or the family’s birthmarks, her aunts and uncles might not have drawn back. Her mother might not have hovered a nervous hand in front of her mouth. But this was the enemy family’s mark. They knew it as well as if a thousand obsidian feathers had fallen from the sky.

Lace’s father stepped between them all. “?Santo cielo!” He took Lace’s arm. “It’s just a feather. You don’t know it’s theirs.”

But to the rest of them, it was currency, true as salt and silver. Lace felt the poison seeping into her blood. She should have noticed it before, felt the sting of that family’s venom.

Her father watched her. Abuela watched her. Her mother stepped back toward the yellowing wallpaper. The rest of the family fringed the hallway.

Abuela turned her back to them all. She went to the door of her room. One glance told Lace to follow.

“Lace,” her father said, his assurance that, once, just once, she did not have to do as Abuela told her.