The Weight of Feathers

First she needed an offering, a sign of her contrition, the way a maize farmer’s daughter who had ignored the goddess Chicomecoatl might have brought her flowers during a famine. So Lace walked the dirt-dusted roads to the outdoor market where her aunts sent her cousins for tomatoes and Casaba melon.

People tried not to stare. Their eyes flashed toward the red heart on her cheek, pity passing over their faces. Their sympathy prodded her. Lace held her throat tight, to stop herself from screaming at them. You think this thing on my cheek is the worst I got that night? Go ask the boy with the wrecked hand what he gave me.

She clutched the coins and dollar bills in her dress pocket. “What’s good right now?” she asked a woman at a fruit stand.

The woman sucked air in through her teeth and touched her own cheek, like looking at Lace might make her grow an identical wound.

“Chin up,” the woman said. “You’re lucky. Three of our men died that night.”

Lucky. It was a word Almendro held close. Those alive were lucky. The town, still alive, was lucky. But Lace knew better. Almendro seethed with the fallout. Any man in a suit collected a set of glares whenever he crossed a street. Some plant workers’ wives, her father told her, protested outside the plant’s fence the last few mornings, but most of them had jobs too, and children, so the picketing dissipated as one after another left for their shifts.

Lucky was the word this town pinned to its shirt collar, a good-luck charm. It helped them ignore the tension, between wanting to know what had happened, and hoping half their jobs would not be gone by the time the trees shed their marred bark and ruined leaves.

Lace paid for a flat of peaches and the strangest watermelon she’d ever seen. Midnight violet, almost black, speckled with dandelion yellow, and one gold spot the size and color of a Meyer lemon. Moon-and-Stars, the paper sign said.

She stepped out from the awning, and a mist of rain dotted the paper sack, the drizzle so light Lace couldn’t hear it. She kept still, two steps from the fruit stand’s edge. The drops hit her skin. They clung to the fine hairs on her arms. She picked at each water bead, pulling at the thin shields of scabbing grown over her burns.

The memory of sirens bore into her temples. The dusk turned to night, quick as a cloth torn off a table. The clouds overhead swirled and the rain turned hot. It stuck to her, turning her clothes to ash. It would streak through her body until she was nothing but a rib cage and a rain-seared heart. She had to get them off. Every drop. She dug her nails in to rake them away.

Little threads of blood showed.

She stepped back under the awning, her pulse shuddering in her neck. Her hands trembled, the threads of blood vibrating like river grass underwater.

“You okay?” the woman asked.

Lace nodded, keeping her back to the woman. She gaped at the air, getting her breath back, waiting out the rain.

A few days earlier, she’d thought of rain as little different than the spray off a river. It was all the same, wasn’t it? All water. But now she knew better. She wasn’t willing to offer the sky her blind trust that the drops coming down were water and not poison.

Yes, all the clean, venomless storms she’d run through, all the sudden showers and downpours, told her that this rain, and every one after, should be plain water. But she wouldn’t count on it. She’d never give the sky that faith again. In place of that faith now lived her suspicion that all rain was hiding some secret she wouldn’t know until she found it burning into her skin.

She should have known all along not to trust the sky. It was where the crows lived.



Eso es harina de otro costal.

That is wheat from a different bag.

The closer Lace got to the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, the more the scent of feathers pushed up through the trees’ smells. The rain had let up, leaving the air clean and woody like damp bark, but that scent still hovered.