The Weight of Feathers

“My sister? She has her boyfriends, she forgets we have our shows.” The woman hair-sprayed a loose curl. “She will marry one of them soon and have five hundred babies. The beauties always do.”


She said “beauties” like she wasn’t one.

“If you don’t,” the woman said, “I’ll have to go on tonight looking washed-out, and it’ll be your fault.”

“My fault?” Lace splashed alcohol on another tissue, and wiped the color stains from her fingers. “Your sister’s the one who didn’t show up.”

“But who knows where she is?” The woman opened her eyes. “And you’re here.”

Lace folded her arms, hiding the feather burn. She couldn’t keep saying no without the woman wondering why.

It couldn’t be harder than putting waterproof color on the other sirenas. She just couldn’t use her fingers.

“What do you need?” Lace asked.

“Base, blush, lip color.” The woman gestured at her temples, holding her pinched thumbs and forefingers at the corners of her eyes, opening them as she moved her hands out. “The eyes are more difficult. Liner, highlighter, shadow.”

Lace remembered the wings of color on Eugenie. The lilac pink had fanned across the bridge of her nose, all the way to her hairline, the color dotted with press-on jewels. “I think I know what you mean.”

She sponged foundation on the woman’s face, then powder, then concealer, then more powder. She brushed color onto her cheeks, and picked a green cream eye shadow that matched the woman’s dress.

A man stopped at the vanity as Lace was gluing on rhinestones. One of the winged men, his hair neat and gelled, good-looking enough to be a festival queen’s older boyfriend.

If not for his size, Lace might have laughed at his bare chest and his costume. That the Corbeaus put their men into their shows made her family trust them even less. Men shouldn’t display themselves like quetzals.

Justin and Oscar never got tired of the jokes. Male fairies. Maricas. Reinonas.

But Lace couldn’t laugh. His wings made his muscled frame even bigger. He was the kind of man Lace had feared meeting in the woods the night she first saw Eugenie.

“What is this?” he asked, his voice a little like Cluck’s, but edged with irritation.

Her spine felt tight and hard as the barrel of her father’s Winchester. Her pulse beat against the raw skin on her back, like a moth in a jar.

The woman opened her eyes. “The locals are friendly here, non?”

“She’d better be the only local you’re getting friendly with.” He left, the shadow of his wings following.

The moth under Lace’s skin shook itself off, and slept.

“Dax.” The woman stuck out her chin and laughed. “He sees to it we children follow all the rules.” She shut her eyes again.

Lace finished the color and added mascara.

A thread of black showed at the back of the woman’s neck. At first it looked like a few strands of black hair mixed in with the blond. The woman moved, and a few more threads flashed dark, like the veins on a leaf.

Lace dabbed a sponge over the woman’s eyelids, pretending she was still working so she could look. She made out the vane of a feather, the thick central shaft. The barbs looked like enormous eyelashes, spiny with too much mascara, then dusted with the palest face powder.

She blew gently on the woman’s eyelid, to seem like she was helping her mascara dry. But she moved so her breath skimmed past the woman’s temple, and down toward the hair against her neck.

A mist of white powder broke loose. It smelled like raw bread dough.

Flour. The open bag of cake flour was for covering their feathers.

Lace reached out a brush to the plume, letting a little flour frost the bristles. She held the brush so lightly the woman wouldn’t feel it. The feather gave, and the hair around it parted, showing the root.

The feather’s dark shaft vanished into the woman’s head like a vein. It was growing out of her skin.