The Weight of Feathers

Lace folded her tongue and bit down. The relief of her tail going from Dax’s hands to Cluck’s was so sharp it was almost pain.

“You really want to go over there and make this worse?” Cluck asked, his voice low enough that Lace could barely hear it, the words meant just for his brother. He shrugged his shoulder toward their cousins. “You want to see one of them die this year?”

A few Corbeau women came outside. Clémentine. Eugenie. A couple others Lace had done makeup on. One screamed at the sight of all the red, but one of the cousins rushed to show her the blackberry jam jar.

Dax thumbed a spot off his chin and stared his brother down. “You hate them as much as I do.”

“More.” Cluck tightened his grip on the fabric. “But we are not doing this.”

Dax glanced over his shoulder, sensing the women watching.

He looked back at Cluck. “You just used your one free pass.” He took a handful of the tail and shoved it at Cluck’s chest, staining his shirt worse.

Cluck balled the tail up in his hands and took it into the costume trailer.

Lace followed him.

He folded the tail like an antique dress or a lace tablecloth. “Sorry you had to see that.”

She shut the trailer door.

“We’re not crazy, just so you know,” he said, but didn’t look at her. “There are reasons we feel how we feel.”

Right then, she didn’t care what he thought of her family, what he would think of her if he knew her full name. She cared that her old tail wasn’t in Dax’s hands, on its way to Tía Lora.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He set it down on the counter. “If I throw it out here, Dax’ll find it. I could throw it out in town.” He ran his fingers over the beading, and Lace shivered. “But it just doesn’t seem right.”

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked a little sad, a half-frown creasing the corner of his mouth. “It’s just good work, that’s all.”

The sting of Dax’s hands faded, and the feeling of Cluck’s came back. Cluck may have hated the name Paloma, but he recognized the art in those stitches and beads. To him, seeing them stained and torn must have been a little like finding a pair of peacock-feather wings ripped apart.

Her last name may not have been safe on his tongue, but this fabric and these beads, this part of her the water had sealed to her body like skin, was safe in his hands.

“If I bring it to the other family, it’s gonna look like a threat,” he said.

“Then let me do it,” Lace said. “They don’t know who I am.” She could get it to Martha, who’d hide it in with the dresses Abuela didn’t like her wearing.

“No,” Cluck said. “I don’t want you anywhere near that family.”

That family. Her mouth grew hot with wanting to tell him whatever he thought he knew, whatever he thought about her family, he had heard wrong, been told wrong.

He was the one good one out of all these crows.

“I have an idea,” she said.

She brought him to the river, the ruined tail in her arms. This way it would be out of the Corbeaus’ hands, and her great-aunt would never see the stains.

She gathered handfuls of small stones, worn smooth by the current, and stuffed them through a hole in a fin seam. When enough stones weighted down the bottom edge of the fin, she gave it back to the water.

The dull pink sank and vanished. Quiet fell over her, the slow joy of finding the sun on a cold day. Those stones would hold her ruined tail at the river bottom.

The relief was so perfect it made her escamas sore. It bubbled up through her, spilling out of her, making her kiss Cluck’s cheek.

He ignored it, took it as the same kind of teasing as her shoving his arm. So she kissed him on the mouth to make him understand, lightly, just enough to feel the fine grain of his lips, a little chapped by dust and wind. He accepted it, not pulling away. But he didn’t deepen it. He didn’t take her tongue or give her his. He took it like she meant it. More than a greeting, less than it would have been in the cab of his grandfather’s truck.