The Weight of Feathers

When she pulled away, he did too.


He opened his eyes. “What was that for?”

“For what you did,” she said.

He squinted enough that his eyelashes almost met. “What do you care? This isn’t your fight.”

“It is my fight.” She said it without thinking. But it slipped into lies she’d already told, easily as her old tail sinking into the river. “This town’s too small for a war,” she said, like this town, not the war, belonged to her.

He watched the corner of the fin flick up and then go under. Then he started back toward the house.

A few steps away, he realized she wasn’t behind him, and looked over his shoulder. “You coming?”

She searched the river for a flush of peach, but the water had folded it into the dark.

They walked back to the old Craftsman. She went in with him, and the breath of the Paloma women followed. Those voces tried to tell her that him holding the door wasn’t a polite thing. He could turn himself into a crow with knives for feathers, and she wouldn’t see in time to run.



Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.

Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

Cluck held his hands under the kitchen tap, washing the blackberry off his fingers.

He watched Lace pat her hands dry on a dish towel.

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

The water jumped from warm to hot, prickling his fingers. “You getting ideas?”

She shoved him. “It’s stained. I can get those out.”

Cluck unbuttoned the cuffs. “I know how to wash a shirt.”

“Do you know how to get Almendro blackberry out? Because I do.” She cut open a lemon from the fruit bowl and found a half-flat bottle of soda water in the fridge. “My younger cousins always got this stuff on their good clothes.”

He unbuttoned the front, and slipped out of it.

She rubbed the lemon and soda water into the stains and ran them under the kitchen tap. The flecks faded and disappeared.

“Hey, that actually works,” Cluck said. “I thought I was gonna have to figure out what to wear with a pink shirt.”

“Why not just wear stuff you can throw in a washer?” she asked.

“My clothes used to be my grandfather’s,” he said. “I like wearing what he wore.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess it makes me feel like I could be like him.” He thought of the Alain Corbeau-ness flooding into him.

She scrubbed at a stain. Even watching her profile, he could see a little bit of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You doing okay here so far?” he asked.

“Yeah. They trust me to make them look good, believe it or not.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked.

She turned her head, and that smile turned sad and patient, bearing with the question.

She meant the burn on her cheek. Even his mother, piling loose powder on her like layers of une millefeuille, couldn’t make her forget it. That burn kept her from seeing how her hair was the deep brown of black mustard seeds, or that her eyelashes looked like the smallest feathers.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

Her lips parted a little. She looked as likely to tell him to go screw himself as she did to say thank you.

“You don’t have to say that,” she said.

He needed to shut up. The older Corbeaus always taught the younger ones how to talk to girls, but nobody had taught him. At eighteen, he was too old to be outright forbidden from talking to girls, but he was still le petit démon. His uncles’ glares whenever they saw him so much as ask a local girl for directions was enough to put him off trying altogether.

But he couldn’t let Lace think he was talking about some version of her from before the accident. She had the same face. It just had a bloom of red on it.

“I know I don’t have to say it,” he said. He stopped himself from saying the word “beautiful” again. “It’s just true.”