The Weight of Feathers

Cluck stood at the end of the hall, talking to another Corbeau about lights and cables. She took a few steps down the hall as fast as she’d taken the stairs and put her palm to Cluck’s shoulder blade.

He turned around. “What’s wrong?” His eyes flashed over her face.

“There’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered.

Cluck said something in French, and the other man nodded and left.

“What happened?” Cluck asked.

She dragged the words off her tongue. The coughing. The blood. The handkerchief.

Cluck did not flinch. He got on the phone and didn’t put it down until he found a doctor three towns over who could take a last-minute appointment.

“How do you know he’ll go?” Lace asked.

“I’ll tell him the appointment’s for me,” Cluck said. “I’ll say I want the company.”

That bought Lace time. Cluck’s grandfather wouldn’t know she’d told, not for sure, until they got to the doctor’s office. That gave her a chance to run.

“What if he doesn’t believe you?” Lace asked.

“He will.” Cluck’s eyes ticked toward his hands, scarred from pulling at the cotton of her dress. “I can’t believe this. How many years working at the plant? And he acts like all those chemicals are just dye and water.”

The floor wavered under Lace. “Your grandfather worked at the plant?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Cluck said. “For most of his career.”

Lace didn’t know any of the Corbeaus had done anything outside of this show.

Cluck pulled on a blazer, soft with half a century of wear. “You know where the thread is. If someone tears a dress, you think you can handle it?”

“Yes,” she said. She’d do everything they expected tonight, painting all their faces. If she left them, took off without doing her job, it would be one more wrong against Cluck. One more stolen Camargue horse. She might wake up with a feather on her other arm, her back, her neck.

But once the show started, she’d run.

Cluck set a hand on her upper arm. “I’m glad you told me.”

She nodded, bit the inside of her cheek, kept her face from telling him that when he came back, she’d be gone.



Celui qui veut être jeune quand il est vieux, doit être vieux quand il est jeune.

He who wants to be young when he is old, must be old when he is young.

Pépère barely acknowledged the nurse who took his pulse and blood pressure. When she told him the doctor would be right in, he looked out the window like he was waiting for a bus.

The nurse flashed Cluck and his grandfather a smile, bright as the flowers on her scrubs, and shut the door behind her.

Pépère nodded at her, his mouth in the same pinched smile he gave children. Cluck knew that look. His grandfather gave it to Dax and to Cluck’s cousins when they were small. How Cluck escaped it, he didn’t know. Probably because his hand bothered the rest of them so much they didn’t want to be near him. Pépère took their disdain as a recommendation.

“I don’t like that gadji,” Pépère said.

Cluck leaned against the sink and flipped through an old copy of Popular Mechanics. “The nurse?”

“Your new makeup girl.”

“You don’t like her for telling me about the blood on your mouchoir.”

“You let her follow you around like she is your little sister.”

Cluck cringed. Yes, that was exactly how he wanted to think of Lace.

“I understand,” his grandfather said. “You saved her life. She has nowhere to go. You want to care for her like she is some stray cat.”

Cluck turned the page. “So which is it, Pépère, is she my sister or my cat?”

The doctor came in, asked Pépère a few more questions, told him, “You should stop smoking.”

“I’ve told him that my whole life,” Cluck said. A waitress from Calais had gotten Pépère started on cigarettes before he left le Midi for the United States.