The Weight of Feathers

“I lost a needle,” Lace said.

Eugenie shrugged and left her to it.

Lace tried to follow her out. Cluck shut the door behind Eugenie and held his arm to the small of Lace’s back, the same as he had in the tree last night.

He wore his loneliness like his scar. Most of the time his sleeves covered it, but when she cuffed them back, he couldn’t hide it. She wanted to tell him she was not afraid of what he was, this red-streaked thing in all the pure, perfect black. But the words dissolved between their lips like ice crystals.

She pulled her mouth off his. “I still have to put makeup on half of them.”

“You’re fast.”

“Later,” she said.

She stepped down from the trailer and left Cluck to the wings, the taste of violet-black salt still under her tongue. She made up the last of the performers, and the Corbeaus drained toward the woods like sand through fingers. Lace put away the powders and colors, cleaned the brushes, swept the flour off the wood.

A small shadow broke the light. Lace turned her head. A girl no older than five or six stood near the vanity. She had hair dark and coarse as Cluck’s, but eyes pale as dishwater.

She sipped from a plastic cup. “Will you do me next?” she asked.

Next? Who was ahead of her? The performers had gone, and no one was out here. Cluck’s grandfather was inside. Yvette had Eugenie’s younger brothers and the rest of the children in the house, cutting construction paper with craft scissors. Georgette, thanks to a heavy dose of cough syrup, was sleeping off a cold. “She chooses now to be sick,” Nicole Corbeau had said.

Lace pulled out a chair. “Bien s?r,” she said, one of two or three French phrases she’d picked up.

The girl set her cup down and closed her eyes, letting Lace give her a dusting of powder. She swung her legs, her shoes brushing Lace’s skirt. “When I’m in the show I’m going to wear a purple dress, like Violette’s.”

That told Lace what color eye shadow to use. She washed on the lightest tint of lavender.

The girl reached out for her cup, eyes still squeezed shut. Before Lace could help her get it, the girl’s small hand knocked it over. Grape juice splashed across the desk and onto Lace’s skirt and top.

The girl’s eyes snapped open. She took in the mess, and her face scrunched up. Lace knew that look from her younger cousins. It meant she had about five seconds until the wailing started.

“It’s okay.” Lace mopped up the spill. “I’ve done it a hundred times.”

The sugar soaked through Lace’s skirt, stinging the burns on her thighs.

“In fact,” Lace whispered. “How about we don’t tell anyone? I spill stuff so much, if we tell, they’ll think I did it, and I’ll get in trouble. So we won’t tell, okay?”

The girl nodded, a smile showing her baby teeth.

Lace breathed out, her shoulders relaxing. The last thing she needed was Yvette and the girl’s mother wondering what she’d done to make her cry.

She blotted the juice from her skirt, but the sugar still stung. “I’ll be right back, okay?”

The little girl nodded.

Lace went to get a clean dress from her suitcase.

The sound of arundo reed pipes echoed through the yellow trailer. They reached out from the other side of the woods like fingers. She wondered if the girl had heard them. She wouldn’t have known what they were. But they might have sounded enough like the cry of far-off wolves to startle her into tipping over the cup.

Lace peeled off the blouse and skirt, and splashed water over the stains. Happy? she wanted to call back to the arundo sounds. They’d quieted now that she was out of her skirt and top, her foolish choice. She’d put on a dress that would hide her escamas.

The trailer latch clicked, and the door opened.

She couldn’t grab her dress fast enough.