The Weight of Feathers

Cluck stood in the doorway. His eyes found her lower back, where the arc of white birthmarks crossed her skin. No paillettes hid her escamas now. She felt them glow under his stare.

He stepped down from the trailer. “Go inside, okay, Jacqueline?” Lace heard him tell the little girl.

The little girl skipped inside. The house’s back door fell shut behind her.

Lace pulled on her dress and followed Cluck into the trees.

“Son of a bitch.” He let out a curt laugh. “When you said you did a lot of swimming, you meant it.”

She buttoned her dress, trotting to keep up with him. “Cluck.”

He stopped. “Did your family send you?”

“No,” she said.

“Are you here to sabotage us? Or just to spy?”

“My family doesn’t know where I am.”

“Right.” He kept walking.

She got in front of him. “It’s your fault I’m here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This.” She held her forearm to his face, letting him see the garnet-colored scar. “You did this to me. You put this on me, and now my family doesn’t want me.”

“I didn’t do that to you. The plant did that to you.”

She blocked his way. “It’s because of your feathers.”

“They’re part of my hair. They can’t do anything to you.”

He knew. He had to know.

“If you thought I did this to you, why were you keeping my feathers?” he asked.

“I thought it would give me something on you,” she said.

“Something on me,” he said. “So when you came here, it was to try to get me to fix that.” Not a question.

He looked at her, and the truth sank through her, a stone through a river. He’d thought she’d come here because she wanted him.

The night she first came here, she was so quick to hold down thinking of him that way. Now something ticked inside her, an urgency to tell him that yes, she came here about the scar, but she had already wanted him that night. She should’ve come here for no reason other than that she wanted him.

If she’d known how his hands would feel as they spread over her body, or how his mouth tasted like black salt, or that he was beautiful in ways that made him ugly to his family, she would have. She would’ve left the hospital still in her blue gown and gone looking for him.

But she could see the last few days crossing his face. The two of them scrambling over each other in the front seat of his grandfather’s truck. Her fingers catching in the feathers under his hair. Him holding her in the high branches, and her letting him, giving him her body so completely that she would’ve fallen if he’d let go.

“Cluck,” she said.

“This was all because you thought I could take that off you?” he asked. “Wow, you really know how to commit, don’t you?”

The place where his hands had slid over the small of her back went cold. Now he thought she’d kissed him, cupped each of his red-striped feathers in her palms, for no other reason than that she wanted the mark off her arm.

“Luc,” she said, calling him his real name without thinking, some wild grasp at getting to him.

All he gave her back was a hurt smile that said he thought it was cheap for her to try it, and almost funny that she thought it would work.

“You and your family,” he said. “You really think I have nothing better to do than curse you? What kind of old wives’ tales do you all tell each other?”

“Our old wives’ tales? You’re one to talk. You won’t even admit you’re left-handed.”

“I’m not.” He almost yelled it.

She picked up a pinecone and threw it at him. He caught it with his left hand, his thumb and index finger gripping the scales.

He hurled it at the ground.

“If you don’t believe me,” Lace said, “ask my family why I’m not with them.”

He gave that same dry laugh. “Sure. Why don’t I just stop by? I’ll bring a salad.”

“They don’t know who you are,” she said. “My cousins sure didn’t.”