The Weight of Feathers

Dax pinched his third finger. “This one?”


Cluck looked away and didn’t answer.

Dax grabbed a needle and shoved it into Cluck’s right hand. Without thinking, Cluck gripped it with his thumb, index, and third finger.

His older brother was nothing if not practical. Even nine years ago, he didn’t go for the fingers Cluck needed most to help their grandfather with the costumes.

Right hand this time, because Dax thought Cluck had learned. Pépère had kept the secret, so everyone thought Cluck only held needles with his right fingers now.

Cluck didn’t fight. Fighting would just lose him use of more of his hand.

Dax took the needle and held Cluck’s ring finger. He bent it back, the pressure building at the joint. Cluck felt himself getting smaller, the edges of him pulling in, until he was half his age again. Folding his tongue, pressing it against the roof of his mouth, clenching his back teeth to keep from crying, because if he started crying, Dax would think he had him, and he’d break every one of his fingers until he gave him what he wanted.

A tear found the cut on Cluck’s lower lip, the salt stinging. It wasn’t the pain coming. It was all the lies after. I closed my hand in a door. I fell. I got my fingers caught in the wire. Trying them on like his grandfather’s old clothes, seeing which one fit. Coming up with one good enough that even Pépère would believe it. And the fear of what his mother would do to him if she knew he’d stolen something from Dax.

It was Pépère arguing with his mother about why she hadn’t taken Cluck to a doctor. His mother screaming that—Nom de Dieu!—she hadn’t known anything was wrong with the boy’s hand. Pépère yelling that it was her fault for not watching her sons, that now he’d watch Cluck since clearly she didn’t, that now the doctors couldn’t do anything unless they had the money to get his fingers broken again and reset. The knowledge that Cluck had done it wrong, curling his fingers under to protect them when he should have set them straight.

That one tear soaked into the cracks on his lips. Then there was just the taste of salt. The memory of nine years ago, of Dax bending back the fingers on his left hand. Where’d you put the net? But Cluck wouldn’t tell. Dax snapped his pinkie to show he wasn’t kidding, but Cluck wouldn’t tell. Surprise shot across Dax’s face. Then he broke Cluck’s ring finger. Tell me what you did with the net. Cluck still wouldn’t say. An almost-fear had flared in Dax’s eyes, the clean, new knowledge that even though Cluck was small, and ugly, and stupid, he would not talk when hit.

Dax had broken Cluck’s third finger anyway.

This time Dax had his right hand, his right ring finger. This time shutting up wasn’t a way to get half his hand broken.

It was how to survive this.

But a question had gotten into Cluck. It’d been burrowing in since he walked away from Lace. And he wasn’t as good at keeping quiet as he was nine years ago.

He looked up at Dax. “Did you let them put another net in the water?”

Dax held Cluck’s hand still, the pressure steady for that one second, not easing up, not pushing harder.

“Did you?” Cluck asked. Pain got around the words, strangling the sound out of them.

Dax wrenched Cluck’s finger, and the bone cracked like ice in hot water. Cluck clenched his teeth to keep himself quiet. They cut his tongue, and blood spread through his mouth.

The pain tore through his arm up to his shoulder. This was Dax’s flight call to Cluck, the stab of a new bone break, something that hurt enough to make him remember.

It would remind him to stay with the flock.

Dax dropped his hand.