The Weight of Feathers

They shared a breath out.

Dax left, slamming the trailer door. The vibration splintered through Cluck’s finger. He gritted his teeth against the pain. That feeling of cracking ice, bound around his finger like a ring, pulled every other feeling from his body. The memory of his mouth on Lace’s. The warmth of her under his hands. The grain of cottonwood bark on his palms and the soles of his feet.

Dax must not have checked the yellow trailer. He hadn’t seen Lace had already left. Her things were already gone.



Qui ne risque rien n’a rien.

He who risks nothing has nothing.

“Where are you going?” Eugenie asked.

Cluck kept his hand at his side so she wouldn’t notice his finger, bent out of place.

“We need milk,” he said. They always needed something. Bread. A crate of peaches or strawberries. Eggs, bought a flat at a time. The least le batard could do was make himself useful.

He taped his ring finger to his middle one, three bands to hold them together. If he’d known to do this when he was nine, if he’d had enough unbroken fingers to pair them up, maybe he’d still be Luc. Not cygnon. Not Cluck.

The bones in his finger wouldn’t settle. He’d lost the feeling of his veins and muscle holding him together. He’d burnt out into pieces, like firewood gone dark. The wind breathed on the few live embers left, keeping them lit. The little knives stabbing into his ring finger every time he moved his right hand. The cut on his tongue. The wet salt of blood, drying on his lower lip. Where Lace had set the glow of her mouth, a burn’s left-behind heat. The rest of him was as broken as wood crumbling into ash.

He scratched at his lower lip. The cut opened again, and he tasted the salt in his blood.

He wasn’t going after her. If she was there, he didn’t want to see her. He just wanted to know how much of a liar she was, if she believed that conte de bonne femme. Some story about the scar she’d gotten when one of his feathers stuck to her arm.

Keeping his head down worked. The woman at the lakeside took his money, told him to enjoy the show.

The audience gathered on a low cliffside, just high enough to see down into the water. His grandfather told him that before the lake took those trees, there’d been a wide beach between the drop and the waterline.

Cluck stood behind everybody else who spread blankets on the rough grass and rocky ground. The sun had gotten low enough to make the lake glow. The blue-green was translucent as a dragonfly’s wings. He could see straight down to those sunken trees, bare of leaves, an always-winter. Those reaching branches made him shudder, the stark look of dead things.

An old man stood on the bank, holding a pan flute as long as his torso. His fingers, dark and wrinkled as a shelled chestnut, gripped the woven band. He blew a first note, wide and empty as the sky. The first mermaid, a purple one, took her cue and swam in. A few more bars, and another came, bright yellow like a nectarine. Another couple of minutes, and they’d all gathered. Turquoise and indigo. The mint green of tarnished copper.

They moved like kelp, the shapes of their bodies rippling like a current. They didn’t fight their costumes. Instead they looked like they’d gone their whole lives with their legs sealed in the shimmer of beads and sequins. They bent backward and touched their own fins. They joined hands, and the sheer fabric trailing from their tails became the points of enormous stars. Pairs of mermaids touched their fins and arched their backs to form hearts.