The Weight of Feathers

A few of his aunts had whispered their suspicions that Margaux’s disrespect for the family business would turn her into a crow one day. They told stories of how it had happened before, years ago. A wayward son, a runaway sister, all turned to black-feathered things. But even they would never be afterfeathers. They were whole birds, not extra plumes that broke the line of their own wings.

“Sorry,” Cluck said, this time for asking about the pink mermaid.

He put his hands in his pockets, not remembering his broken finger until it hit the lining seam. He held a grunt at the back of his throat.

The woman looked up. The pinch to her eyelids fell away. The way her stare moved over his hair, his face, his shirt, made him feel like she was cataloguing him, figuring out what specimen jar to put him in.

He stepped back, hands vibrating with the knowledge that he could not fight with his right hand now, or his left. Any second, the woman would scream to call the rest of the family, warning them that a Corbeau had crossed the woods.

She didn’t. Her eyes settled on the collar of his shirt, where a few drops of blood had stained the white.

She shook her head, the light shifting over her face. “What did they do to you?”

“They didn’t,” he said. She probably thought Lace’s cousins had gotten him, and he’d come to finish the fight.

She folded over the costume tail and got up.

He moved back a little slower than she moved forward. She reached him, taking his elbows in her palms. Her stare was so fixed, still even when a moth fluttered between them, that he didn’t pull away.

She could kill him. Holding his elbows could spread the Palomas’ poison through him.

But if he pulled away, if he startled her into thinking he was violent, she’d yell. Lace’s cousins would come kill him themselves.

“You’re a beautiful boy,” the woman said, quiet as the click of the moth’s wings.

She moved her palms to his forearms, and pulled his hands from his pockets. His wrists stiffened. She lightly clasped his fingers, and his muscles settled and stilled.

“You know this, don’t you?” she asked. “That you’re a beautiful boy?”

Her eyes were so round, like the blue spots on a peacock’s tail fan, that for a second he believed it. That he was more than red-stained feathers and three broken fingers.

Four broken fingers. Three on the left, wrecked years ago. One on the right, the break new. The bones in his right ring finger floated like glass shards in water.

If Lace had told the truth, if this family had locked her out for that scar, this woman hadn’t done it. If there was that kind of malice in her, he would have felt it in his finger. The weight would have ground down his knuckle joint.

She put her arms around him. He tensed. She held onto him, but didn’t tighten her hold.

The scent of her pressed into him. She smelled like halved apples and the new metal of sewing needles and a little like cinnamon. Remembering Mémère’s picture, those watercolor eyes and light Alsatian braids, turned this woman’s scent to lavender, the shells of pale green eggs, those doilies his grandmother crocheted from when she ten until she died.

Mémère would have hugged him this way, if he’d been born soon enough to know her. But she’d died years before, so all he had was guessing.

The tension didn’t leave, but it shrank, pulled its branches back into its heartwood. He shut his eyes.

His finger hurt so much he bit down, and his lip opened again.

He pulled away. The woman let him.

“Thank you,” he said.

The woman pressed her lips together, and went back to her sewing.

He left looking over his shoulder. The woman didn’t look at him. She stared into the dark, moving her needle without watching it.

He still had to get the milk. Without it, there’d be questions about where he’d gone. He couldn’t go by the liquor mart again. That left the grocery store. So he walked to the wide parking lot it shared with a twenty-four-hour donut shop and a boarded-up storefront that once sold vacuums.

The thought of the grocery store’s fluorescents made him cringe. He’d feel their hum and buzz in his broken ring finger. But he walked, and the crackling in that small bone faded.