The Weight of Feathers

He peeled off the three rings of white tape on his right hand.

He curled his right fingers into a fist. He folded them down, and spread them out. His ring finger came with the rest, closing until his fingertips met his palm. Then it opened with them, stretched out straight as the woman’s needle.

The three wrecked fingers on his left hand stayed curled under, stuck closed. But the right one worked like Dax had never touched it.

Cluck could still feel la magie noire from the Paloma woman’s hands. It shivered from his healed finger to the rest of his body. He could feel his blood carrying it to every part of him, turning him into something even darker and more dangerous than what he’d been born.



De noche, todos los gatos son pardos.

At night, all cats are black.

A woman stuck her head out of the donut shop door. “You want to come in?”

“Thanks,” Lace said. “I’m okay.”

The woman stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Come on. Four times out of five the bus is late. No reason to stand out here.” She tilted her head toward the few tables inside. “They don’t mind.”

Lace came in and sat down. The girl at the register kept looking over at her. She glanced up after wiping down the counter, then after taking down her hair and fixing it up again.

It might have been a look for not buying anything. But Lace didn’t think she could stomach the coffee, so strong she could taste it in the air, or the few donuts left at this time of night, each with a sheen of hours-old grease. So she went up to the register and bought two coffee refills, one for the woman and another for the man she was sitting with. They both thanked her, whispered my goodness, what a nice girl.

The cashier kept looking over. She consolidated almost-empty bakery trays, and eyed Lace. She took apart a ballpoint pen that wouldn’t write, and looked over again.

Lace looked back at her. She found the girl’s face open and wide, the pink of a favorite prom dress.

This wasn’t mean staring. The girl couldn’t help it. Lace had forgotten the red on her cheek, deep and wet as pomegranate seeds.

The couple couldn’t help it either. They whispered between glances over to Lace’s table.

Then, around the time the cashier started drawing on napkins, the couple stopped whispering.

“You’re one of the mermaids,” the woman said.

Lace uncrossed her arms.

“We brought our granddaughter to see your show,” the man said. “We took her picture with you.”

“I don’t think so,” Lace said. She’d been in plenty of shows this summer, but had only taken pictures with the tourists once, the one night Abuela had promoted her. The night of the accident. The one time little girls studied the fin of her tail, wondering if it felt like a fish’s scales.

“You were the pink one, weren’t you?” The woman rested an elbow on the table, her hand in the smoke blue of her perm. “She said you were the prettiest mermaid.”

It never had anything to do with how pretty Lace or her cousins were. It was always about what tail they wore. Pink must have been their granddaughter’s favorite color. If a girl liked orange or gold, she called Martha the best mermaid. If she liked blue-green, it would be Emilia, with all those sea-colored pearls glittering in her hair.

The little girl Lace put makeup on had declared she’d wear a purple dress when she grew up and joined the show, so she would’ve picked Alexia, for that tail as purple as field milkwort.

Lace said thank you anyway. Moving her mouth knocked tears from the corners of her eyes. Twin drops fell, one from each lash line. The first traced a smooth trail. The other caught on the raw skin of her burn. The salt seared her cheek.