The Weight of Feathers

The man and woman’s kindness hurt. It made her hunch her shoulders and round her back.

She’d had one night as a mermaid close enough for posed pictures. At least someone would remember it. The little girl wouldn’t. She was too young. But her grandparents would. One day they’d pull the snapshot from an old album and remind her of when they took her to see mermaids.

Maybe they’d gone to see the fairies too. Lace didn’t ask.

She ran her fingers over her forearm, feeling the change in texture when they crossed the feather burn. For now it felt rougher, sand-coated. It would heal smooth, like dried amber. She held it to her mouth and kissed it, stroked it with her thumb. She clutched it against her body, let it spark through her. It kept her heart charged and alive.

The bus rolled into the parking lot. The groan of the brakes finished so high that Lace, the couple, and the cashier all flinched.

“That’s yours,” the cashier said. She smiled at them, even Lace, no shame from staring. Maybe she didn’t realize she had been. Lace was a junk thing on a road. A lost hubcap, or one of the strips of tire tread her father called los cocodrilos.

Lace got the door for the couple and their rolling suitcases, and then followed.

Clouds had turned the sky to pewter. A mist of water hit her skin.

She stopped, felt the drops sticking to her, dissolving her dress, turning her to wet silt.

The distance to the bus opened. It wasn’t the graded shelf of a lake where the sun reached the mud. It was a steep drop-off, where everything floated into the dark.

She backed toward the donut shop.

The woman caught her arm. “Don’t worry, just a little water. If my hair can take it, so can yours.”

Lace tried pulling away.

They had to feel it, the rain searing them. The woman’s blouse, printed with flowers big as hydrangeas, must have been some kind of cotton. Those flowers would fall to pieces, burning her skin underneath.

The woman tightened her grip. “They won’t wait,” she warned. “This town’s a nothing little stop to them. We had to make noise for them to keep it on their route.”

The man put a hand on Lace’s back. “Come on,” he said, and she remembered his voice, him talking to his granddaughter. Stand right there. Smile, Sierra.

Lace tried pulling on the woman’s arm. “We have to go,” she said, her voice not breaking a whisper. “We have to run.”

“Nobody’s running,” the woman said. “They know we’re coming. But if you go back inside, they’ll leave without you.”

Lace put her whole throat behind her voice. We have to run. But nothing came out this time, not even that weak whisper.

They’d all melt, like painted faces on wet canvas. This was no plain summer storm. It had teeth, and breath hot as a gas flame.

Pain flared through Lace’s body, like sandpaper rubbing the new skin on her burns.

She forced the sound stuck in her throat. It came out not in words, but in screaming. She screamed into the sky, looking for that spreading cloud. She wrenched herself out of the woman’s hold, but the man set his hands on her shoulders to lead her forward. She listened for the plant sirens under her own screaming, but there were only those two voices, telling her to calm down, there was no reason to get so upset.

The rain picked at her skin, peeling it back like old wallpaper. Sobbing punctured her screaming. They would all die here, because no one had turned the sirens on this time.

Her screaming pulled a crowd from the grocery store. They would die too, because of her, because she couldn’t turn the sound to words.