The Weight of Feathers

Palms spread across her back. Not the woman’s or her husband’s, but hands Lace knew. They carried the violet and ash scent of black salt. The wax and powder down of feathers. They came with a voice that told the man and the woman, “It’s okay, I know her, she’s with me.”


He held her against him, one hand in her hair, the other gripping her waist, and she couldn’t feel the rain anymore. She screamed into his shirt, sending the rage of unmade words into him. It vibrated through him to her hands on his back. The rain on her dress and his shirt would stick them to each other, dissolve the skin between them, until their veins tangled like roots, and they breathed together, one scaled and dark-feathered thing.



Les fruits défendus sont les plus doux.

Forbidden fruit is the sweetest.

He’d gotten her back to the trailer. More because she wanted to get away from the bus stop than because she wanted to go with him, but he’d take it.

He set water on the stove. He couldn’t stay mad at her. If she’d seemed mad at him, he could’ve kept it going. But she just sat on the built-in bed, wearing one of his shirts, crying into the sleeves that hung past her hands.

She stopped for a minute, saw the makeup stains her eyes had left on the cuffs, and started crying again.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll come out.”

Then she just held the heels of her hands to her eyes, pressing her front into her knees. “Everyone in this town thinks I’m crazy now, don’t they?”

By morning the whole town would probably hear about the girl who snapped while waiting for a bus.

“You want me to lie to you?” he asked.

“So that’s a yes.”

“If they know you’re from a show family, then believe me, they thought you were crazy already.” He poured hot water over lavender buds, thyme leaves, lemon peel, the way his grandfather told him Mémère used to for her sisters when they couldn’t sleep, and then for Pépère and their children.

The lavender and lemon cut the scent of rain. It had stopped, but the metallic smell of clouds hung on.

“They really kicked you out, didn’t they?” Cluck sat next to her on the built-in and set the cup in her hands. “Your family?“

She took it. “It’s not that simple.”

He rolled up one of the shirtsleeves, one slow cuffing-up at a time, in case she stopped him. She didn’t.

He folded the cuff up to show the semiplume imprint. “You thought I gave you this?”

“It’s your feather,” she said.

The truth pinched at him. It did look like one of his feathers, its shadow caught and made still.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t put it there. I promise. It’s a burn. It’ll heal, and it’ll either scar or it won’t.”

It wasn’t Cluck’s choice whether it stayed, but he wanted it to. He wanted that mark on her, the copy of one of his feathers. The shame of it pushed up against his anger about Dax signing off that net.

“How’d you get out of that thing?” Cluck asked. “The night the mixing tank blew.”

“How do you think?” she asked. “I ripped my costume.”

He remembered putting the fabric and beading into the river, watching the water take it. “That was your tail Dax had, wasn’t it?”

She nodded.

That was why she’d kissed him, because he’d taken something that had once been part of her out of his brother’s hands.

“Don’t you hate me?” she asked.

“For not telling me? I can’t blame you, seeing as how I took it so well.”

“No, because you hate my family.”

“I don’t hate your family,” he said. “I hate what they did.”

“How do you know they did it?”

“I wasn’t there, so I don’t. But my best guess is that they did.”

“Your best guess is wrong,” she said.

He wasn’t doing this again. Whatever happened twenty years ago, neither of them had been around to be part of it. Lace hadn’t even been born when the Palomas got his grandfather laid off. It wasn’t on her. Cluck was keeping the rest of their families outside the trailer door. There wasn’t enough room for everybody.

“Does it matter?” he asked.

“You tell me. If you knew for sure you were right, would you still want me here?”