The Weight of Feathers

The water grew colder against Lace’s back. She peered around the rock, looking for the frame of a Corbeau man big enough to make the trees shrink away from him.

Her breasts stung from the chill. The current pulled at her hair. She’d only ever seen pictures of the Corbeaus’ wings, all those feathers fastened to arched wire. They were wide as a hawk’s span, so tall she wondered how the wind didn’t tip them.

They twitched on the back of their wearer.

Lace squinted into the dark, making out the body attached to these wings.

It wasn’t a man, but a woman, smaller than the shortest of Lace’s cousins. How did she stand up against wings that size?

She stumbled, lost or drunk. Her feet grazed where Lace had hidden her dress in the undergrowth.

The woman tripped on the underbrush, and her hand bumped her lips. A smudge of red-orange came off on her thumb and forefinger.

She pinched her fingers, making the imprint of her mouth move. She laughed at her own hand.

Then she noticed Lace.

She turned her head and took in the pink of Lace’s tail, the matching cream eye shadow, the plum-red lipstick.

The woman’s stained fingers froze in the air, a tethered balloon.

“Ah, ouais?” she asked, as though Lace had said something.

Her hair was cut to her chin, with thick bangs, like the girls in Martha’s old postcards. By the light of the candles Lace’s father left burning in glass jars, it looked orange like flowering quince. Her crown of flowers and leaves reminded Lace of fruit topping a tarta.

She was iced as a cake, her eye shadow the mauve of new lilacs. Painted wings spread from the bridge of her nose across her eyelids and temples. Rhinestones glinted at the corners of her eyes. The blue and bronze peacock feathers on her back rippled like wheat. Not the black ones Lace and her mother kept finding. Those, her cousins swore, grew from their heads like hair, another mark of el Diablo.

Lace’s fingers dug into the rock. She and this woman could tear each other’s hair out. Lace could scratch at those feathers. The woman could wade into the river and shred the soft fabric trailing from Lace’s fin.

Lace could take off her costume top and swing it at the woman. The scallop shells and fake pearls would leave her lip bloody.

She didn’t.

If the woman pulled a wire loose from her wings, she could put Lace’s eye out.

She didn’t.

Lace slid down into the water.

The woman backed toward the woods until the tree shadows swallowed her whole.



On ne marie pas les poules avec les renards.

One does not wed hens with foxes.

They didn’t want money. If they did, they would’ve gone for his wallet as soon as they’d gotten him on the ground and then just left him outside the liquor store.

In the dark, he could only tell them apart by size. The biggest one. Another a little shorter, quick enough to get him in the stomach before he could tense. The third a couple of years and a few inches behind them both.

“You don’t talk, chucho?” the biggest one asked. He hadn’t hit him for a couple minutes. He let the other two get the practice.

The smallest of the three got Cluck in the jaw. He hit the hardest. More to prove.

The salt taste thickened inside Cluck’s cheek.

“You speak English, chucho?” The quick one kicked him in the shoulder.

Pain spread down Cluck’s arm. Letting them get him on the ground was his first mistake. He knew that now. But it always worked with Dax. Once Dax got him down, Cluck wasn’t fun anymore. Better not to fight back.

This was about territory. These guys didn’t like him in their part of town after dark. He’d figured if he went slack, they’d know he’d gotten the message.

Next time, he’d just walk the extra half-mile to the grocery store.