The Weight of Feathers

“If you knew for sure you were, would you want to be here?”


She brushed her thumb over the cut on his lip. The pad was hot from the cup.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“You should see the other guy.”

“It wasn’t my cousins, was it?”

“No.”

“Who was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. There aren’t usually introductions.” He got up from the built-in. “Drink that, okay?”

“Are you drugging me so you can go through my suitcase?” she asked. “I’ll save you some trouble. Yes, my costume’s in there. Not that I’ll need it anytime soon.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She rubbed her thumb over a cuff button. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I’m not,” he said. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have wanted to know her. He’d never have known what it felt like to hold a girl with a fear of falling, to help her steady her weight on those high branches. He never would have met that woman who made him so sure what Mémère would have been like.

He listened for the back door of the house opening or closing. He shouldn’t have had Lace in the blue and white trailer with him. But he was so far past “shouldn’t.” He’d held a Paloma girl close enough to feel the heat of her mouth through his shirt. He’d let a Paloma woman fix the splintered bone in his ring finger. If the Palomas’ magie noire was poison, he had more than enough in him to kill him. And if it didn’t, it meant there was so much in him it was turning him, his body folding it into its cells until he was immune.

Cluck wouldn’t tell anyone about the Paloma who’d fixed his ring finger. They’d just call her une sorcière. He didn’t even know how to tell Lace without sounding like he was calling the woman a witch.

“You want to come back to the show?” he asked her.

Lace watched the lavender spin in the cup.

“You’re good at your job,” he said. “No one wants to lose you.”

She flicked the side of the cup with her forefinger, and the buds spun the other way.

“No one has to know,” he said.

“Half your family must have heard us.” She set the teacup down. “I think they already do.”

“They didn’t hear what we were saying. My brother. He just thinks we’re, uh … You know.”

She laughed and curled on her side, looking up at the trailer’s water-stained ceiling. Mémère’s dreamless cure was working.

“Why’d you come after me?” she asked.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I went out for milk.”

She shut her eyes. “What happened to your hand?”

Even half-asleep, she kept trying.

“Car door,” he said.

“Which one?”

“Which car?” he asked. “It was this old Ford. It barely ran. We don’t have it anymore.”

“Which hand, Cluck?”

A hollow place inside him grew hot and tight, like the neutron stars in Pépère’s books. He checked his right ring finger. It bent and straightened. He flinched, wondering if Mémère’s tea let Lace see things, places now healed but once broken.

Lace let her cheek fall against the mattress. “It’s not fair. You know everything about me now.”

“No, I don’t.”

“There’s stuff I want to know about you, and there’s nothing left you want to know about me.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “There’s plenty I want to know.”

“Like what?”

“How you look in that tail.”

She smiled, not making it all the way to a laugh, and slept.

The muscles in his right hand hummed, full of electricity as dry clouds. The bone knitting in his ring finger was new and restless. It wanted to act, to make something. So he collected the years of white peacock feathers off the floor, and took his wires and tools to the Airstream.