The Weight of Feathers

“I never agreed to that.”


The shape of her bare breasts showed, lighter brown than the rest of her. They floated like fallen oranges. He couldn’t tell whether the accident had scarred them. The refraction through the water kept him from seeing.

The blue-black of the river made them look pale. They glowed like twin moons, turned gold from staying near the horizon.

Heat crawled up the back of his neck. “You’re not wearing a top.”

“What were you expecting? A couple of clam shells and a piece of string?”

“Don’t give me that.” He’d seen the show. The Paloma women wore costume pieces that looked like bras covered in sequins. “If you all performed topless, the chamber of commerce would have you arrested before your hair dried, and you know it. You’ve got to wear something.”

“We do,” she said. “And mine got ruined the night you found me.”

She must have forgotten how much length her hair had lost that night. When she lifted her shoulders out of the water, the ends stuck to her breasts, but didn’t cover them. He looked at them so hard he could almost feel their weight in his palms. He wondered if the water would leave them cool, or if they’d give off the warmth that lived under her skin. He thought of touching her until there was none of the river’s cold left on her, just the heat of his hands.

Those thoughts stayed on him. He felt them sticking to him like his feathers stuck to the back of his neck when his hair was wet. That feeling, strong as the prickling of vanes and barbs, made him want to check his body for some mark she’d left on his skin. There had to be something on him that would tell her how much he wanted to touch her, a thing clear and dark as the imprint his feather had put on her.

“You’re blushing,” she said. “I thought you were French.”

“Not that kind of French.”

She flicked her tail again. The glass beads looked like the million bubbles of water just starting to boil.

If any of the family caught them, they’d have worse trouble than stories about Melusine and the nivasia.

“Get out of that thing before somebody sees you.” He knelt on the bank. “Where’s your dress?”

She went under again, staying close enough to the surface that he could make her out. Her hair was as dark and blue-black as the river until the sun lit it up and turned it red-brown. Her back looked like a sandbar glinting with mica. He couldn’t tell the scarring from the rippled water.

Her tail reminded him of raw pink salt. As she moved, the light found the clusters of glass beads.

She surfaced. The sun on the water broke into pieces.

She swam up to the bank and rested her forearms on a rock. “You coming in?”

“I don’t swim,” he said.

“You don’t know how?”

“I know how.” He wasn’t going to win any contests for holding his breath, but he knew how not to drown. How to get out of a colander and how to fight a current. His grandfather had taught him so he would keep safe around rivers, not so he could swim in them. “I just don’t.”

“Fine.” She wrung out her hair and let it all fall to one side of her neck, leaving one of her breasts bare under the water. He hoped the distance between them was enough to hide where he was looking. “But I’m not getting out until you get in,” she said.

Pépère didn’t much care for water, so Cluck didn’t either. It had to do with the Romani traditions, what parts of their bodies they could wash at which places in the river, how if a man didn’t know the current, something clean could be made mochadi. Unclean.

But Cluck had never learned all the rules. His mother had told him he was too young to understand, and then, when he was older, too stupid. That he shouldn’t worry about it because they were lucky enough to have running water. They didn’t have to think about the Romani laws that ran in his grandfather’s blood like silt in streams.