The Weight of Feathers

Even down, the wings filled the mirror’s age-speckled glass. Her sudden breath in felt like taking air after surfacing.

At first the wings looked white as flour-covered feathers. Then the eyespots showed their colors, like the tints of a rainbow. Those after-storm skies were never as bright as children painted them. The light washes, so watered down, didn’t live in crayon boxes. This was where to find them, on the eyes of white peacocks.

A wire wing frame leaned up against the corner of the mirror, clean and bare as a winter tree. This was what Cluck did, making these winter branches, filling them in like there was summer in his hands.

But he always covered them in bronze and blue and green, not the white of frost and the glint of color when the sun hit wet ice.

“Those things on your back are a lot like these feathers, you know,” he said.

“How?” she asked.

“Iridescence.” He kept his hands on her waist. “The way the colors look like they’re changing depending on the angle. It’s all directionality. Polarization of light.” He moved her left hip a little forward, then her right, and the pale colors flashed like light through a prism. “Same as with the blue peacocks. Morpho butterflies, hummingbirds, fish.”

His breath fell on the back of her neck. “The structures are hard to describe optically, because little adjustments to the angle of illumination change what you see.” The wood and water scent he picked up from swimming displaced the vinegar smell of the iodine. “It’s a pain in the ass to study, but it’s the best thing about them.”

She shut her eyes, and listened, her pulse clinging to the spot where his breath heated her neck. Her father’s lessons never would’ve covered anything like this. To him, it wasn’t worth the time. Smart girls didn’t need to know what made some birds shimmer like soap bubbles.

Her father had taken her to the shore at night to look for sea sparkle, those algae blooms glowing like moonstones, but that was different. Noctiluca scintillans lived in the water. Her father taught her about sea sparkle for the same reason he taught her about undertows and wasp jellyfish. Noctiluca scintillans shimmered with its own light, but with the right depth and nutrients, it flared into red tide. She was una sirena, and she should know the water was full of beautiful things that were one moon phase from turning poisonous.

Cluck traced where the ribbons crossed. She didn’t point out that he was using his left hand. If she did, he’d stop.

“Biologically speaking, it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Turning yourself all those colors. Especially if you don’t have a lot of pigment, like white peacocks, or your scales. And you’re more susceptible to damage afterward.” His hand stopped over her escamas.

She opened her eyes and met his in the mirror. The sharp note of arundo reed reached across the woods, warning her that if her birthmarks were not for turistas, they were even less for a gitano boy.

“So my question is,” Cluck said. “Why do you have them?”

His hair smelled like the wet leaves dotting the current.

“Why do you have your feathers?” she asked.

He dropped his eyes from the mirror, his half-smile sad. “You got me there.”

She didn’t mean why were his red instead of all black. She meant what had given his family their plumes, the same as his question about her family’s escamas. They were both birthmarks. His feathers marked him as a Corbeau the way her escamas marked her as a Paloma. The things they wore on their bodies made them as distinct as water and sky.

“Come on.” He took his hands off her back. “I’ll show you how to open them.”

He took her outside and guided her up his favorite cottonwood, holding smaller branches away so the folded wings didn’t snag.