The Weight of Feathers

She stood her ground, made them leave first. Then picked up her bag of fruit and kept walking. The town went back to its chatter. Their stares dwindled to glances.

Matías was waiting for her around the side of the next fruit stand. He held his arms crossed, one shoe kicking the dirt. “So you’re staying in Terra Bella, huh? What, you thought you’d come all the way back here to buy some fruit?”

She checked to make sure Dax wasn’t around.

“You got a death wish?” Matías asked.

“Do you?” she asked.

Matías rubbed her upper arms. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“He touched you.”

“It was my sleeves,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“He still touched you.”

Not even Matías could keep las supersticiones straight. All he knew was that hitting and kicking were safe.

“I’m pretty sure it has to be skin on skin,” Lace said.

“Where’ve you been?” Matías asked. “Where are you staying?”

Her body flushed with the feeling of Cluck tying wings to her back.

“In town,” she said. “I thought if I waited Abuela out she might change her mind.”

“Can I tell Tía Lora?” Matías asked. “She’s worried about you.”

Lace wished he could. But she didn’t want her aunt looking for her and finding her at the Corbeaus’. She hated thinking of her great-aunt catching her in those wings, cringing when she realized Lace was living among the people who had murdered her husband.

“No.” She picked a peach from the paper bag and held it out; Matías took it. “Don’t tell anyone. If Abuela finds out I’m waiting, she’ll dig in her heels.”

He turned the peach in his hand. “Hey, Lace?”

“Yeah?”

“It wasn’t fair,” he said.

It was all he said.

“Thank you,” she said back.

He knocked her hat brim. “What the hell are you wearing?”

She pinched his elbow.

To him, she was another Licha, cast out from the family. He probably thought she’d get by okay; Licha did nails now and made good money. But she’d never come back to the show, and she never saw the family except for Christmas and Pentecostés.

But she was no Licha. Licha had peeled off the emerald green of her tail and left it behind, never aching for it again. Lace wanted to lift up the back of her dress and show Matías her escamas were all still there. They were her sign from Apanchanej that she was still una sirena, even if not a Paloma.

She felt a stare still on her. Her eyes crawled to its source. A little girl stood by her mother’s legs. She was short enough to see under the hat brim.

Lace touched her cheek, wondering if she’d forgotten to brush on a last layer of powder.

The girl rocked on the balls of her feet. The sun flashed off her shoes. Pink jelly sandals. Lace had last seen those shoes on the wet ground near the lake.

She wasn’t staring at Lace’s cheek. This was a girl who’d reached a small hand out for a grapefruit-pink fin. She’d seen Lace as a mermaid. Now she’d seen her out of her tail, no longer la sirena rosa, no longer a Paloma.

Lace put her finger to her lips, asking the girl to keep the secret.

The girl’s smile spread through her whole face. First teeth, then eyes. To her, Lace had shed her fins and grown legs, maybe until midnight, maybe forever. She probably thought Matías was a prince she’d come on land for. If she noticed that Lace had been the only mermaid without river pearls or shells in her hair, maybe she took it to mean that the pink mermaid was not so tied to the water that she could not walk.

“Lace?” Matías said.

“Yeah?”

“Go stay with Martha’s friends,” he said. “Abuela’s never gonna change her mind.”



Cual el cuervo, tal el huevo.

The egg is the same as the bird.