The Weight of Feathers

“I was with one of them,” Pépère said, his words sharp as when Cluck couldn’t answer one of his questions about bird flight or earth metals. “I know about them better than you do.”


Cluck crouched over the prescription bottle. “A Paloma?” he asked, the words as weak as when he had to guess an answer to one of those questions Pépère thought he should’ve known. “You were with a Paloma?”

“And after, she claimed I forced her,” his grandfather said. “This is how that family is. They can get their own to say anything.”

He said it without hesitation, clean and even. These were facts etched into his life, as much as being let go from the plant.

He started coughing again, each inhale splintering the wood of the floorboards. The sound cracked Cluck open, knowing that he could have stopped this.

Cluck stood, a pill in his palm.

Pépère held a pointing hand between them, a warning, a sign that he would take nothing from that bottle. “This girl will do the same to you. That family will get her to do the same to you.”

“Who was the woman?” Cluck asked.

His grandfather hacked into the cotton square. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If it doesn’t matter, then tell me.”

His coughing got quieter, but still shook his frame. “End it.”

The words got into Cluck’s body. Their weight came down on him, but he couldn’t get his hands on the meaning, wet and slipping from his grasp.

Pépère looked at the door. “You.”

Lace froze at the threshold, eyes flitting between Cluck and his grandfather.

“I let you stay,” Pépère said. “I knew and I said nothing. And you went after him.”

“Pépère,” Cluck said.

His grandfather ignored him. “You will ruin his life,” he said to Lace.

Cluck saw Lace try to speak. Her mouth moved. But the sound sank under Pépère’s coughing.

Cluck reached out for his grandfather’s hand, to set the pill in his palm.

But his grandfather’s hand slipped down and out of reach, his body falling with it.

Cluck dropped to his knees, calling him back. Pépère. Alain. Any name he might answer to.

The handkerchief fluttered to the floor, the blood spray dense as the spotting on an umber-brown mushroom. The chemicals sharpening the air had needled Pépère’s smoke-worn lungs into forgetting they were for breathing.

Lace called. The sirens came for Alain Corbeau.

As they took him, Cluck opened his fingers and set his rosary in his palm. The string of dark, carved beads and the medal of Sara-la-Kali would be his grandfather’s guard against things left in the air.

Cluck got in the Morris Cowley and followed them.

But Pépère was faster than Cluck. He had always been faster. He left the whole world behind before Cluck even caught up to the ambulance.

Cluck got to the hospital in time for the doctor, shaking his head, to stop him in the hallway and tell him there was nothing they could do. That his grandfather’s lungs had forgotten how to breathe and his heart could not take it. That he was sorry. That Alain Corbeau was already gone.

A few minutes later the rest of his family was there, Clémentine sobbing so hard the echo vibrated through the waiting room.

A nurse set Alain Corbeau’s rosary into Cluck’s palms, the beads still warm from his grandfather’s fingers.



No todo lo que brilla es oro.

Not all that shines is gold.

He looked misplaced, an obsidian shard in a bowl of flour. In sunlight, his skin was the brown of unfinished wood, but here, the fluorescents stripped its warmth. His hair stood out against the hospital linoleum and walls. His dark trousers, inherited from the man he’d just lost, did not belong among the white coats and pastel scrubs.

The nurse who always wore purple came down the hall, eyes on the floor. She patted Cluck’s shoulder on her way by. Lace could tell by her face she knew he wouldn’t feel it. He didn’t react. The touch didn’t register.