The Weight of Feathers

Cluck poured his grandfather’s rosary from one hand to the other, then back. He stared down at the carved wooden beads. His thumb circled the saint’s medal.

The last words Lace had said to Alain Corbeau clung to her mouth. They left her tongue hot and dry. I love him. She knew she’d said it. She’d felt her mouth forming the shape of the words. Her throat hummed with the sound. But Alain Corbeau hadn’t heard it. Neither had Cluck.

She stood in front of him.

He saw her. The wavering of his eyes spread through her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She tried to hold him.

He set his hands on her upper arms. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”

Lace brushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. She would not hold him to words those rosary beads bled out of him.

“Don’t say anything,” she whispered, and tried to put her arms around him again. “Not now.”

He took a step back. The metal-and-earth scent of violet-black salt pulled away with him.

His face hardened. Losing Alain Corbeau had set him like clay.

“I can’t be with you, Lace,” he said.

His words fell against her lips, parched them like wind and dust. It stripped the words off her tongue.

I love him, her defense against everything Alain Corbeau thought she’d do to Cluck, was as weak as it was true.

He walked away. Back to the family who thought of him as a blur in a photograph. Back to the brother who threw him against walls to see if he’d break.

A few steps, and the distance opened like the height from a bough. It shook through her like a branch snapping.

She went after him.

A hand on her arm stopped her.

“Don’t,” Clémentine said, her eyes pink-rimmed. “Not now. He won’t listen. The only one he’d listen to now is gone.”

Clémentine left, biting the side of her thumb against sobbing.

Lace opened her hand. A black semiplume, the barbs striped deep red, crossed her palm. She lifted it to her face, and her breath trembled the afterfeather. A perfect copy of the plume still burned into her arm, first a curse, now the only thing she had to prove that he had ever touched her.



No puede ser más negro el cuervo que sus alas.

The crow cannot be blacker than its wings.

She went back to the Corbeaus’ trailers, the place she had never belonged and now belonged less. Cluck had been the one holding her passport. He had taught her the language and the landscape, shown her this country’s trees, the secret thrill of almost falling.

She took her suitcase, the clothes inside flecked with the black and red of Cluck’s lost feathers. She took her tail, the fabric stiff from drying. She folded up the wings Cluck made her.

The money her father had given her was still hidden in the lining of her suitcase. She slipped it out and used it to check into the cheapest motel in Almendro that was not the River Fork.

Her suitcase bounced on the bed, the lock clicking unhinged. She shoved it off the comforter. It thudded on the floor and flopped open.

A few black feathers floated out, like air bubbles underwater. They drifted toward the ceiling. Then one fell and brushed her fingers, the plume soft as the underside of Cluck’s hair.

First a dozen. Then a few dozen. Then hundreds more than she’d kept. More than could have fallen from Cluck’s head in his life.

Those black and jewel red plumes filled the air like dandelion fluff. The dark cloud rose up and then dispersed, raining red-streaked black over everything. She opened her hands to catch them.

Coverts spun down onto the bed. Secondaries wafted over the dresser. Some feathers were small, all down. Others were primaries, long as quill plumes, bigger than any that had grown in with Cluck’s hair. But they were all his, all marbled with his same red. Whether they’d fallen from him or not, they were his.