The Weight of Feathers

She went back to that old Craftsman house, ready to sneak into the blue and white trailer. But the few Corbeaus who saw her just nodded as she passed. Cluck must not have told them he didn’t want her there anymore. Not that they’d ever cared what he wanted.

She stole things no one but Cluck would miss. Scraps of wire. A few spools of the darkest thread she could find. Scrapped ribbon, red as a blood orange, leftover from trimming a dress.

The blank wing frame leaning on Cluck’s old mirror, bare as a February tree.

She’d never blamed Cluck for wearing his hair long enough to hide his feathers. She wouldn’t have wanted questions from strangers either. But if she left him alone with his family, without his grandfather, without her, they’d break him until he hated the red in his feathers as much as they did. He’d start thinking of it as a sickness that held onto him.

She wasn’t letting that happen. Even if he didn’t want her anymore, she wasn’t letting anyone, not even the Corbeaus, make him think the red that streaked every one of his feathers was a thing to hate.



Les petits ruisseaux font les grandes rivières.

Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

They kept saying his grandfather’s name. They would not listen to Cluck when he told them Pépère would not have wanted them saying his name.

His grandfather did not say Mémère’s name for weeks after her death, so her soul could break free from her bones. But now they all said his, throwing it around without thinking. If everyone kept saying Pépère’s name, his mulo would get tethered to his body, stuck as a balloon tied to a weight.

But they wanted to be French, all French. Cluck told them, “Don’t say his name out loud,” and they looked at him as though he’d spoken of broken mirrors. Like he was an old woman who wouldn’t let a black cat into the house.

They forgot they had Manouche blood of their own. But they had thrown it away with the rest of Romanipen.

His mother and her older sisters made the arrangements. A priest, a friend of Cluck’s aunt, would drive in from Linden for the service.

None of them knew that Cluck could have saved him, if he’d just thought for one minute about those pills instead of about a girl who loved water as much as he loved the sky.

The owners of the chemical plant offered to buy a plot in a cemetery on Almendro’s east border. They presented it as charity, not an admission. They said it was to express their condolences, to thank the family for the work Alain Corbeau had done for the plant decades ago.

It was their way of keeping the Corbeaus from wondering what killed him. The plant didn’t want them thinking about it too hard, considering if the fallout in the air had turned the wet surfaces of his lungs to blood.

“They’re being very generous,” his eldest aunt said, signing the papers. “We should be grateful.”

“They just want the body in the ground before a medical examiner can look at it,” Cluck said.

His eldest aunt’s husband slapped him and told him to show some respect.

Cluck held his palm to his right cheek. He breathed into the pain, knowing he deserved it. He’d failed, left those pills undisturbed in their bottle.

But that didn’t mean he had to like how they were taking the gadje’s blood money, crumpling up Romanipen like an old map. And they wanted respect out of him.

His aunts and his mother accepted the plot. Dax kept saying, “This is the best thing for him and for us,” as though he had made the decision.

Cluck only heard in time to see them sign the papers, God knew what they said.

It should not have been this way. The thought of Pépère in that shellacked wooden box, surrounded by this family who had made themselves gadje, sharpened the pain on Cluck’s cheek. How many times would they say his name during the service, and then over the next month?