Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

The ground wavered like a pond’s surface. The porcelain vines flickered with life, lit up with the chatter of small creatures. Sparrows flitted to their nests. He made out the dark shapes of wild rabbits and prairie voles darting into burrows. Squirrels scratched up trees. Two stray cats slipped into a hollow trunk, a gray fox into its den. They scrambled like wasps into a nest, sensing rain coming.

Cluck lifted his eyes to the moon. Wisps of white-gray cut across its gold, like curls of smoke off his grandfather’s cigarettes.

He looked over his shoulder. A ball of cirrus clouds rose from the chemical plant, a nest of white thread. He swore he felt the cloud reach out through the night, the threads tangling in his hair, cutting through his throat toward his lungs. The closest he’d ever come to le vertige . Not from height, but from the distance across Almendro’s sky.

The moon pulled back. The cloud spread out from the plant, a blanket unfurling. The siren throbbed between his temples.

Cluck half-climbed, half-jumped down.

He ran through the woods, calling his grandfather. “ Pépère ,” then “Alain,” then “ Pépère” again.

Cluck ran down the hill. He found his mother sitting on a costume trunk, counting ticket receipts.

He caught his breath. “We have to stop the show.”

She looked up from her ledger, pencil paused.

“We have to stop the show now,” he said.

She shook her head and went back to her numbers.

He slammed the book.

She backhanded him. He knew that kind of slap, meant to knock sense into him as much as to reprimand. Suggesting they stop a show was little distance from cursing the family name. They’d gone on through sprained wrists, jammed shoulders, nosebleeds. If one fairy twisted her ankle, the rest kept on. The first night Margaux took off with a local, they put Violette in her place, like changing out a lightbulb.

Cluck turned his face to his mother again, his cheek hot.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

He lifted his hand, toward the siren’s swell. The glass chime sounds died under its rise. But even the audience ignored it. The sirens annoyed the residents of Almendro, but they were used to them. The tourists took their cues from the locals and figured no tornado or air raid was coming.

“It’s not a drill,” Cluck said. He pointed to the sky. The ball had thinned to a veil. It spread out over the town, opening like a trumpet flower.

To his mother it must have looked like cloud cover. Nothing more. She had begun to tip her chin back down to her work when Cluck heard his grandfather’s voice.

“He’s right,” Pépère said. Cluck could see the readiness in those hands, his fingers half-bent. But what would he do with those hands? The plant had locked him out years ago, so he wasn’t there to check gauges or turn off valves.

Cluck’s mother watched the sky. The veil thickened and grew uneven, like la religieuse, the hard layer coating the bottom of a fondue caquelon .

The pen fell from her hands. “ Et maintenant que faisons-nous? ” she asked Cluck’s grandfather. What do we do now?

It was the first time Cluck had heard her sound like Pépère ’s daughter, her voice open and fearful, instead of annoyed, put-upon, as though the old man were an aging dog. Her words so often brimmed with “ Et alors? ” What now? Now they were full of “ Papa , take this, fix it.”

The three of them didn’t whisper. The audience couldn’t hear them. A hundred yards, the trees, and that siren took the sound.

But the audience saw the cloud. Children watching for fairies spotted it first, thinking it was the magic of winged beings. They squealed and waved at the fairy cloud.

Their parents followed those small hands. That cloud drew a shared gasp from mothers, a what-the-hell from fathers. The siren swelled from background noise to a shriek, and they registered the sound.

Pépère closed the space between him and them. “Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies,” he said, his voice level but loud. It carried, pulled their eyes from the sky, covered the faint breath of glass chimes. “We’re going to have to cut tonight’s show a bit short.”

Cluck watched him, his own muscles sparking and restless. How did Alain Corbeau keep such stillness in his voice?

“I’m going to ask you all to proceed to the road,” his grandfather said. “There’s a service station very close. Everyone go there. Stay inside or under an awning.” He spoke in his safety engineer’s voice, a pilot directing passengers. Stay calm. Breathe. Brace. “Do not try to go to your cars. Do not try to go home.”

Cluck’s cousins climbed down from the boughs, light as cicadas. Never rush when they can see you, Nicole Corbeau had taught them. The women moved no faster than the blooms that pulled loose from their flower crowns and drifted down.

The audience scattered.

“If you need assistance to the road, ask any of us,” Pépère said . “If you’re wearing anything cotton, and you can remove it easily, then do so, but the important thing is to get to the service station.”

“Cotton?” a man with a camera strap around his neck asked the question Cluck could see on every face. “Why cotton?”

“The fallout may contain adhesive intermediates,” his grandfather said. “Cotton will stick to the skin worse than other fabric.”

There was no screaming, no flurry of clothes tossed aside. Alain Corbeau’s voice calmed them like a song. Men took off cotton pullovers. Mothers urged children out of cotton jackets. But shirts, pants, and dresses stayed on, and the audience streamed toward the gas station at the road’s edge, quick, but not running. Alain Corbeau’s stillness assured them that, cotton or no, they would be fine as long as they took cover.

Cluck pulled his grandfather aside. “Cotton. They’re all wearing cotton.”

“They won’t be hurt,” his grandfather said. “Between the station and the pump awnings there’s enough cover.” He eyed the sky, gauging how long they had. “Half of them are already there.”

The cloud balled like chewing gum. Soon it would break into rain. Once that cloud fell, full of the plant’s adhesives, polyester would stick to their skin just as bad.

“Why did you say cotton?” Cluck asked.

“Think, boy,” Pépère said.

He heard these words from his grandfather more than his own name. Pépère always asked him questions to make sure he stayed vif, sharp. What was the difference between primary and secondary remiges? What were the components of structural coloration? If Cluck didn’t give the answer as easily as the day of the week, he heard “Think, boy.”

But his grandfather was choosing now to quiz him?

Pépère walked a few paces behind the last audience members, a wary shepherd. “What do they make at the plant?”

Cluck went with him, his muscles tense with wanting to run. “I don’t remember.”

“You remember,” Pépère said.

There had to be somewhere Cluck needed to get. The mayor’s house? Not that he knew the address. The police station? Anyone who could do something about the strands of cloud tangling overhead. This town was deaf to those sirens.

“What do they make, boy?” his grandfather asked.

“Cyanoacrylate, okay?” Cluck shouted.

The feeling of the word stayed on his tongue. Cyanoacrylate . Those six syllables rooted his feet in the underbrush. The memory of Pépère crumpling newsprint crawled up Cluck’s back. A one-paragraph story in the paper. The worker who had never been given enough safety training to know not to wear cotton. The spray of chemical eating through the man’s jeans.