Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

“Cluck,” she said. Her pupils spread, the twin moons growing.

“Dammit, Eugenie.” He was shouting again. “Do it!”

She froze. She must have thought he didn’t know how to yell. But he wasn’t Alain Corbeau. When the sky started falling, he yelled.

She wasn’t hearing him. She only heard the panic in him. He saw it in her face. She picked up on his fear, tuned in to it like the static between radio frequencies, because she knew what fear looked like on him. She’d just never seen anyone but Dax put it there.

It threw her. He needed it not to throw her. Not now.

He grasped for something that would get to her.

“You need to make sure Noe and Mason get inside,” he said.

Georgette would have herded all the younger cousins into the house by now. But the names of Eugenie’s little brothers was all it took, and she ran.

Jugar con fuego es peligroso juego.

To play with a flame is a dangerous game.

The feeling of hands throbbed through Lace’s body.

“Don’t fight,” said a voice she couldn’t place. Those hands tore at the back collar of her dress. She cried out at the sound of ripping fabric. The back of her dress being torn from her felt like getting her body slit open.

She wrenched her head up, away from her shoulder. Heat stabbed through to her mouth. Her cheek evaporated like water on a dust road. There was nothing but pain spreading through her face.

Her hair tethered her, tangled in the weeds. She pulled, but it held her.

The boy from outside the liquor store held scraps of her dress in his hands. Her bra had gone with the fabric. Only a thin layer of nylon stuck to her breasts. The fake pearls had melted, the plastic stuck to the buttons on her dress.

She looked down at her body. The small movement seared her cheek. Shreds of her dress had stayed, burned to her breasts and stomach. Her body let off wisps of smoke, like steam off a lake on cold nights.

But there was no cold; she was all heat. Everything was. Her back and the riverbank. Her breasts and the underbrush. Her hips and the sycamores, all melting like the clocks in her father’s favorite paintings. Each losing drops until they were gone.

The boy from outside the liquor store didn’t have a shirt on. No undershirt either, just the silt brown of his chest.

What happened to your shirt? she tried to ask. The sound didn’t come. Her lips mouthed the words, but her throat didn’t help.

Had her cousins laid into him again?

The boy was talking at her, asking her things, beating her dress like it was alive.

She didn’t hear him. She watched a black feather drift from the back of his neck like a fallen piece of hair. The wind swirled it down to her arm, and it stuck. She jerked her elbow to shake it off, but it stayed. A single plume, the tip stiff with barbs, the lower half fluffy with down. Black, streaked red.

Pain spread through her cheek and neck. It burst open like a peony. The lights her father left for her flickered in their glass jars and went out.

El pez grande se come al chico.

The big fish eats the small one.

“Can you say your name?” the nurse asked. Lace knew the woman was a nurse without opening her eyes. She had all the nurse smells. Powdered latex gloves. Ballpoint pen ink. Unscented fabric softener.

The back of Lace’s scalp throbbed. She bit her tongue to keep from crying out.

“Do you remember why you’re here?” the nurse asked.

Lace’s lips scratched against each other. “The cotton candy,” she said. The cloud in the sky had looked so much like spun sugar. Waiting for a paper cone to whirl through. “Because of the cotton candy.”

She tried to curl onto her side, shifting her weight. The pain in her head rushed through her body. In the dark of her clenched-shut eyes, she saw it, the night twenty years ago. She may not have been there, but she’d heard the stories, all those trees sinking into the water. The lake swallowing the trunks whole.

No one in her family, not even the few of Lace’s uncles who saw it happen, knew how the Corbeaus had done it, except that however they did came from the strange power of their feathers. Their magia negra.

“What if they’re doing it again?” Lace asked, the sound barely enough to make the words.

“Shh,” the nurse said, soft as a faucet running in another room.

Lace and her cousins had never been allowed to talk about that night. What the Corbeaus did was like death; the women in her grandmother’s village would not speak of it because they believed the word muerte burned the lips.

“They could be out there doing it again,” Lace got out, but all she got back was more shh .

Lace had not been born twenty years ago to see what the Corbeaus had done. But she had heard the story. First when she was four, the day she picked up a crow feather off the ground, all the barbs perfect and pure black. When she came inside twirling it in her hand, her mother had grabbed it from her small fingers so hard Lace braced for her mother to slap her. Instead, her mother told her about the awful thing Lace had not yet been alive to see.

The Corbeaus had meant the accident twenty years ago to ruin the Palomas’ stretch of river, spoiling their stage and killing as many of them as they could. All at once the slow, steady current had grown turbulent, like there was a storm under the surface. Loose branches stabbed through the water. Sudden rapids tumbled in from the lake. The Corbeaus had wanted the sirenas trapped in the river’s root tangles like figurines in snow globes.

The mermaids had all escaped those waters, rough as a wild sea. And the Corbeaus’ own magia negra had turned on them. They did not love the water, so they could not control it. The lake rushed up onto its beaches, and the grove of shoreline trees where the Corbeaus held their own shows went into the water, pulled in quick as if the current had grabbed them by the roots.

Tía Lora’s husband was swept into the lake with those trees and drowned.

Lace opened her eyes, the lids heavy and swollen. The light made her forehead pulse, like having her hair pulled.

The nurse’s lilac eye shadow matched her scrubs. She wrote on her clipboard, the cap of her pen chewed like a licorice stick.

One corner of a ceiling panel lifted away from its frame, just enough to let in a black feather. Lace watched it dip and rise. It spun down and landed on the back of her hand. She brushed it away. It slipped off the sheet and through the guardrail.

But another fell.

“See?” she asked the nurse, but the nurse didn’t see.

Lace shook it off, but two more fell, then six more, then a dozen, until there was no more ceiling. Only a sky made of black feathers, brushed with the red of candy apples. Red glaze made of the same sugar as that cotton candy sky.

She screamed. Her screaming made another nurse appear, this one all blue. She came with a needle and a vial and a bag of water. Lace looked for the goldfish in the bag of water, but they’d forgotten the goldfish.

Lace said so. She told them they needed to bring back the bag of water and the candy apples and the cotton candy. Give it all back for a bag of water with a goldfish.

“Did you hear me?” Lace asked. “They forgot the fish. They didn’t give you the fish.”

But there was still no goldfish, and the feathers kept falling.

Drowsiness settled over her. Her weight fell against the bed. Her eyes shut without her shutting them, like a doll tipped backward.

Her pulse ticked under her skin, like a watch under tissue paper.

She was the fish, raw and sliced. The bag of water was for her.

Qui trop embrasse mal étreint.