Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Grasp all, lose all.

A nurse stopped in the doorway, hand on the frame. “You been here all night?”

“No,” Cluck said. Another nurse had sent him home around one in the morning, promising, “We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.” So he’d gone back to the trailer and changed his clothes. It took him fifteen minutes to get his pants off. Thanks to the adhesive, the linen took half the hair on his legs.

He’d come back with a milk bottle full of Indian paintbrush, bachelor buttons, a burst of wild roses. It had taken the better part of an hour to find flowers the adhesive hadn’t ruined, ones low enough to the ground that taller stalks had shielded them. On the walk back to the hospital, Cluck had almost stepped on a tourist’s Polaroid, left on the side of the road. The hot adhesive had burned through the film. Except for a corner of sky, the image never developed.

The nurse stepped into the room. “Visiting hours aren’t until eight, you know.”

“I can hide in the supply closet until then if you want,” he said.

She chuckled and joined him at the window. Cluck parted the blinds. It bothered him how much Almendro looked the same as it had yesterday. If he didn’t look too close, he couldn’t see the adhesive glossing the roof shingles like rubber cement, or the stray cats and dogs, their fur matted with it, or how it frosted cars and mailboxes like drying Elmer’s glue.

The difference was how the air felt, hot with the faint sense that the smallest noise would make everyone in this town flinch at once. The things that had changed were harder to see than the wilted plants and the tacky sidewalks. The ruptured mixing tank had left three plant workers dead, and a dozen others injured. Every family who relied on paychecks from the plant held their breath still in their lungs. And everyone else kept quiet, stunned by the noise and the rain, afraid to go outside.

None of it had to happen. None of it would have happened if the Palomas hadn’t ruined Pépère, cost him his job. Cluck’s grandfather was the only man pushing for the plant to run safer, and when they let him go, they dropped his safety procedures one by one in the name of efficiency. When the Palomas wrecked Pépère ’s good name, they destroyed the credibility of all the work he’d done.

“Did you lose anybody?” Cluck asked the nurse.

She checked an IV line. “Nobody close.”

Cluck had heard the nurses talking about some workers’ wives, friends, a few others picketing at the fence, wanting answers. He didn’t have to ask why the plant workers weren’t there too. He could almost hear Almendro pulling at its own seams. Half the town would demand justice, an admission from the plant’s owners, and the other half would beg them to shut up. If the plant pulled out, there were no jobs. So the workers swallowed the last-minute shifts, the blowdown stacks that made the air sting their eyes, the non-regulation safety gear.

The nurse put her hair back with a rubber band that matched her scrubs. Her nails, that same light purple, clicked against her pen. He couldn’t imagine liking one color that much. Not even the red in his feathers. Especially not the red in his feathers.

“Try not to get me in trouble,” the nurse said, checking her watch on the way out.

The girl in the hospital bed ground her teeth in her sleep. The solvents they’d used to get the adhesive off her skin left her rawer.

Where she’d held her cheek against the sleeve of her dress, she now had a deep red burn in a blurred heart shape.

She’d probably never know that all of this was the Paloma family’s fault. She’d never know that it started twenty years ago, the night the lake had flooded onto its shores like a creek bed overflowing, and those trees sank straight down like hands had pulled them under. His mother said they disappeared under a surface so calm it must have been la magie noire, the same dark magic that gave the Palomas their scales.

The Palomas started some rumor that Cluck’s grandfather caused it, that it was some failed experiment, as if his engineering degree had taught him how to make a lake swallow trees. Cluck couldn’t prove they’d started it, but he knew. The rumors had tainted the rest of Almendro like fire blight, and Pépère had lost his job. Now he had to travel with the family, Cluck’s mother and aunts not caring that he might not want to come back to this town.

One day Cluck would go to school the way his grandfather had. He’d keep things like what happened to this girl from happening to anyone else.

Maybe his family would cut their run here short because of the accident. Maybe they’d move on, give this town space to stitch itself back together. They could move up their stop in Tuolumne County. They always got plenty of tourists there, and some of the best climbing trees Cluck had ever seen. Sturdy, well-spaced boughs. Full greenery that let the light through like tissue paper. In those branches, his cousins looked like oleander blossoms in a sea of leaves.

The girl stirred, making noises that could’ve been pain or waking up. He saw the shape of her moving in the windowpane.

“ Tío Lisandro?” she asked. “Aren’t you dead?”

Any other morning, he might have laughed. Thanks to his grandfather’s clothes, he probably looked like an old black-and-white photograph in one of her family’s albums. A ghost come to life, complete with suspenders.

“Nope.” He turned around, hands in his pockets. He didn’t want her seeing his fingers. Pulling off his shirt and her dress had left them blistered and burned. Every time the nurse spotted him, she made him cover them in something greasy that smelled like a citronella candle. “Not dead. Not Lisandro either.”

But the girl wasn’t looking at him. She patted the bed around her.

He wondered when she’d notice her hair. Last night it fell to her lower back. Today it stopped just below her collarbone. The rest had been so tangled, so full of brush bits and cyanoacrylate, they’d had to cut it off.

He rubbed at the back of his neck. The falling adhesive had turned his skin raw, and now the starched collar of his grandfather’s old shirt made it worse.

She pulled at the loose fabric around her waist. “Where are my clothes?”

The strips of fabric that had once been her dress were long gone in a hospital waste bin. Her bra hadn’t made it either. It had some kind of plastic beading on it that melted like sugar.

“Hospital gown,” he said. “It’s cute. Got ducks on it.”

Her fingers found her IV. She pulled it from the inside of her elbow. The long needle flopped out, limp and bloody, and she climbed over the guardrail.

“Hey. You’re supposed to hit the button, not pull the thing out. Hit the button.” He put his hand on the rail.

She saw it before he could pull it back. He couldn’t tell if her stare was because of the blisters, or because of his third, fourth, and fifth fingers, always curled under.

He tried giving her the call button, but she was staring down at the hospital sheet. One of his feathers had fallen onto the bed, a brushstroke of red and black. Scratching at the back of his neck must have knocked it loose.

She looked up at him, eyes red from solvents and morphine, and registered that he wasn’t an orderly or a dead relative. She smelled like blood and acetone.

“What did you do to me, gitano ?” she asked.

He dropped the call button. It hit the sheet and bounced.

Gitano . The Spanish was close enough to the French. Gitan . Gypsy.

She thought he’d done this to her, that the feather on the sheet meant he’d put a gitan curse on her. Her burns, her cut hair. She thought it was all him. He could tell from how she’d said the word.