Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

This was why his family never let people see their feathers. If they hid them, they were just show performers. But if anyone saw them, they’d think what this girl thought, that they were full of dark magic.

She grabbed the water pitcher from the bedside table, holding it up like it wasn’t cheap plastic, but ceramic. Something she could break over his head. The spout splashed her hand and her hospital gown.

“Get out,” she said.

Cluck held up his hands, not caring what she thought of them, and backed out of the room.

Eugenie leaned against the hallway wall, painted the same dull salmon color as the water pitchers and emesis bins. She stood out, a brighter pink. She’d taken the cyanoacrylate worse than he had. Cluck was out in it longer, but Eugenie was paler. She’d been wandering each floor of the hospital, still in her ruined silk dress, looking like she’d taken too hot a bath. The frog who didn’t feel the water boiling.

She handed him a Styrofoam cup, and sipped from the one in her other hand. “From the cafeteria,” she said. “It’s awful, but I can’t stop drinking it.”

He followed her toward the stairwell.

A man in a suit caught his eye. He stood outside a patient’s room, looking in.

The suit was too nice for a hospital. For a funeral, maybe, but if whoever he wanted to see had gotten as far as the mortuary, he wouldn’t be here.

The suit was navy. No man in a town like Almendro paid their respects in anything but a plain black suit.

“Risk something,” Eugenie said, answering the question Cluck had almost spoken. “Risk assessment? Risk management? Something like that.”

Cluck turned his head.

“I heard him talking to one of the nurses,” she said. “I pretended I was waiting so I could get a look at his card.”

Cluck touched Eugenie’s shoulder, to tell her he’d be right back.

Eugenie grabbed his arm. Hard. He’d forgotten from when they were kids how her small fingers could dig in. When it was her and him against the bigger cousins, that grip always wore them down. She didn’t hit or kick, but she held on like a ferret, not letting go until whichever cousin she was on surrendered.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not worth it.”

Risk managers were his grandfather’s opposite, a photographic negative to that undeveloped Polaroid. They found so many corners to cut, they turned everything to confetti.

“None of this had to happen,” Cluck said. The Styrofoam heating his palm made him want to throw coffee on the man’s silk tie. “Don’t tell me it’s not worth it.”

Eugenie felt him pulling away, and held his arm harder. “We’re not worth anything to anyone here. We don’t even have names. We’re just les gitans, right?”

He cringed. She’d heard everything the girl said. And like him, she’d heard gitan when the girl said gitano .

Eugenie shook her head and shrugged. “So why bother?”

Si quieres tener enemigos, haz favores.

If you want to make enemies, do favors.

El gitano . She’d touched him, held ice to his bruises. The liquor store’s salt and sugar smells came back. They crept down to her stomach. She turned onto her side, fighting off the sick feeling.

Her cousins hadn’t known what he was either. If they’d been beating up a Corbeau, Justin would’ve told her, knowing Lace couldn’t have said a word. Fighting was the only way to touch a Corbeau without taking on their curse. His Corbeau blood was the thing about him Justin didn’t like, even if he couldn’t name it.

It was worse than her helping him up and putting ice to his temple. He’d gotten her out from under that tree, to here. How much touching had that taken?

But she knew now. That feather had told her.

A nurse in green scrubs tried to put her IV back.

“No,” Lace cried out, wrenching her arm from the woman’s grasp. “No, I don’t want it.”

She wasn’t letting them make her numb to how the Corbeau boy had touched her. How he’d left that net for her, even if he didn’t know she was the one he’d left it for. There was no other reason for him to be in that part of the woods. He’d set a trap for las sirenas and then saved her only because he didn’t know she was one of them.

“He did it,” she tried to tell the nurse, but the nurse didn’t listen. “It was him.”

The nurse got a better grip.

“I don’t want it.” Lace jerked her elbow away. Her forearm banged the bed rail.

The nurse dropped her arm. “Fine.”

So Lace lay there, needleless, seething at the knowledge that she had touched him, he had touched her, that her body had been against his.

The stick site prickled. The longer she had the needle out, the worse her skin stung. It shrieked with the burns and the stain of the gitano boy’s hands.

When she got so thirsty she couldn’t swallow, the nurse told her she needed to take the IV again, that she wasn’t ready to drink water.

Lace said no. After the nurse left, she drained the pitcher next to the bed. But then it was empty, and she was still thirsty. So she stumbled to the bathroom sink without turning on the light, and drank from the tap.

As soon as she swallowed, the water came up again, yellowed with stomach acid.

The nurse flicked on the light. The overhead fluorescent bleached her blond hair white. “You want it back in yet?”

Lace shook her head. Pain shot through the muscles above her jaw, and she threw up the last of the water.

“All right, girly,” the nurse said. “Have it your way.” She flipped the lamp off.

Lace ran water down the sink. The changes in light made her forehead throb.

The mirror showed a face reddened like a half-ripened apricot. The skin was tight in places, gathered like rippling water in others. The right cheek looked bloody as a garnet, but her fingers found it dry, rough as sandstone.

Her hospital gown gaped away from her body. The cotton billowed, showing her shoulders, her breasts, all the way to her thighs.

Her family might never see the blight the boy left on her. These burns veiled it. Abuela and her mother might never know if a Corbeau touching her had seared off her escamas . Lace wouldn’t look, but she knew. The rain had already burned them away.

A nurse, the blue one this time, pulled her away from the mirror. “Come on, honey.” She slipped the needle in, taped it down. Lace took it, and the fishless water made her sleepy, quiet, less likely to climb over the guardrail.

A square of fabric sat on the nightstand. Filmy, printed with roses, folded. The scarf she’d forgotten in the boy’s hands, when melting ice soaked it.

She balled it up and threw it. It fluttered to a chair and then slipped to the floor.

Her hand knocked a milk bottle she hadn’t noticed. It stood at the back of the nightstand, bursting with wildflowers. The dusk blue of bachelor buttons. The white and yellow roses that grew wild on the hillsides. Red blossoms like blooms of flame.

She must’ve looked even worse than she thought. Nobody in her family brought flowers to hospitals unless someone was dying or having a baby.

Her fingers worried the tape on her IV as she slept.

The purple nurse came back, woke her up, tried to get her to eat. Lace shook her head at the plate, because everything tasted like her dry lips.

The nurse ripped off the tape encircling Lace’s elbow. “Your friend went home?” she asked.

Lace tasted the grit of her own dry tongue. “He’s not my friend.”

“Oh, yeah? He ripped up a quarter acre of Spanish broom to get you free.”

And she’d kept her cousins from kicking his ass. It didn’t make them friends.