Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Salt stung the wound on her cheek. She pressed the pads of her fingers to the tear’s path. The Corbeau boy had touched her. The rain had scalded her. But nothing in those drops or in his fingers could take the name Paloma from her.

She put her dress back on and threw the door open. She called for her mother and her father and Abuela and Tía Lora. Aunts, uncles, and cousins cracked their doors and peered out.

Apanchanej had given her a sign she would be healed. The garnet would fall from her cheek like flecks of mica. The crushed roses on her back and breasts would turn to skin again. She would swim. She would still be la sirena rosa .

“What is it, mija ?” her mother asked, shaking painkillers from a bottle. Lace held her hand out to stop her.

Her fingers froze before they reached her mother’s. A dark wisp of a mark on her forearm made her still. A burn, deep and red as a crushed blackberry, fanned in the shape of a feather, the barbs as clear as scratches of ink.

She’d missed that feather. Maybe the reddening and swelling had hidden it. Or she’d dismissed it as dried blood. Or the burn on her cheek kept her staring into the mirror instead of looking down.

But she saw it now.

Her mother saw it too. The pills and bottle fell from her hand.

Lace’s aunts whispered prayers. Her cousins drew back, as though Lace had cut her hands on the thorns of la Virgen Morena ’s roses. They all saw it, the messy, fluffy barbs seared into her arm.

The Corbeau boy’s feather had scarred her. It had fallen from him and branded her. Now she wore the mark of the family who’d killed Tía Lora’s husband. The net the Corbeau boy left for her would not let her go.

If the feather’s imprint had been light, the pearled skin of a healed scar or the family’s birthmarks, her aunts and uncles might not have drawn back. Her mother might not have hovered a nervous hand in front of her mouth. But this was the enemy family’s mark. They knew it as well as if a thousand obsidian feathers had fallen from the sky.

Lace’s father stepped between them all. “ ¡Santo cielo! ” He took Lace’s arm. “It’s just a feather. You don’t know it’s theirs.”

But to the rest of them, it was currency, true as salt and silver. Lace felt the poison seeping into her blood. She should have noticed it before, felt the sting of that family’s venom.

Her father watched her. Abuela watched her. Her mother stepped back toward the yellowing wallpaper. The rest of the family fringed the hallway.

Abuela turned her back to them all. She went to the door of her room. One glance told Lace to follow.

“Lace,” her father said, his assurance that, once, just once, she did not have to do as Abuela told her.

Lace’s calves pulsed, fighting her moving. Don’t go, her muscles crackled out. You know how this will end. Don’t go.

But she shook off the feeling biting up her legs and followed.

The rest of the family let out a shared breath. When Abuela gave an order, any Paloma girl who did not want to become another Licha obeyed.

A quien dices tus secretos, das tu libertad.

To whom you tell your secrets, you give your freedom.

Lace closed the door behind her, shutting out the hallway murmurs.

Abuela faced the window, back to Lace. “At the hospital the nurses talk about how some gitano boy pulled a girl from the woods. But I said not my granddaughter.”

“ Abuela, ” Lace said.

“I said my granddaughter is una niña buena . If my granddaughter had been touched by one of them, she would have told us. She would have let us help her.”

“Help me?” A laugh pressed up from under the two strained words. “What would you have done?” Exorcismo? Brought her to a bruja who would push the breath out of her?

“Was that you with the gitano boy?” Abuela asked.

“He didn’t know who I was,” Lace said.

“Was that you?” Abuela asked again.

Lace would not say yes. Abuela already knew. She just wanted to make her say it.

“Those people killed my big brother,” Abuela said.

The words dragged Lace’s gaze to the floor. So often she thought of the Paloma who died that night as Tía Lora’s husband, the man who made Lace’s great-aunt a Paloma. She sometimes forgot he was also Abuela ’s brother. When the lake flooded its shores, and he drowned, he was lost not only to Tía Lora but to Abuela .

Her grandmother turned from the window. The scent of her reached out to Lace. For more than half a century, she’d worn the same perfume her mother gave her on her sixteenth birthday. Her mother had scraped together enough for a tiny bottle, no bigger than a jar of saffron, and Abuela had saved up for a new one each year ever since. Cream Lace . Lace’s mother had named her for that perfume, a gift to Abuela, a sign that Lace belonged as much to Abuela as to her mother and father.

The powdery smell of violets and almond sugar curled around Lace’s shoulders. Such a sweet scent, shy and young. How did it stand up to Abuela ’s wrists and neck?

Now Abuela ’s face was soft as that scent, and almost as sad. “Pack your things, mija .”

The words were the slap Lace had expected. She’d braced for them. They jolted her anyway.

Lace turned her forearm, letting the light glaze over the burn. If she fought Abuela on this, everyone would know she had been touched. Abuela would tell them all. She would be the cursed thing, a burr hooking its teeth into this family.

Abuela had only just let her be seen. La sirena rosa had come to shore for one night, and then had slipped back into the water. Now she could bring a plague on her family, sure as crows making children sick. It didn’t matter that Apanchanej had spared her scales. She had let a Corbeau touch her.

A flush of shame gripped her, strong as the Corbeau boy’s hands.

“Don’t tell them,” Lace said.

“They saw it already.”

“Don’t tell them how I got it.”

Her grandmother said nothing.

Lace had obeyed. Her whole life, she’d obeyed. She’d done makeup for all the sirenas, even when it meant she couldn’t finish her own. She’d hidden her escamas even though they were the part of her body she loved most, all because Abuela was sure people would call her and her cousins los monstruos if their scales ever showed.

Lace kept her feet flat on the carpet. If she didn’t steady her own weight, she’d waver and sound desperate. Abuela would stick a knife through any break in her voice.

“What have you ever asked me to do that I haven’t done?” Lace asked.

Abuela tipped her eyes to the curtains, studying the mismatched panels.

“If you don’t tell them how I got it, I’ll do what you want, I’ll go,” Lace said. Not a question. An equation, sure and immutable as the ones on her father’s worksheets.

Abuela turned her head, half-shutting her eyes. She knew what Lace meant. Listen to me, or I will make this messy. I will be a pain in your ass.

“My dad will go against you on this,” Lace said. “You know that. If you promise you won’t tell them, I’ll convince him. He’ll let me go.”

Abuela kept her laugh behind her lips. “You can take him with you. He has the name for it.”

Lace flinched. Abuela had never forgiven Lace’s father for being born with the last name Cuervo, even after he let it go, changed it, endured the taunting of other men for taking his wife’s name.