Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Eso es harina de otro costal.

That is wheat from a different bag.

The closer Lace got to the Corbeaus’ side of the woods, the more the scent of feathers pushed up through the trees’ smells. The rain had let up, leaving the air clean and woody like damp bark, but that scent still hovered.

Lace caught a thread of it every time those black feathers blew to the Palomas’ side of town, and here it was strong as Abuela ’s perfume. A dull earth smell. Something waxy like crayons. A sweetness like powdered honey that Lace might have liked if she didn’t know where it came from.

Lace set her suitcase at the base of a cottonwood tree. She buried it under wet leaves. Los gitanos couldn’t steal it if they didn’t know it was there.

She held the bag of peaches in one arm, Moon-and-Stars in the other. The sight of the old Craftsman house made an unsteady feeling jitter down her arms. But she reminded herself that the Corbeau boy couldn’t have known she was a Paloma, that if he had, he would have left her to turn to smoke, and that stilled her.

From far off, the Corbeaus’ camp looked like children’s toys. Lace had heard rumors about the travel trailers, but until tonight, she’d never seen them. They were primary-colored like alphabet blocks—clover green, weed daisy yellow, apple red, crayon blue. One was plain aluminum. Another pink with tail fins like a jet. Strings of globe lights hung between them.

The wings on the performers’ backs towered over their heads and spread out past their shoulders. Lace had never seen so much teal and bronze. Feathers brushed when one passed another.

The men wore no shirts, nothing but the flesh-colored bands that held their wings on. Lace tried not to laugh at the shine of their chests, wondering if they used Vaseline or vitamin oil. Women in antique dresses sat at outdoor vanities, rows of lightbulbs illuminating the mirrors. Their enormous wings filled the glass. They fixed their hair in soft waves and pinned curls, trailing under flower crowns.

One who didn’t have her wings on noticed Lace, a flash of movement in her mirror.

She caught Lace’s eye in the reflection. “You are early, and lost.” She patted her hair and turned around. “The show doesn’t start for an hour. You buy the tickets down the road.”

Recognition pressed into Lace’s collarbone. She knew this narrow frame, the copper hair, the sleepy flirtation in the woman’s eyes. Lace had met her in the woods.

But nothing registered on the woman’s face. Lace didn’t have on her stage makeup, only lipstick, and base that did a poor job hiding the burn on her cheek. She didn’t have on her tail, and her hair wasn’t wet. She looked nothing like la sirena rosa .

“ Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça? ” The woman pulled back the edge of the paper sack with her forefinger. “Are you from the grocery store?”

Lace shifted the bag so their arms wouldn’t touch. “No. I’m looking for someone.”

“Who?” the woman asked.

Lace tried holding her hand above her head to show the Corbeau boy’s height, but she didn’t know his height. She just knew he was taller than she was. “Dark hair, longish,” she said, hovering a flat hand over her shoulder. “He has”—Lace closed and opened her fist, thinking of his left fingers, curled under—“a hand.”

“Two, I’d guess,” the woman said.

“He wears old-timey clothes.”

“You mean Cluck.”

“His name’s Cluck?”

“He answers to it.” The woman gestured for Lace to follow. She stopped at a blue and white teardrop trailer. “Cluck.” She banged her palm on the siding.

The door flew open. Lace put up a hand to keep it from hitting her. The boy in the old-fashioned clothes stepped down from the trailer.

He had his hair rubber-banded in a low ponytail, but it was a little too short to stay pulled back. A few pieces had fallen out and gotten in his face.

She’d only ever seen him in the dull neon of the liquor store or through the cloud of what the nurses had put in her IV. Now he looked different. His eyebrows, low-arched, dark as his hair, gave him a serious look she’d never seen when he was talking. The way his eyelashes screened his irises when he looked down made him seem a little sad. The inner curve of his lower lip had a lavender tint that should’ve made him look sick or cold, but it just added to that sadness that started around his eyes.

He held a pair of peacock-feather wings. The breeze stroked the feathers, and the gold and sea glass colors shimmered.

Lace caught the shine of bright aqua, the same blue as the nylon net, and her stomach clenched. She tried to forget that she’d come to apologize to the Corbeau who’d probably left that net for her, the boy who’d had no reason to be on the Palomas’ side of the woods except to put those nylon threads in the water.

Cluck didn’t see her in the door’s shadow.

“ As-tu fini? ” the woman asked.

He turned her around by her shoulders and tied the satin ribbons to her torso, crossing them over her front so they looked like part of her dress.

The woman slid her thumbs under the ribbons, checking that they’d hold. They were the same bluish purple as the bodice, and almost vanished against the chiffon. “ Tu as de la visite .” She pushed the trailer door shut, throwing light on Lace.

Cluck jumped when he saw her. He pulled off the rubber band and shook a hand through his hair. Not like he cared what he looked like but quick, out of habit, like taking his hat off before going into a church.

The woman skipped off. Her wings twitched as she ran. The plumes all moved together like a field of oats, wind-rippled.

“Here to take another shot?” Cluck asked. Sadness tinged his expression. She couldn’t have hurt his feelings. The Corbeaus didn’t bother with any opinions but each other’s. As far as he knew, she was just some girl from Almendro. What did he care what she said about him?

She pulled her eyes down from his face so she wouldn’t have to see that look.

He had his sleeves cuffed up to the elbow. A thread of blue vein ran along the muscle in his forearms, like an irrigation ditch snaking through a field. It gave Lace an idea of what the rest of his body must have been like under the loose fit of those old clothes, the kind of thin muscle that made him strong but not as big as the other men.

Abuela would murder her for thinking about a Corbeau with his shirt off. Lace tried to make herself stop, sure that Abuela would sense the thought from across town. But the more she tried to force it aside, the more the thought came floating back, like a balloon bobbing up after being held underwater. It was like the game she and her cousins tormented each other with. Don’t think of a Christmas tree. Don’t think of an alpaca. And then all they could think about for the rest of the day would be a whole herd of alpaca, or a pine forest big enough for every Christmas tree in the world.

She shoved the watermelon and the bag of peaches into his arms and flicked away the memory of that net. She pushed down the knowledge that he put into the water something that almost killed Magdalena, and could have killed her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For what I said. For how I acted. I’m sorry.”

“Heavily medicated?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she said. “I just came to say thank you for what you did.”

“Anytime,” he said. “Well, not anytime. Never again, I hope.”

“So we’re okay?” she asked. The sooner he forgave her, the sooner the feather would heal. Her apology was the same as her cousins returning that Camargue colt.