Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

It was easier to do it than argue. Lace scrubbed off the makeup at the downstairs sink, gritting her teeth against the soap.

She came back with her face heat-reddened, and sat down, her thin scarf tied to her arm to hide the feather burn.

Nicole sponged a little foundation over her face, then concealer. She brushed the lightest layer of powder over Lace’s cheeks and forehead, then a little more base, then powder again. “Better to use a light hand many times than a heavy hand once.”

Lace clenched her back teeth to keep from wincing, her skin still raw enough that bristles and foam pads stung.

Nicole swirled blush onto her cheeks, swept on eye shadow with a few flicks of a brush, handed her a lipstick. Lace dabbed it onto her mouth and rubbed her lips together.

Nicole set the compact mirror into Lace’s hands. “ Regarde .”

Lace opened her eyes. The coral on her cheeks and lips stood out. Her eyelashes looked pure black against the cream shadow.

The burn on her cheek was still there, still visible. Just fainter, a little discoloration under a veil of sand. In the right light, if Lace wore her hair down, it might go unnoticed. In the dusk and globe lights, she could pass for almost pretty.

“How’d you do that?” Lace asked.

“A light hand, and patience,” Nicole said. “You teach people what to see.”

Ne réveillez pas le chat qui dort.

Don’t wake the cat who sleeps.

Cluck watched his mother standing at the kitchen counter, picking lavender from a dish of herbes de Provence . Every time she bought a jar, she never noticed the violet buds until she got home, when she cursed in French as though it were her first language.

Years ago Cluck used to do this. His mother and Dax figured out that telling six-year-old Cluck to pick out all those tiny buds would keep him out of the way for a couple of hours. “Look, we have found a way for you to be useful to this family,” she’d say.

Cluck leaned on the door frame, thinking of how different Lace looked now that his mother had gotten ahold of her. Still pretty, but painted. Her skin looked made of powder and blush.

“Did you have to do that to her?” he asked.

She flicked the lavender into another bowl. If Clémentine didn’t ask for it, she’d throw it out. “Do what to who?”

“Lace,” he said. “All that makeup. She looks like a pageant contestant.”

“You hired a girl to do makeup, and you don’t like that she wears it?”

His mother couldn’t act like she didn’t have a hand in this. He’d seen that same look on half the girls in this family.

“I know your work,” he said.

“And she thanked me.” She shook the dish. “Now she looks us in the eye. This is a good thing in the girl we trust with our faces.”

He’d liked seeing Lace the way she was the night before, without anything covering her face, her lipstick almost the same deep red as the patch on her cheek. Nothing between that wound and the air it needed to heal.

If she had to scrub off all that makeup every night, her burn would take twice as long to scar over.

“Three days ago, she was in a hospital,” he said. “She doesn’t need someone telling her to cover up something that just happened to her.”

“Girls need what they need to feel pretty,” his mother said.

“She’s pretty without it,” he said.

His mother lifted her eyes from the counter, catching him in her peripheral vision.

He crossed his arms. This way his mother had of looking down at him even though he was taller than she was made him want to take up as little space as possible.

“Careful,” she said.

There were only a handful of people with the show who weren’t Corbeaus by blood or marriage. And everyone, not just Cluck, had to follow one simple rule: don’t touch them.

But there were more rules for Cluck. Cluck was everything bad about his father, and Dax was everything good, chaff and wheat like the verse in Matthew. When Dax asked about their father, aunts burst with stories about how handsome and tall he was, how when he played the euphonium it sounded like the breath of un séraphin . When Cluck asked, they looked at him as if he’d been the one to make their father leave. They reminded him that the man had left so completely after Cluck was born that they did not even know for sure what county he was in now. Inyo, they guessed? Monterey maybe?

Cluck, the bad son, was only allowed to talk to girls Dax and his mother chose for him. Girls they met at churches they would never bring Cluck to. Girls they thought would grow into women who might make him something less dangerous than he was.

Lace was not one of them. And now Lace worked for the show. He couldn’t have found a girl more off-limits to him in Saint Mary’s Convent.

“ Cygnon, ” his mother said as he was leaving.

The nickname stopped Cluck in the door frame. Until Eugenie came up with “Cluck,” for the way the fingers on his left hand looked like a rooster’s claw, Dax got all the cousins to call him le cygnon , for having no more contour feathers than a young swan, gray and ugly.

Dax and his mother still called Cluck cygnon sometimes, Dax’s way of pointing out that all the other Corbeaus had feathers that were stiff and neat, narrow on the leading edge and wider along the inner vane. And they were the true black of forest crows, not red-streaked like Cluck’s. Cluck’s hadn’t changed as much from when he was small, when his first feathers grew in fluffy and short. They weren’t natal fluff anymore, but they’d only developed into semiplumes, a cross between a cygnet’s fuzz and a flight feather.

Cluck turned around.

His mother kept picking out lavender. “Your brother would like to talk to you.”

Cluck slid his hands into his pockets, hiding his wrecked fingers in the lining.

This wasn’t an order to go find his brother.

Dax would find him.

Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.

Raise crows and they will peck your eyes out.

Lace held an eye shadow brush under the bathroom tap, flooding out the color she couldn’t get with rubbing alcohol the night before. Lilac-tinted water swirled down the drain.

One of the Corbeau women pushed on the half-open door. Lace couldn’t remember her name. Only that the dress she wore for the show was yellow as a pear.

“ Excuse-moi .” She reached past Lace for a bottle of perfume all the Corbeau girls shared.

Lace nodded to the woman’s reflection. At first she’d kept the door closed, but cleaning the brushes took so long that every few minutes a Corbeau woman knocked, wanting the mirror so she could fix her lipstick on her way out to the Blackberry Festival. After the second time, Lace gave up and just left the bathroom door open.

She’d wondered what about those booths and fruit stands thrilled them so much until Eugenie sighed and said, “So many farmers’ sons,” as she combed her hair.

The woman sprayed on a little perfume, and the room filled up with a warm, sweet smell like cardamom. All wrong for the weather, but if the Corbeau girls wanted to stand out among all the powdery flower perfumes, that was how to do it.

The woman rubbed one wrist against the other, eyeing the brushes. “How’d you get stuck with that job?”

“Someone has to.” Lace pressed water out of the rinsed bristles. “And I don’t mind.”

“Better you than me.” The woman set the bottle back on the counter. “Next time use the sink upstairs,” she said on her way out. “Horrible little mirror. No one will bother you.”

Forget it. Lace would rather do all this at two in the morning than go upstairs. Being in this house was bad enough.