Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Lace laid out the brushes to dry, the chatter of a few Corbeau girls rounding the side of the house and then moving too far away to hear.

A door slammed at the other end of the hall, and Lace jumped. So many Corbeaus had left the house in the last few hours—off on errands or enjoying the free hours before tonight’s show—that she’d thought the whole downstairs was empty.

Even from the bathroom doorway, Lace could hear the muffled yelling. She patted her hands dry on her skirt and took slow steps to the other end of the hall, trying to keep the old wood quiet.

She stopped at the closed door, making out two voices she was just starting to learn, and the clipped sound of skin hitting skin.

“Who is this girl?” one voice asked. Dax, the man who’d stood over Lace and the blond woman.

“She’s from around here,” the second answered. Cluck.

Dax chuckled. “She’s from around here. Well, that fixes everything, doesn’t it?” Then came the thud of a body hitting a dresser or a wall. “We don’t know enough about her. She could be a thief.”

Lace pressed herself into the door, listening against the wood.

“That’s what everyone thinks we are,” Cluck said, his voice strained with trying to get his air back. “So I take that as a recommendation.”

“You don’t get to make that kind of decision on your own.”

Guilt pinched at the back of Lace’s neck. It crackled down her body, spreading through her escamas.

“Do you want me to fire her?” Cluck asked. “She’s good. You saw her work.”

“ Les mecs, ” a voice behind Lace whispered, close enough to warm her shoulder.

Lace startled, tripping on the hallway carpet.

Nicole Corbeau passed by, shaking her head. “ Il faut que jeunesse se passe, n’est-ce pas? ” She rolled her eyes at Lace, ready for her to agree.

The alcohol and sharp floral scent of Nicole Corbeau’s perfume slipped into Lace’s open mouth and needled her throat.

This woman had given her back her face. She’d told Lace about dyeing Eugenie’s hair red, teaching the blonder Corbeaus to coat their feathers in cake flour, showing Violette and Margaux how to bleach their freckles with salt and lemon juice. And now she kept on her way down the hall, taking out her earrings, gliding by the room where one of her sons was beating the other?

Lace waited for Nicole Corbeau to shut herself in her bedroom. Then she put her body back against the door, and listened.

“She’s good,” Cluck said. “She doesn’t even use her fingers. Just brushes, sponges, Q-tips.”

“So she’s a germaphobe,” Dax said. “Wonderful.”

Lace’s fingers worried the doorknob. She thought of opening the door, wondered if that would make things worse for Cluck later.

“You shouldn’t have gone around me.” Lace heard the snap of Dax’s fist on Cluck’s skin.

What was Cluck doing? It didn’t sound like he was fighting back, but he was still talking. He took what Dax did to him, but did not let it make him silent.

“We were screwed,” Cluck said. His words sounded wet, and Lace wondered if there was blood in his mouth. “We needed her.”

“You should have asked me,” Dax said. Again, the sound of Cluck’s back against the wallpaper. “I would’ve given her a shot.”

Lace could almost make out Cluck’s breathing, faint as far-off rain.

“Then give her one,” he said.

She heard a body hitting the floor. Older brother throwing the younger one down against the baseboard.

The guilt knocked around in her, a heavy bead inside a jewelry box, rubbing down the velvet lining.

Dax’s footsteps made the floorboards whine, and Lace ran down the hallway.

She opened the refrigerator and stared in, showing Dax she’d been there all along, of course she hadn’t been listening.

Dax passed her and said nothing.

She turned her head, checking on what she already knew. Dax wasn’t bleeding. His hair looked neat as it had before last night’s show.

Dax slammed the back door, and the window blinds rattled.

Lace took off her scarf, filled it with half a freezer tray of ice, carried it back down the hallway.

Cluck sat on the floor of that room, arms resting on his knees. A dot of blood broke the line of his bottom lip. Sweat stuck his hair to the back of his neck.

Lace stepped through the half-open door. The screech of the hinges made him look up.

She stood over him, offering the scarf full of ice.

He gave her a weak laugh. “Cute.” He took it and held it to his cheek.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Well, I gotta let him win one every now and then. It’s good for morale.”

He didn’t look at her. The flush in his jawline and neck showed his embarrassment. She should’ve gone back to Clémentine’s trailer and pretended she hadn’t heard anything.

Standing over him felt cruel, rubbing it in even if she didn’t mean it that way. So she sat on the floor, a good five feet between them. “What happened?”

He retied the scarf. “Nothing. We were just talking.”

“You were just talking?”

“This is kinda what it looks like when we talk.”

No wonder he hadn’t panicked when her cousins cornered him. He was used to it. His brother could hit him, and his mother wouldn’t look up.

Cluck wasn’t in his family’s show. Whether he’d wanted to be or not, she doubted he’d had the choice. This family called him a name that suited a hen better than a man.

Her mother would tell her she must have a fever to feel sorry for a Corbeau. But this boy had all the mal in him of being a Corbeau when the Corbeaus didn’t even like him.

“Could I ask you something?” she said.

He nodded and rested the back of his head against the wallpaper.

“That night,” she said. “What were you doing out in that part of the woods?”

“I was trying to find Eugenie.” No flinch of lying in his face. Only the tired look of remembering. “The mixing tank blew, and nobody knew where she was.”

Maybe Cluck hadn’t put the net in the water. Maybe he wasn’t the reason Lace was late getting out of the river. All of that could not live inside his body. Enough malice to go trapping mermaids. Enough worry to keep track of his cousins. Enough fearlessness of the poison in that rain to help Lace when he did not know her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You said that already.”

But this time she meant it.

“Don’t worry.” He turned his head, his temple against the wall. “We’re good.”

They weren’t good. She owed him however long he’d make her stay, however many nights cleaning brushes and fixing eye shadow he wanted. She’d work off the feather scar, stop fighting against the debt and just pay it.

Cluck got up, smoothed out his shirt, held out his hand to help her up. Burns had reddened his palm, leaving his skin uneven as raw citrine.

That night outside the liquor store, she hadn’t known his last name. The night of the accident, she’d seen the feather, but her skin was too covered in poison to fight. But right now, she had no excuse. Taking his hand would mean touching a Corbeau on purpose.

But taking his hand was less of a betrayal to her family than touching any other Corbeau. These people, Cluck’s own family, hated him. They didn’t say it but she felt it, like heat under the earth. His hand looked like it had gotten broken all at once, maybe slammed in a door, or crushed under a costume trunk. If these people loved him, they would’ve gotten him to a doctor in time to save his fingers.

If she hated him, she’d be like them, their scorn of Cluck Corbeau the same as a shared eye color. It would make her one of them.

But she could defy this family by touching him.