Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Dax and a couple of the other Corbeau men clustered behind a trailer. Cluck joined them, his back to Lace. Even through his shirt, she could make out the tension in his shoulders.

Cluck shifted his weight, and Lace saw the thing in Dax’s hands. She stopped, and her feet skidded against the ground.

She knew those scraps of beaded fabric as well as her own body. The small stitches. The bursts of glass beads. Her old tail, the grapefruit pink now dulled to peach. The current must have pulled it loose from that ball of roots. The silt and river water had left it dirty, drying stiff.

Something deep red had splattered it. The color, close to new blood, pressed into Lace’s collarbone. Then she saw the jar of blackberry jam, dark as wine, in a cousin’s hands.

Dax holding her old tail made her feel his hands on her lower back, her hips, her thighs. Everywhere Cluck had touched cooled, leaving room for the pinch of Dax’s grip.

“What the hell are you doing?” Cluck asked.

“What does it look like?” Dax asked. “We’re gonna make a delivery.”

“Where did you get this?” Cluck grabbed the fin, balling it in his hands. The sense of his fingers on Lace’s ankle, while Dax still held the rest of her, almost made her kneel.

“It washed up,” said one of the cousins, flicking more of the blackberry jam over the fabric. “One of the fish must’ve lost it.” Red stained his fingers, and Dax’s. It stained all their hands.

Lace had made her peace with losing that tail to the river. The water would swallow it and keep it. Like a communion hostia, it would dissolve on the current’s tongue.

But now the Corbeaus had it.

If she saved it from their hands, they’d know, and she’d have to run. The feather burn would stay on her forever, this family’s hate searing it deeper into her skin.

If she did nothing, they would stain it, leave it outside the motel for Abuela or Martha or worse, her great-aunt, whose skilled, tired hands had worked so many nights to make it. Tía Lora would take it as a sign that Lace had died or would soon.

The one with the jar held it out to Cluck, offering him a turn.

Cluck stood close to his brother. “Stop.”

Dax laughed and splashed a little more blackberry jam on the tail. Lace felt it, sharp as cuts.

Cluck ripped the tail out of Dax’s hands. Flecks of red sprayed both their shirts.

The cousins froze. One stepped back.

Lace folded her tongue and bit down. The relief of her tail going from Dax’s hands to Cluck’s was so sharp it was almost pain.

“You really want to go over there and make this worse?” Cluck asked, his voice low enough that Lace could barely hear it, the words meant just for his brother. He shrugged his shoulder toward their cousins. “You want to see one of them die this year?”

A few Corbeau women came outside. Clémentine. Eugenie. A couple others Lace had done makeup on. One screamed at the sight of all the red, but one of the cousins rushed to show her the blackberry jam jar.

Dax thumbed a spot off his chin and stared his brother down. “You hate them as much as I do.”

“More.” Cluck tightened his grip on the fabric. “But we are not doing this.”

Dax glanced over his shoulder, sensing the women watching.

He looked back at Cluck. “You just used your one free pass.” He took a handful of the tail and shoved it at Cluck’s chest, staining his shirt worse.

Cluck balled the tail up in his hands and took it into the costume trailer.

Lace followed him.

He folded the tail like an antique dress or a lace tablecloth. “Sorry you had to see that.”

She shut the trailer door.

“We’re not crazy, just so you know,” he said, but didn’t look at her. “There are reasons we feel how we feel.”

Right then, she didn’t care what he thought of her family, what he would think of her if he knew her full name. She cared that her old tail wasn’t in Dax’s hands, on its way to Tía Lora.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He set it down on the counter. “If I throw it out here, Dax’ll find it. I could throw it out in town.” He ran his fingers over the beading, and Lace shivered. “But it just doesn’t seem right.”

“What doesn’t?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He looked a little sad, a half-frown creasing the corner of his mouth. “It’s just good work, that’s all.”

The sting of Dax’s hands faded, and the feeling of Cluck’s came back. Cluck may have hated the name Paloma, but he recognized the art in those stitches and beads. To him, seeing them stained and torn must have been a little like finding a pair of peacock-feather wings ripped apart.

Her last name may not have been safe on his tongue, but this fabric and these beads, this part of her the water had sealed to her body like skin, was safe in his hands.

“If I bring it to the other family, it’s gonna look like a threat,” he said.

“Then let me do it,” Lace said. “They don’t know who I am.” She could get it to Martha, who’d hide it in with the dresses Abuela didn’t like her wearing.

“No,” Cluck said. “I don’t want you anywhere near that family.”

That family . Her mouth grew hot with wanting to tell him whatever he thought he knew, whatever he thought about her family, he had heard wrong, been told wrong.

He was the one good one out of all these crows.

“I have an idea,” she said.

She brought him to the river, the ruined tail in her arms. This way it would be out of the Corbeaus’ hands, and her great-aunt would never see the stains.

She gathered handfuls of small stones, worn smooth by the current, and stuffed them through a hole in a fin seam. When enough stones weighted down the bottom edge of the fin, she gave it back to the water.

The dull pink sank and vanished. Quiet fell over her, the slow joy of finding the sun on a cold day. Those stones would hold her ruined tail at the river bottom.

The relief was so perfect it made her escamas sore. It bubbled up through her, spilling out of her, making her kiss Cluck’s cheek.

He ignored it, took it as the same kind of teasing as her shoving his arm. So she kissed him on the mouth to make him understand, lightly, just enough to feel the fine grain of his lips, a little chapped by dust and wind. He accepted it, not pulling away. But he didn’t deepen it. He didn’t take her tongue or give her his. He took it like she meant it. More than a greeting, less than it would have been in the cab of his grandfather’s truck.

When she pulled away, he did too.

He opened his eyes. “What was that for?”

“For what you did,” she said.

He squinted enough that his eyelashes almost met. “What do you care? This isn’t your fight.”

“It is my fight.” She said it without thinking. But it slipped into lies she’d already told, easily as her old tail sinking into the river. “This town’s too small for a war,” she said, like this town, not the war, belonged to her.

He watched the corner of the fin flick up and then go under. Then he started back toward the house.

A few steps away, he realized she wasn’t behind him, and looked over his shoulder. “You coming?”

She searched the river for a flush of peach, but the water had folded it into the dark.

They walked back to the old Craftsman. She went in with him, and the breath of the Paloma women followed. Those voces tried to tell her that him holding the door wasn’t a polite thing. He could turn himself into a crow with knives for feathers, and she wouldn’t see in time to run.

Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid.