Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

Cluck held his hands under the kitchen tap, washing the blackberry off his fingers.

He watched Lace pat her hands dry on a dish towel.

“Take off your shirt,” she said.

The water jumped from warm to hot, prickling his fingers. “You getting ideas?”

She shoved him. “It’s stained. I can get those out.”

Cluck unbuttoned the cuffs. “I know how to wash a shirt.”

“Do you know how to get Almendro blackberry out? Because I do.” She cut open a lemon from the fruit bowl and found a half-flat bottle of soda water in the fridge. “My younger cousins always got this stuff on their good clothes.”

He unbuttoned the front, and slipped out of it.

She rubbed the lemon and soda water into the stains and ran them under the kitchen tap. The flecks faded and disappeared.

“Hey, that actually works,” Cluck said. “I thought I was gonna have to figure out what to wear with a pink shirt.”

“Why not just wear stuff you can throw in a washer?” she asked.

“My clothes used to be my grandfather’s,” he said. “I like wearing what he wore.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess it makes me feel like I could be like him.” He thought of the Alain Corbeau-ness flooding into him.

She scrubbed at a stain. Even watching her profile, he could see a little bit of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You doing okay here so far?” he asked.

“Yeah. They trust me to make them look good, believe it or not.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked.

She turned her head, and that smile turned sad and patient, bearing with the question.

She meant the burn on her cheek. Even his mother, piling loose powder on her like layers of une millefeuille, couldn’t make her forget it. That burn kept her from seeing how her hair was the deep brown of black mustard seeds, or that her eyelashes looked like the smallest feathers.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

Her lips parted a little. She looked as likely to tell him to go screw himself as she did to say thank you.

“You don’t have to say that,” she said.

He needed to shut up. The older Corbeaus always taught the younger ones how to talk to girls, but nobody had taught him. At eighteen, he was too old to be outright forbidden from talking to girls, but he was still le petit démon . His uncles’ glares whenever they saw him so much as ask a local girl for directions was enough to put him off trying altogether.

But he couldn’t let Lace think he was talking about some version of her from before the accident. She had the same face. It just had a bloom of red on it.

“I know I don’t have to say it,” he said. He stopped himself from saying the word “beautiful” again. “It’s just true.”

She stared at him. Her hands stayed still, holding his shirt. The wet fabric dripped into the metal sink.

He shouldn’t have said it at all. Saying it with his shirt off just made it worse. Why not unbutton his fly while he was at it?

He grabbed for something to change the subject to, but everything he landed on made it worse. The pattern on her dress. How the ends of her hair had gotten in the way, and were wet from the tap. Her hands working the fabric of his shirt in a way that made him wish he was still in it.

She wrung out his shirt and handed it to him. “Just hang it up. It should be good.” She put the club soda and the other half of the lemon in the fridge. The citrus smell made the air feel thin and clean.

He had to leave. Standing there with the wet shirt in his hands would make him look even more comme un con than he already felt.

You’re beautiful. It’s just true. His own words hovered in the air like dragonflies. Even when he went out the back door to hang up his shirt, he could hear the humming of their wings. He had no way of knowing if she wanted to swat them away or open her hands to let them land.

Pájaro viejo no entra en jaula.

An old bird is difficult to catch.

“Lace.”

Lace woke first to Clémentine’s voice, then to the pain in her arms.

“Lace.”

Clémentine held her hands, stopping her from clawing her own skin.

Lace sat up. She remembered the dream of that cotton-candy sky, how it fell, scalding everything.

“You’ve scratched yourself open,” Clémentine said.

A few dots of blood speckled Lace’s sleeves. Clémentine tried to roll them up, but Lace pulled her hands away.

“You should clean those.” Clémentine handed Lace the things she needed to shower.

Hot water still hurt. It drummed heat into Lace’s back, scratched at her cheek. It came on like the sting of touching dry ice. It made her brace her hands on the wall tile.

So she flipped the shower to cold and shivered under the tap. Beads of water clung to her body, icing her back and her breasts. The chill stayed, her lungs and heart cooling like fruit in the aguas frescas .

The sound of the water made her think of Cluck’s voice, him saying, “You’re beautiful” under the soft rush of the kitchen faucet. She wished, as hard as she wished for her skin to heal and close, that she’d been looking at him when he said it. His face would’ve told her what those words meant. If he felt sorry for her, or if wondering what might have happened in the front seat of the truck, absent his cousins’ laughter, bothered him as much as it bothered her.

A shudder rattled through her as she dried off and pulled on her clothes. Dresses only, as long as she was here. No more skirts and tops. If her shirt rode up in the back, her escamas might show.

She did her makeup the way Nicole taught her. A thin layer, then another. Then blush, lip color. Her hair soaked the back of her dress, sticking it to her skin. She balled it up to pin it on her way down the hall.

The sound of coughing startled her. Her hands opened, and whips of her wet hair hit her back.

She followed the sound farther into the hall. It had the deep, hollow echo of a hard cough. She could hear it starting and ending in the lungs, pinching the heart and pressing against the rib cage.

Lace found the room the coughing came from. The wooden door was cracked, letting her see the old man standing among the mismatched furniture. A plain bed and a dresser with vine-shaped carvings along the edges. Yellowing doilies on everything. A wooden bead rosary dripped off the nightstand.

He held a white handkerchief to his mouth, the cough shaking his body.

Lace had exchanged few words with Cluck’s grandfather. The night she’d started with the show, Eugenie had introduced her to Alain Corbeau, who’d made a “Hmm” sound that was not quite a greeting but not quite disapproval either.

The strings of globe lights hadn’t shown how much Cluck took after him. But now, with daylight filling this room, she would’ve bet her new tail that Cluck would look just like him in fifty years. They both had the same tint to their forearms, brown, but not like Lace’s family. That brown had the gray thread of an ashwood tree, more silver than olive.

Both had that same dark hair too, worn a little long. Gray streaks lightened the old man’s, but he still had plenty of black left.

The old man lowered the handkerchief from his mouth. The linen came away blood-speckled, like the flecks of brown on a robin’s egg.

The difference between Cluck and the old man was more than age. It was the way, when the old man realized Lace was there, his eyes caught the light a little more sharply.

“Are you okay?” Lace asked.

“This is the last time I let my daughter give me one of her sleeping pills,” he said. “This morning I was so foggy I tried to brush my teeth with my razor.” He forced a smile. It started out kind, then twisted, wry and wary, when Lace didn’t return it.