Anna-Marie McLemore: The Weight of Feathers

Emilia— Abuela called her la sirena aguamarina —leaned toward Lace. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “That’s a good sign. The day she starts calling you fat and saying your poses are sloppy is the day she’s decided you’re one of us.”

Emilia would know. Her hair glittered with strands of paillettes and river pearls that marked her as a lead mermaid. She swam in last, perched in the center of those sunken trees, posed for tourists. But when she first joined, it was months before Abuela even let her choose her own tail, a blue-green like Colorado turquoise.

They all wore tails bright as tissue paper flowers. Butter yellow. Aqua and teal. The orange of cherry brandy roses. The flick of their fins looked like hard candy skipping across the lake.

Lace’s own, pink as a grapefruit, branded her as the youngest, in her first season. Same with her hair, loose, no decorations. At the end of this season she’d earn a gold-painted shell or a strand of beads. Then another every season after. When the light hit Martha’s wet hair, sequins shimmered like constellations. Reyna and Leti wore clusters of shells at their hairlines. Her older cousins had so many strands clipped in that their hair looked made of paillettes.

They used those same plastic coins, sheer as beach glass, to cover their birthmarks. Their escamas were not some spectacle to be displayed in the show. Apanchanej, the river goddess who had blessed them with their love for water, had given them these marks, and they were not to flaunt them. Lace had barely gotten the high school equivalency all Paloma girls had to earn to join the show when Abuela filled her hands with paillettes and told her, “I don’t care if you have three GEDs. You cover your escamas, or you don’t swim.” So every sirena did, even though the waterproof glue made their skin itch.

Lace touched up her cousins’ cream eye color, fixed the pins in their hair, and then slipped into her own tail.

“Don’t let the water keep you, la sirena rosa, ” Tía Lora whispered.

The sun turned the trees to fire and gold, and Abuela called them to their places. Lace’s uncles sold their aguas frescas to the audience at the lakeside. Mothers charged their camera flashes. Fathers held video recorders, speaking the year and month and panning across the lake. Children held up plastic binoculars, seesawing the focus bars. Couples soaked up the light off the water and the fever of looking for mermaids.

The stretch of river Lace’s grandmother had her swimming from ran through deep woods, the edge of where the Corbeaus would set up their show.

“But you are a good girl,” her grandmother said. “So you will not go into the woods.” A statement and a warning. ¿Sí, mija? ¿Verdad?

Lace clutched an algae-slick rock and listened for the hollow whistle of her uncles’ zampoñas . To start the show, three of them blew into the long pipes. The arundo reed gave back clean, full sounds. Those thin walls meant louder notes, but only a few of her uncles knew how to hold them without snapping the pipes.

“ Los turistas are gullible, huh?” they said as they warmed up the zampoñas . “They think we can call mermaids with these things.”

But it added to the show’s mystery, one man, silent and sun-weathered enough to look wise, standing on a near bank, two others in the trees across the lake, where the audience could spot them. All three played those wooden pipes, fastened with strips of cane and braided bands, the notes long and steady as their breaths.

Lace kept listening for the deep call of the arundo wood. Tangled river roots gave the air the scent of cool earth. It mixed with the tart fruit of the aguas frescas .

She took the deep breaths she’d need to stay under. The tail was heavy, and if she didn’t have the air to kick against it, it pulled her down.

A few low trees shivered. A handful of night birds scattered. Lace crossed herself, like her mother told her, to keep away feathers.

The silhouettes of branches trembled in the fading light.

“Hello?” Lace called out, but the wind choked the sound.

She ducked behind a rock, ready to dive into the current. She’d never been quick on her feet, but she could swim away so fast anyone would think she was a trick of the light, the flicker of a candle in a glass jar. Half her job was disappearing.

The branches parted, and a pair of enormous wings emerged from the woods. Their shape stood black against the sky. They loomed over the bank. A few more steps, and their shadow would find Lace. If the wearer brought them down, they could crush her. The Corbeaus’ magia negra would harden them into flint.

The feathers vibrated with all the evil that family carried. These crows had left Lora Paloma nothing. There were reasons a flock of crows was called a murder.

Lace waited for the figure to click his back teeth like the rattle of a comb call. If she let him, he’d get those teeth into her, his bite sharp as a beak.

The water grew colder against Lace’s back. She peered around the rock, looking for the frame of a Corbeau man big enough to make the trees shrink away from him.

Her breasts stung from the chill. The current pulled at her hair. She’d only ever seen pictures of the Corbeaus’ wings, all those feathers fastened to arched wire. They were wide as a hawk’s span, so tall she wondered how the wind didn’t tip them.

They twitched on the back of their wearer.

Lace squinted into the dark, making out the body attached to these wings.

It wasn’t a man, but a woman, smaller than the shortest of Lace’s cousins. How did she stand up against wings that size?

She stumbled, lost or drunk. Her feet grazed where Lace had hidden her dress in the undergrowth.

The woman tripped on the underbrush, and her hand bumped her lips. A smudge of red-orange came off on her thumb and forefinger.

She pinched her fingers, making the imprint of her mouth move. She laughed at her own hand.

Then she noticed Lace.

She turned her head and took in the pink of Lace’s tail, the matching cream eye shadow, the plum-red lipstick.

The woman’s stained fingers froze in the air, a tethered balloon.

“Ah, ouais ?” she asked, as though Lace had said something.

Her hair was cut to her chin, with thick bangs, like the girls in Martha’s old postcards. By the light of the candles Lace’s father left burning in glass jars, it looked orange like flowering quince. Her crown of flowers and leaves reminded Lace of fruit topping a tarta .

She was iced as a cake, her eye shadow the mauve of new lilacs. Painted wings spread from the bridge of her nose across her eyelids and temples. Rhinestones glinted at the corners of her eyes. The blue and bronze peacock feathers on her back rippled like wheat. Not the black ones Lace and her mother kept finding. Those, her cousins swore, grew from their heads like hair, another mark of el Diablo .

Lace’s fingers dug into the rock. She and this woman could tear each other’s hair out. Lace could scratch at those feathers. The woman could wade into the river and shred the soft fabric trailing from Lace’s fin.

Lace could take off her costume top and swing it at the woman. The scallop shells and fake pearls would leave her lip bloody.

She didn’t.

If the woman pulled a wire loose from her wings, she could put Lace’s eye out.

She didn’t.

Lace slid down into the water.

The woman backed toward the woods until the tree shadows swallowed her whole.

On ne marie pas les poules avec les renards.