Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Lace took off her dress and twisted to look at her escamas, jeweling her lower back like coins of water. Each one was round, the size of a dime, raised a little like a mole. They shone like the cup of an abalone shell. A sprinkling of scales off a pale fish, a gift from the river goddess Apanchanej .

Las sirenas all had them. Alexia’s spotted the back of her neck. Sisters Reyna and Leti wore theirs on opposite shoulder blades.

Martha was lucky. Hers encircled her lower calf like an anklet, hidden by the costume tail. Any paillettes she wore were for decoration.

Lace sank down on her side of the bed. Her skirt fluffed, and a wisp of black wafted out. She pinched the air and caught it between her fingers. A feather, dark as obsidian, streaked with the red of wine and pomegranate seeds. She’d never seen one like it, with all that red.

The color turned her throat sour. It made her lower back prickle. If it brushed her birthmarks, it might make each one peel away like a scab.

She took the feather out to the parking lot, struck a match from one of the motel books, and lit it. The fire ate through the plume. She let it fall to the ground and then stamped it out until it crumbled to ash.

Entre l’arbre et l’écorce il ne faut pas mettre le doigt.

Don’t put your finger between the tree and the bark.

Cluck watched his grandfather lean an elbow out of the Morris Cowley’s driver’s side window. The wind from the highway made the end of his cigarette glow.

“Those things’ll kill you, you know,” Cluck said.

“So will the things they eat in this country,” Pépère said. The soda in the liquor store horrified Alain Corbeau, those colors bright as neon tubes. He thought Kraft Singles contained, within a few square inches, all American evils. His career at the adhesive plant had only strengthened his belief that chemicals belonged on the flaps of envelopes and between layers of pressboard, not in the stomach.

Cluck laid two new peacock feathers out on the dashboard, both pale as swans’ wings, thanks to a recessive allele. Leucism. It left nothing but white, and the faintest flashes of sunrise colors if the light hit the barbs the right way.

Locals swore the white peacock of Elida Park was a myth, no more real than a green flash at dusk. But today the bird had dragged his train across the grass and left behind these two perfect tail feathers.

Cluck’s grandfather lifted one off the dashboard. It let off a little blue. “What will you do with them?” he asked.

Cluck held the passenger door handle. Whenever the truck upshifted, its weight pulled on his fingers. The latch was so old that if Pépère sped, it might come unhooked, and the door might fly open. “Same thing I do with the blue ones, I guess.”

His grandfather set the feather down. “Your hard work will never be worn, then. You’ll never catch anyone in this family in white wings.”

Pépère parked the Morris Cowley behind the Craftsman house, their home for the weeks they’d be in Almendro. The plumbing squealed, the floorboards groaned back and forth, and on windy nights, the attic murmured to the second floor.

Cluck didn’t have to hear it though. He slept in the costume trailer, a blue and white 1961 Shasta Compact. It saved his cousins from arguing about who had to sleep in the same room with him, calling not-it like they were still in grade school lessons. To them, his left-handedness and the red in his feathers made him dangerous as a matagot . Worse luck than a black cat brought across a stream. When the family went to church on la veille de Noël or le Vendredi saint, they did not bring him. So Pépère stayed home with him, reading from Luke. “Let them have their Latin and their hosties, ” he told Cluck.

Pépère pointed out the window. “ Regarde .” He lifted his hand toward a flitter of movement. A red-winged blackbird, all dark feathers except for a brushstroke of deep coral on each shoulder, crossed the sky.

This was his way of telling Cluck not to mind the red in his own feathers.

Pépère set the parking break. “I left Eugenie’s wings for you. She tore the right one.”

“Again?” Cluck slammed the door.

“Malheureusement.”

“I’ll get to it.”

First Cluck got the tire pressure gauge from inside the costume trailer. If the Shasta would sit for the show’s run here, he had to make sure the tires weren’t sinking into the ground.

He’d just put the gauge to the front right tire when Dax grabbed him by the back of the neck.

“You just had to go start something, didn’t you?” Dax slammed him against the side of the trailer. He caught a handful of Cluck’s hair, pulling at the back of his scalp.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“Don’t ask me what.” Dax flicked Cluck’s temple. “This.”

Pépère had made Cluck forget the bruising, the soreness. He always made him forget, no matter who gave him the bruise. Locals. Dax. His mother, when he was small, catching him in the eye with her elbow and then telling him “ Le petit imbécile, stay out of my way.”

“You went to start a fight,” Dax said.

The smell of Dax’s aftershave dried out Cluck’s mouth, his tongue a parched sponge.

“I didn’t start anything,” Cluck said.

“Then where’d you get this?” Dax pressed him into the aluminum siding so hard the ridges cut across his body.

“Some guys in town,” Cluck said.

“What guys?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Dax pulled him off the side of the trailer enough to slam him into it again.

Cluck held himself up, but didn’t fight. “I don’t know.” A metal seam pressed into his cheek.

“If you went to settle the score, you better tell me now.”

“What?” was all Cluck could get out.

“Don’t go near them.” Dax held him harder, wringing out the muscle at the back of his neck. “Got it?”

“Who?” Cluck turned his head.

The rage in Dax’s face shifted, the edges ground down.

He loosened his grip, dropped his hand. “You don’t know.”

The back of Cluck’s neck cooled.

“They’re in town,” Dax said. “That family.”

That family .

The Palomas were already here. They came back every year, never any guilt. Because of them, Clémentine’s oldest brother had lost his first wife twenty years ago. Cluck had heard stories about her, the woman with so much grace on the highest branches none of them could believe she had no fildefériste blood.

La magie noire the Palomas carried in their birthmarks had taken her.

The Palomas meant for every performer to die, drowned with those branches when the water flooded up onto its shores. All to steal the lake they thought belonged to them. It was only by the grace of God that the rest of the Corbeaus managed to swim against the pull of their own wings, scramble onto rocks, claw at the shore.

The Palomas lost one of their own too, a man who must have been at the lake to draw the water onto the land, la magie noire ready in his hands. But the Palomas still set up their show where the trees had been, on that man’s grave and the grave of a Corbeau.

Cluck’s family moved to the other side of the woods, as far as that stretch of forest would let them get from a family that danced where one of their own had died.

Cluck’s neck prickled to hot again. This was where the Palomas had ruined their grandfather. And every year they came back to rub it in.

“Does Pépère know?” Cluck asked.

“Since when is it my job to tell him?” Dax shoved him, this time to let him go. “You swear the fish didn’t do that to you?”