The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore Page B

palms. “What’s happened here?”
    Cluck kept his head down. The girl shooing him out of the room, calling him gitano, had stuck him with the feeling that taking her from the woods was some awful thing he’d done. He didn’t want Pépère knowing about any of it.
    “It’s from getting my shirt off,” Cluck said. He didn’t have to lift his head to know his grandfather’s stare was on him. He felt it like a draft through a window. “The reaction with the cotton.”
    Pépère gripped his forearm tighter. “I have never in your life given you reason to lie to me.”
    Cluck felt the words on his shoulders, sure as hands. His grandfather had taught him everything about feathers. Remiges for flight, retrices for balance. And it was thanks to Pépère that Cluck had learned to work with the fingers he had. Nine years ago, his left hand had been so broken, he couldn’t do anything with it. He learned to use his right, buttoned his shirts with it, forced out messy writing. It felt backward as putting a shoe on the wrong foot, but he did it. His fingers healed into a half-fist and grew restless, charged like the static on a metal knob. They wanted to work. But under Dax’s eye, and his mother’s, he couldn’t let them.
    When Pépère found him in the Airstream one night, his right fingers fighting with a needle and thread, he set a hand on his shoulder and said, “Use your left, boy.” Cluck had hesitated, sure it was a trick, but his grandfather took the needle from his right hand and slipped it between his left thumb and forefinger, the only two digits on his left hand that weren’t stuck curled under. “ Notre secret, ” Pépère had said, shutting the trailer door. Our secret .
    Cluck had no right to lie to the man who kept his secrets.
    “There was this girl,” Cluck said. “She was out there.”
    Pépère let go of his forearms. “A girl.”
    “She had on a cotton dress. My hands made it out better than she did.”
    Pépère ’s eyes looked dark as palm ash. “You took off her dress?”
    “As much as I could, yeah.”
    His grandfather let out a breath and put a hand to his temple. “The people here, they think things about us.”
    Cluck didn’t need reminding. It was enough that they were performers, that they traveled from town to town. But a few of them, like Cluck and Pépère, stood out worse, a different kind of dark than the people around here were used to.
    “If you touch a girl in this town,” Pépère said, “it doesn’t matter why, people will talk.”
    “You think I should have left her there?” Cluck asked.
    “I think you should have told me. Then at least I’d know what you’d gotten yourself into.”
    “I haven’t gotten into anything,” Cluck said.
    But Pépère was already halfway out the door.
    Cluck’s stomach felt tight as a coil of wire. His grandfather was the one person he couldn’t take disappointing. To everyone but Pépère, Cluck was nothing more than the red-streaked semiplumes that grew under his hair. A poor substitute for flight feathers. Dax was a primary remex, long, straight, showing. Cluck was a lesser covert feather, hidden, structural. Or an afterfeather, the downy offshoot branching from the central vane.
    Needed but easy to forget.
     
    Boca de miel, corazón de hiel.
    Mouth of honey, bitter heart.
    The other sirenas would say not to go, that she’d get herself killed. That family would peck Lace to death like the crows they were, or turn her whole body to black feathers.
    But the only way to escape the exile of the gitano boy’s hands was to face them. Justin, Alexia, and her brother had made their apology, broken free of the curse that stolen Camargue colt brought on them. As long as the Corbeau boy didn’t realize she was a Paloma, she could do the same.
    The feather burn wouldn’t heal on its own. She couldn’t wait it out. She needed the boy who’d made it. She needed to show enough remorse, enough fear and reverence for the strength of