The Weight of Feathers

“I’m used to it.” Tía Lora turned her face from the window and smiled. Light gilded her brown cheek. “Every year your abuela brings us back here and pretends we can keep the feathers away.”


Lace gave her great-aunt a smile back. A few weeks earlier, Lace’s grandmother had drawn the family’s route on an age-softened map of California, announcing they would set up in Almendro even earlier this year.

Now Abuela sat in the motel parking lot with her coffee, smug smile ready to greet the Corbeaus’ Shasta trailers when they realized the Palomas were already here.

What she was hoping for, waiting out there with her Styrofoam cup of Folgers and powdered creamer, Lace didn’t know. A good brawl, maybe, between the Corbeau men and Lace’s cousins. A shouting match, Abuela screaming in Spanish, Nicole Corbeau shrieking in French.

Either way, her grandmother was disappointed. Lace’s cousin Matías brought her the news that instead of taking a block of rooms at the River Fork, the Corbeaus had rented a run-down house, like they knew the Palomas had gotten ahead of them.

“Where?” Abuela demanded.

Matías told her it was somewhere near the campground, if he could even call it that. Five years ago the state had cut the funding to keep it up. Now it was just a cluster of fire pits, the root growth of porcelain vine and wild roses turning over the earth.

“At least they’ll be out of the way,” Lace said.

Matías folded his arms. “I don’t know what they’re doing. That house is only half as big as they need for all of them.”

“I bet they make their children sleep outside,” Abuela said. “Los gitanos and their trailers.”

Abuela drained the last of her coffee and crushed the cup in her hand. She tossed it over her shoulder, knowing Lace would throw it out.

This was her grandmother’s pride. If she wanted Lace’s father and uncles to make the aguas frescas, she would pelt them with lemons until the mesh bag was empty. Instead of asking for la Biblia from her trunk, her brown, ring-covered hand pointed until the nearest grandchild obeyed.

Lace bent toward the asphalt. If Abuela left her coffee cup on the ground, any Paloma daughter knew enough to pick it up.



Volez de ses propres ailes.

Fly with your own wings.

A knock shook the trailer door.

“Ten minutes,” Cluck said, scrambling to replace a broken wire. During the season, fixing wings was a full-time job. His mother’s qu’il pleuve ou qu’il vente policy meant they performed through every summer storm, rain damaging the feathers and wind warping the frames.

“Five,” his mother said. Her shoes crunched the ground outside.

He tied his hair back. Pépère hated when he did that. He thought ponytails were odd on both boys and girls, something strange and American. He’d fluff the back of Cluck’s hair with his hand and say, “What is this?”

But Pépère was already down at the show site, checking Cluck’s work. Without the wings, there was no show.

Chemical smells blew in through the window. Boiling water. Rusted metal. Hot adhesive in the nearby plant’s mixing tanks. Reminders that his grandfather used to check the temperature and pressure gauges, the pipe-washing logs, the vent gas scrubbers.

That was twenty years ago. Now the plant ran so hot the smell of plastic and ash blew clear to the highway. One day the whole system would overheat and shut down like a fried car engine, his grandfather said. The owners hadn’t replaced the old overflow tank, just to save a hundred thousand dollars. And the plant’s trainings didn’t even cover how workers shouldn’t wear cotton near the tanks. Last year, a pipe burst, and a spray of cyanoacrylate burned through the shin of a man’s jeans.