The Weight of Feathers

It was Pépère and Cluck’s job to make getting up there easier. For the climb, the wire frames folded against the performers’ backs like lacewings or stoneflies. Once they reached a high branch, a few tugs on two ribbons or cords opened the feathered span.

Thanks to the width his mother and aunts insisted on, the wings, once open, acted as sails. They caught all wind. If a performer didn’t have the strength and balance to fight the pull, they fell. A generation before Cluck was born, a sudden gust knocked a great-aunt from a silver maple, and she fractured two lower vertebrae. She walked again, but never climbed.

“Don’t worry about my daughter,” Pépère said just when Cluck thought he hadn’t heard him. “She doesn’t like to see you do anything better than her precious vedette de spectacle.” He moved a few trees away to light up a cigarette, far enough that the wind wouldn’t bring the smoke to the audience.

Cluck smiled. Only his grandfather could call Dax the star of the show and make it sound like an insult.

He watched the trees. The performers let themselves be seen, looked as though they meant not to. They leapt onto lower branches. The strongest ones, like his brother, pulled up the lightest ones quick enough to make them look like they were flying. The women danced as if the thin boughs were wide as the sky. The men stood as their partners, lifting them, offering their hands, and hoisting themselves higher up so easily it looked like their wings had done it. The more graceful of his cousins ventured far onto the boughs of valley oaks, their weight bowing the wood.

He would’ve loved to see any Paloma try it.

Cluck’s mother stopped a few steps from him. Every Corbeau, from five-year-old Jacqueline to Cluck’s grandfather, knew her stare was an order, a flight call keeping a flock together.

“You’re slower this year,” she said, a warning, and then left to count ticket receipts.

Cluck put his hands in his pockets and let a long breath out. “No, I’m not,” he said when she’d gotten far enough not to hear him. “I just hate this town.”



Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando.

A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying.

Lace didn’t have to ask why her family had set out for Almendro so early. Abuela wanted to make sure the Corbeaus couldn’t steal the lakeside.

The Corbeaus had held their own shows there twenty years ago, forcing the Palomas to set up along the river. But after the night the water rose up onto the shore and swallowed the Corbeaus’ favorite trees, the Palomas claimed the lake. Those trees, now on the lake floor, were the only ones near the water strong enough to hold the Corbeaus’ bodies and wings. But Abuela still worried that their magia negra could make birches and young magnolias grow big as sycamores.

“Those cuervos should never have taken the lake for themselves when we’re the ones who need the water,” Abuela said. “And now we’ll keep it. I don’t care if it means we come here in February.”

“We’re gonna freeze our asses,” Alexia whispered as the mermaids wriggled into their tails at the river’s edge.

But none of them could blame Abuela. This was the town where the Palomas and the Corbeaus always crossed paths. Sometimes, in other counties, they overlapped for a couple of days, the end of one family’s run coming up against the start of the other’s. But Almendro was their battleground, even before that night at the lake twenty years ago. And if one family didn’t show, the other won by default.

Lace and her cousins slid down the bank, the heat fading with the light. The water felt cold as the first minute of their motel showers. Their skin puckered into gooseflesh. They held their grumbling under their tongues, but their grandmother still sensed it.