The Weight of Feathers

“The spring in Weeki Wachee was colder than this,” Abuela said. “Seventy-two degrees.”


A shiver of excitement crossed Lace’s escamas whenever Abuela talked about Weeki Wachee. In that little spring-fed town, Abuela had performed with a dozen other women in ruched elastane. Playing to the aquarium glass built into the side of the spring, they combed their hair with carved conch shells, chased each other’s spangled tails, kissed sea turtles. They smiled underwater without making bubbles, something Lace practiced in every motel pool from Magalia to Lake Isabella.

In a little more than a year, she’d be there, sharing the spring with wild manatees, swimming in the town that made her grandmother a famous beauty.

The Paloma sirenas weren’t Weeki Wachee mermaids. They didn’t perform in front of plate glass. They were less like circus girls and more like the world’s tallest thermometer (134 feet, for the record high in Baker, California), mechanical dinosaurs made out of scrapped car parts and farm equipment (Lace and Martha snuck off to see them in Cabazon), or the world’s largest concrete lemon (ten feet long, six feet wide, five miles outside El Cajon).

But the real tourist trap was the Corbeaus’ show. Lace had never seen it herself, but from what Justin told her, all the Corbeaus did was climb trees with wings on their backs. At least the Paloma mermaids were quick, darting through the water, dancing in the drowned forest. Vanishing and reappearing.

“They want to work to see you,” Abuela reminded them. “Don’t start la danza too early. You let them find you first. They find you, they feel smart.”

“Half of them are here for a festival about a berry,” Lace said as she fixed Martha’s smudged lipstick. “How smart can they be?”

Abuela stood over Lace, her shadow great as a jacaranda tree. “You make them feel smart. You make them feel special, or you’re not doing your work. ?Entiendes?” She looked around at Lace’s cousins. “All of you. You understand?”

“Sí, Abuela,” they murmured.

Abuela turned back to Lace. “?Entiendes?”

Lace did not round her shoulders the way Martha or Reyna did when Abuela looked at them. She kept her back straight.

“Sí, Abuela,” Lace said, barely parting her teeth. Always Abuela, never Abuelita.

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.