Read Online The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore - Free Book Online Page B

twirling it in her hand, her mother had grabbed it from her small fingers so hard Lace braced for her mother to slap her. Instead, her mother told her about the awful thing Lace had not yet been alive to see.
    The Corbeaus had meant the accident twenty years ago to ruin the Palomas’ stretch of river, spoiling their stage and killing as many of them as they could. All at once the slow, steady current had grown turbulent, like there was a storm under the surface. Loose branches stabbed through the water. Sudden rapids tumbled in from the lake. The Corbeaus had wanted the sirenas trapped in the river’s root tangles like figurines in snow globes.
    The mermaids had all escaped those waters, rough as a wild sea. And the Corbeaus’ own magia negra had turned on them. They did not love the water, so they could not control it. The lake rushed up onto its beaches, and the grove of shoreline trees where the Corbeaus held their own shows went into the water, pulled in quick as if the current had grabbed them by the roots.
    Tía Lora’s husband was swept into the lake with those trees and drowned.
    Lace opened her eyes, the lids heavy and swollen. The light made her forehead pulse, like having her hair pulled.
    The nurse’s lilac eye shadow matched her scrubs. She wrote on her clipboard, the cap of her pen chewed like a licorice stick.
    One corner of a ceiling panel lifted away from its frame, just enough to let in a black feather. Lace watched it dip and rise. It spun down and landed on the back of her hand. She brushed it away. It slipped off the sheet and through the guardrail.
    But another fell.
    “See?” she asked the nurse, but the nurse didn’t see.
    Lace shook it off, but two more fell, then six more, then a dozen, until there was no more ceiling. Only a sky made of black feathers, brushed with the red of candy apples. Red glaze made of the same sugar as that cotton candy sky.
    She screamed. Her screaming made another nurse appear, this one all blue. She came with a needle and a vial and a bag of water. Lace looked for the goldfish in the bag of water, but they’d forgotten the goldfish.
    Lace said so. She told them they needed to bring back the bag of water and the candy apples and the cotton candy. Give it all back for a bag of water with a goldfish.
    “Did you hear me?” Lace asked. “They forgot the fish. They didn’t give you the fish.”
    But there was still no goldfish, and the feathers kept falling.
    Drowsiness settled over her. Her weight fell against the bed. Her eyes shut without her shutting them, like a doll tipped backward.
    Her pulse ticked under her skin, like a watch under tissue paper.
    She was the fish, raw and sliced. The bag of water was for her.
     
    Qui trop embrasse mal étreint.
    Grasp all, lose all.
    A nurse stopped in the doorway, hand on the frame. “You been here all night?”
    “No,” Cluck said. Another nurse had sent him home around one in the morning, promising, “We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.” So he’d gone back to the trailer and changed his clothes. It took him fifteen minutes to get his pants off. Thanks to the adhesive, the linen took half the hair on his legs.
    He’d come back with a milk bottle full of Indian paintbrush, bachelor buttons, a burst of wild roses. It had taken the better part of an hour to find flowers the adhesive hadn’t ruined, ones low enough to the ground that taller stalks had shielded them. On the walk back to the hospital, Cluck had almost stepped on a tourist’s Polaroid, left on the side of the road. The hot adhesive had burned through the film. Except for a corner of sky, the image never developed.
    The nurse stepped into the room. “Visiting hours aren’t until eight, you know.”
    “I can hide in the supply closet until then if you want,” he said.
    She chuckled and joined him at the window. Cluck parted the blinds. It bothered him how much Almendro looked the same as it had yesterday. If he didn’t look too close, he