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

their uncles’ zampoñas , the mermaids swam in from their different spots along the lake and river, like creatures called from faraway grottos.
    They held their breath and took their places in the underwater forest, made of trees the Corbeaus had sunk twenty years ago. This was Abuela ’s greatest triumph, that every time they came to Almendro they used the stage the Corbeaus had built them, the grove the Corbeaus once called their own. Now audiences who sat on the ridge just above the shore could see down to the lake shelf, where the trees locked together into tangles of branches.
    The mermaids treated those branches like a coral reef, settling into the hollows, perching on the edges of submerged boughs. They swam in pairs, then clusters, then each out in a different direction. They circled, then broke away. Their bodies formed the shapes of hearts or stars. They lined up so their tails made a rainbow.
    No canned music. Just the reed pipes and the soft rush of the river emptying into the one side of the lake and flowing out the other. The applause came in bursts, like the mermaids were fireworks blooming into sparks.
    They draped their bodies to look as though they were sunning themselves, even though they were underwater and the light had fallen enough to turn the edges of the lake copper. A few of them dove in and out of the lake like flying fish.
    It was being under that Lace loved most. The lightness of her own body, the water trying to lift her toward the surface. The silhouettes of the underwater trees, like a forest on a fall night. How everything looked blurred like she was seeing it through stained glass. How water that had felt cold when she slid into the river now felt as warm as her own body. Even the sharp sting in her lungs as she swam out of view to take a breath.
    Just as the audience began to believe they were spying on unknowing mermaids, las sirenas looked at them. They swam up to the rocks, hiding and flirting like water nymphs. The tourists caught those flashes of color on camera.
    At the end of la danza de las sirenas, Lace and Martha posed on the steep bank, fanning their tails out on a rock. The trees filtered the last sun, and the sequins lit up like raw quartz. Los turistas left the low cliffs where they’d been watching and took the path down the slope, to the narrow stretch of beach.
    A girl in jelly sandals the color of hibiscus flowers took a few steps toward Lace. Her eyes wavered between the shimmer of Lace’s fin and her painted face.
    “Do you want to touch my tail?” Lace asked, like she was told to, in the voice she’d heard her older cousins use, soft as the whispers of river sprites.
    The girl opened her small hand and stroked the fin, first hesitant as touching a snake, then surer, like petting a cat. To her, the soaked elastane and sequins might feel a little like a mermaid’s scales.
    Their season’s receipts were at the mercy of children and their favorite cuentos de hadas . The Corbeaus called her family’s show kitschy, as artless and plastic as souvenir snow globes. Matías and his brothers had thrown punches when Corbeau men made fun of the bright colors, the glitter, the wide-eyed looks Abuela made the sirenas wear, as though dry land was magic they’d never imagined. But Lace’s mother told her that tourists probably couldn’t even take their children to the Corbeaus’ show. “They’re French,” she said. “I bet they take their clothes off halfway through.”
    When the crowd thinned, and the families left, the mermaids watched Abuela . At her nod, they slid back into the water, smooth as knives. Martha swam toward her far corner of the lake, Lace back to her spot up the river. She kicked down to where the river’s current didn’t pull.
    A shriek like a car alarm echoed through the water.
    Lace startled, losing her rhythm, and the current swept her.
    She spread her arms to swim, but her tail jerked her back.
    Her fin fabric was caught. A colander had gotten