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

the end of her tail.
    Lace doubled her body over and felt at the fin. Her hands found not just river roots, but tangles of slick threads.
    The nylon of a fishing net.
    The Corbeaus. They hadn’t put a net in the water since what happened to Magdalena. But tonight they’d left one in the river for Lace and her cousins.
    She pulled at her tail. The fin stayed. The net had balled and wrapped around her, holding her to the colander. She twisted and swam, but the roots and the net only gave enough to let her fight.
    A string of bubbles slipped from Lace’s lips, the last air she had left. The dark water turned to stripes of light. Red like the Cheerwine in the liquor store refrigerator case. Green as lime soda. Electric blue like the Frostie bottles.
    She’d been taught to protect her tail like it was as much part of her body as those little girls thought. But now its weight and its trailing fabric were killing her.
    She braced for ripping the fabric to hurt, and tore the fin in half. The tail split up the side. She kicked out of the river roots. The empty tail dangled from the colander, leaving her naked except for the fake pearls of her costume top. She floated toward the surface like a bubble.
    Her grandmother would wring her neck for leaving her tail, but not as hard as she would if Lace washed up dead. A mermaid drowned in the North Fork. What would that do to their ticket sales? Abuela would use every yerba buena in her suitcase to bring Lace back to life just so she could kill her again.
    The net came with her, caught on her fingers. The threads, aqua as a swimming pool, almost glowed in the dark water, this awful thing like the one that nearly killed Lace’s cousin.
    She shook the nylon threads off, and they sank back toward the river roots.
    Lace surfaced to the noise of far-off screaming, and a long call like a tornado siren. Louder than her gasping. Louder than her coughing. Louder than her sucking the air from the dark.
    Her half-drowned brain fizzed at the edges, making her hear things. She got her breath back and shook her head to clear it all.
    But the screaming stayed. So did the siren’s yell. She rubbed her eyes and temples, circling her bare legs to tread. She pressed behind her ears to clear the water. But the noises kept on, joined by a thrumming through the ground. A whole town running at once.
    She lifted her head to the sky, a shade of blue from dark.
    A cloud swirled over Almendro, so thick it seemed made of liquid. It looked deeper as it moved, solid as water. Tilting her head up made her dizzy with wondering if it too held a current and tangles of roots, a mirrored river banding the sky.
     
    Qui vivra verra.
    He who lives will see.
    It took Cluck ten seconds to get up the cottonwood. He didn’t even have to paint iodine solution on the soles of his feet the way his cousins did. Climbing had turned his rough as bark.
    The moon looked wedged between the hills, yellow as tansy buttons. It got free and rose, paling. He could almost make out the ringing of distant glass chimes, the show’s only music.
    Then sound broke the sky open. The moon shuddered. The siren’s first scream filled the dark, turning the stars to needles. It grew, spreading out from the plant like air thinning a balloon’s skin.
    Cluck put his hand to the tree’s trunk and steadied himself. His heartbeat clicked in his ears. Another drill. By now, Almendro had gotten used to them. When Cluck’s grandfather worked as a safety engineer, the plant ran drills more than regulations mandated. Now they just blared the sirens to make the plant sound compliant, while telling employees to ignore the noise and keep working.
    The ground wavered like a pond’s surface. The porcelain vines flickered with life, lit up with the chatter of small creatures. Sparrows flitted to their nests. He made out the dark shapes of wild rabbits and prairie voles darting into burrows. Squirrels scratched up trees. Two stray cats slipped into a hollow trunk,