Free The Weight of Feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore

couldn’t see the adhesive glossing the roof shingles like rubber cement, or the stray cats and dogs, their fur matted with it, or how it frosted cars and mailboxes like drying Elmer’s glue.
    The difference was how the air felt, hot with the faint sense that the smallest noise would make everyone in this town flinch at once. The things that had changed were harder to see than the wilted plants and the tacky sidewalks. The ruptured mixing tank had left three plant workers dead, and a dozen others injured. Every family who relied on paychecks from the plant held their breath still in their lungs. And everyone else kept quiet, stunned by the noise and the rain, afraid to go outside.
    None of it had to happen. None of it would have happened if the Palomas hadn’t ruined Pépère, cost him his job. Cluck’s grandfather was the only man pushing for the plant to run safer, and when they let him go, they dropped his safety procedures one by one in the name of efficiency. When the Palomas wrecked Pépère ’s good name, they destroyed the credibility of all the work he’d done.
    “Did you lose anybody?” Cluck asked the nurse.
    She checked an IV line. “Nobody close.”
    Cluck had heard the nurses talking about some workers’ wives, friends, a few others picketing at the fence, wanting answers. He didn’t have to ask why the plant workers weren’t there too. He could almost hear Almendro pulling at its own seams. Half the town would demand justice, an admission from the plant’s owners, and the other half would beg them to shut up. If the plant pulled out, there were no jobs. So the workers swallowed the last-minute shifts, the blowdown stacks that made the air sting their eyes, the non-regulation safety gear.
    The nurse put her hair back with a rubber band that matched her scrubs. Her nails, that same light purple, clicked against her pen. He couldn’t imagine liking one color that much. Not even the red in his feathers. Especially not the red in his feathers.
    “Try not to get me in trouble,” the nurse said, checking her watch on the way out.
    The girl in the hospital bed ground her teeth in her sleep. The solvents they’d used to get the adhesive off her skin left her rawer.
    Where she’d held her cheek against the sleeve of her dress, she now had a deep red burn in a blurred heart shape.
    She’d probably never know that all of this was the Paloma family’s fault. She’d never know that it started twenty years ago, the night the lake had flooded onto its shores like a creek bed overflowing, and those trees sank straight down like hands had pulled them under. His mother said they disappeared under a surface so calm it must have been la magie noire, the same dark magic that gave the Palomas their scales.
    The Palomas started some rumor that Cluck’s grandfather caused it, that it was some failed experiment, as if his engineering degree had taught him how to make a lake swallow trees. Cluck couldn’t prove they’d started it, but he knew. The rumors had tainted the rest of Almendro like fire blight, and Pépère had lost his job. Now he had to travel with the family, Cluck’s mother and aunts not caring that he might not want to come back to this town.
    One day Cluck would go to school the way his grandfather had. He’d keep things like what happened to this girl from happening to anyone else.
    Maybe his family would cut their run here short because of the accident. Maybe they’d move on, give this town space to stitch itself back together. They could move up their stop in Tuolumne County. They always got plenty of tourists there, and some of the best climbing trees Cluck had ever seen. Sturdy, well-spaced boughs. Full greenery that let the light through like tissue paper. In those branches, his cousins looked like oleander blossoms in a sea of leaves.
    The girl stirred, making noises that could’ve been pain or waking up. He saw the shape of her moving in the windowpane.
    “ Tío Lisandro?” she asked.