“There’s something I want to show you,” he said, counting them again, this constellation of moons glowing under her skin.
Árbol que nace torcido, jamás su tronco endereza.
A twisted tree will not grow straight.
Cluck took her right ankle in his hand. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”
His hair was still wet with river water. It dampened his shirt collar, graying the white cloth.
Lace’s soaked the back of her dress, turning the thin fabric cold. Her dress was a little like the one the adhesive rain ruined, off-white, saffron-colored flowers instead of blue. She was already forgetting the lost one. The details were falling away. How many petals the blue flowers had. Whether the agua de jamaica stain that stayed, stubborn, through so many washes was on the right sleeve or the left.
Tía Lora had made them both. Missing her clutched at Lace.
Now that she thought of her great-aunt, the act of showing herself to Cluck Corbeau in nothing but her tail felt like a betrayal. With her costume top gone, Lace hadn’t known what to wear on top—a bra? The camisole she slept in? So she’d just worn the tail, and the way Cluck looked at her made her feel brave and sure, like his stare was covering her so no one else could see her.
Cluck soaked a brush in a dish of iodine. It smelled like nail polish remover, salt, balsamic vinegar left out too long. Lace’s stomach tightened. Smells like that no longer reminded her of painting her nails, but of the solvents they used on her in the hospital, the morphine holding her under. The smell wrapped around her throat.
He ran the brush along the bottom of her foot. The feeling of bristles on her arch made her twitch.
“Sorry,” he said. “You’re ticklish, aren’t you?”
The iodine soaked into her foot, darkening the sole so it was almost as brown as her hair. “What’s this for?”
“It’s good for climbing trees.” He held her other ankle and painted the sole of her left foot. “It seals your skin. Keeps things from getting in, makes you less sensitive to the grain of the bark.”
The night she found him in his tree, the soles of his feet had been pale as his palms, shades lighter than the rest of him. They stood out like the moon. “You don’t use it.”
“I’ve been climbing trees barefoot long enough I don’t need to.” He rinsed off the brush, twisted the iodine bottle shut. “My cousins all do it. It helps with the show.”
The iodine dried, leaving the soles of her feet tight and leathery.
He pulled her to standing. “Close your eyes.”
She did. “Why?”
His fingers brushed her shoulders and set a ribbon against her rib cage. The heel of his hand grazed her right breast, a band of thin satin following after.
Weight pulled on her back. A feather skimmed her neck.
She stopped his hands with hers. “Forget it. I’m not one of your fairies.”
“Trust me, okay?”
“Are you trying to convert me?” She reached back and slapped at him, her hand hitting the thigh of his pants.
He gathered her hair and moved it to her left shoulder. “No.” He fastened the ribbon between her shoulder blades, his fingers warm on her dress. He tied the bow and knotted it. He moved her, turning her waist to lead her. “You can open.”
Even down, the wings filled the mirror’s age-speckled glass. Her sudden breath in felt like taking air after surfacing.
At first the wings looked white as flour-covered feathers. Then the eyespots showed their colors, like the tints of a rainbow. Those after-storm skies were never as bright as children painted them. The light washes, so watered down, didn’t live in crayon boxes. This was where to find them, on the eyes of white peacocks.
A wire wing frame leaned up against the corner of the mirror, clean and bare as a winter tree. This was what Cluck did, making these winter branches, filling them in like there was summer in his hands.
But he always covered them in bronze and blue and green, not the white of frost and the glint of color when the sun hit wet ice.
“Those things on your back are a lot like these feathers, you know,” he said.
“How?” she asked.
“Iridescence.” He kept his hands on her waist. “The way the colors look like they’re changing depending on the angle. It’s all directionality. Polarization of light.” He moved her left hip a little forward, then her right, and the pale colors flashed like light through a prism. “Same as with the blue peacocks. Morpho butterflies, hummingbirds, fish.”
His breath fell on the back of her neck. “The structures are hard to describe optically, because little adjustments to the angle of illumination change what you see.” The wood and water scent he picked up from swimming displaced the vinegar smell of the iodine. “It’s a pain in the ass to study, but it’s the best thing about them.”
She shut her eyes, and listened, her pulse clinging to the spot where his breath heated her neck. Her father’s lessons never would’ve covered anything like this. To him, it wasn’t worth the time. Smart girls didn’t need to know what made some birds shimmer like soap bubbles.
Her father had taken her to the shore at night to look for sea sparkle, those algae blooms glowing like moonstones, but that was different. Noctiluca scintillans lived in the water. Her father taught her about sea sparkle for the same reason he taught her about undertows and wasp jellyfish. Noctiluca scintillans shimmered with its own light, but with the right depth and nutrients, it flared into red tide. She was una sirena, and she should know the water was full of beautiful things that were one moon phase from turning poisonous.
Cluck traced where the ribbons crossed. She didn’t point out that he was using his left hand. If she did, he’d stop.
“Biologically speaking, it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Turning yourself all those colors. Especially if you don’t have a lot of pigment, like white peacocks, or your scales. And you’re more susceptible to damage afterward.” His hand stopped over her escamas.
She opened her eyes and met his in the mirror. The sharp note of arundo reed reached across the woods, warning her that if her birthmarks were not for turistas, they were even less for a gitano boy.
“So my question is,” Cluck said. “Why do you have them?”
His hair smelled like the wet leaves dotting the current.
“Why do you have your feathers?” she asked.
He dropped his eyes from the mirror, his half-smile sad. “You got me there.”
She didn’t mean why were his red instead of all black. She meant what had given his family their plumes, the same as his question about her family’s escamas. They were both birthmarks. His feathers marked him as a Corbeau the way her escamas marked her as a Paloma. The things they wore on their bodies made them as distinct as water and sky.
“Come on.” He took his hands off her back. “I’ll show you how to open them.”
He took her outside and guided her up his favorite cottonwood, holding smaller branches away so the folded wings didn’t snag.
The coat of iodine let her feel the warmth of the ground and the bark but not the texture. When she lost her balance, the ball of her foot slid as Cluck caught her. She braced for the friction, but it didn’t hurt.
Cluck picked a branch he liked, and they stayed. He tied a ribbon to each of her hands, slack loops around her wrists. He held her hands, guiding them away from her body, until the bent wires unfolded, and the wings opened. They cast a translucent shadow on the ground below, like a glass-winged butterfly.
He slid one hand between her back and the wings. “Wings aren’t so different from arms.” He touched her shoulder blades. “This is where the scapula connects to the rest of the body.”