Feathers: Chapters 1–7

And he was skinny too. Tall and skinny with white, white hands hanging down below his coat sleeves. Skinny white neck showing above his collar. Brown corduroy bell-bottoms like the ones I was wearing.

Sean smiled and shook his head. You’re a fool, he signed to me. The word doesn’t have feathers. It’s a metaphor.

My grandmother always said Mama had the gift of gab and that I inherited it.

My grandmother always said Mama had the gift of gab and that I inherited it.

I thought of myself as more of a listener than a talker. Except with stuff like math and science and geography.

“It’s the nineteen seventies,” I said. “Not the fifties. There’s no more segregation, remember?”

Maribel was Rayray’s cousin on his daddy’s side, but the only resemblance between them was they both had really smooth brown skin.

I flinched a little bit. It was no good when people said things like you deaf or something. My brother was deaf and deaf was something.

We had everything we needed on this side—huge supermarkets like Bohack when you have to do the big family shop once a week, tiny old Tanks store when you were last-minute desperate for something like high-priced milk.

He slouched down in his seat and just about disappeared into that big shirt.

“People starving,” Samantha said, ignoring me and counting off her fingers.
“Dust bowl. Depression,” I said, counting off my own.

“Jesus wandered the earth that same way—looking for a place where he could be accepted. How surreal is that?”

Samantha looked at me. “Yeah—but if Abigail Francesca Wright Barnes cried, it wouldn’t get put into a book that millions of billions of people would read.”
“Maybe it would. If I did it in front of the right person at the right time. I could be inspiring. Maybe not a whole lot of people know me now, but—”

That night, we found out that she’d had a baby growing but the baby wasn’t thriving.

She’s supposed to be all better, I signed, slinking down against the wall.