III.
Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk
High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study
hall—Corbin had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the
peacocks, or otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The
route from his house to the school a mile and half away ran along the same
expressway that let onto the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he
approached this turnout, Corbin practiced the first aversion technique Dr.
Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly clenched and released his fists, inhaled
deeply, and held his breath, so that a tingling began to work its way up his
neck. This tingling permitted him to pass the turnout without surrendering to
the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ooOWWw!”
In study hall, Corbin’s eyes wandered from the
“Common Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics
Now! textbook to a poster tacked up on a chalk-dusted corkboard in the
corner. The infographic poster featured an array of Jurassic fossils,
fine-print columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all
orbiting a central meter-tall painting of this interstitial creature. The
painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous; he decided to deploy
the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning
technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the peacocks.
He closed his eyes and imagined that the act of looking at a peacock provoked
hot urine to spread across his crotch, as onlookers snickered. The prickling
dread of this vision pushed him to return to his reading assignment.
By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries
began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were
sufficient anymore to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks. So he
reverted to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache
of peafowl picture files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color
printer once the lab monitor stepped out. He also slipped a pair of steel
sheers from the supply cabinet into his bag. At lunch twenty minutes later, he
crouched on a dirt patch under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement
patio, and laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out covert feathers from
the Grove and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up one of the
pictures, a photo of a peacock perched on a headstone outside a conical Yazidi
shrine, and began cutting around the painted eyes at the tips of its raised
train.
“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice
spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped
cutting. Bending over him was Patricia Foxcroft, a sixteen-year-old sophomore
Corbin had often watched with curiosity from the back of art class. Patricia
had assiduously cultivated an arch goth couture: she wore licorice-black
lipstick; her raven fringe lay straight across her pale forehead, over her
sharply manicured eyebrows; an iron ring dangled from the leather choker around
her neck; the silk laces on her knee-high boots matched those running up the
back of her paisley-overlay corset dress and down her fingerless elbow gloves.
Corbin caught the scent of anise as she knelt next to him and lifted one of his
pictures between her long fingers.
“Peacocks. Love peacocks. Did you know sometimes
the males will fake orgasms with the females to attract more mates?” Patricia asked.
She replaced the picture on the dirt and took up one of the covert feathers.
Corbin opened his mouth to answer but said nothing. Patricia continued,
“Actually, I’m planning on getting a tattoo of one of these, right here.” She
bent the feather into a curl and held it against her bare thigh, above her boot
collar. “What do you think?”
“Um, yeah, that—yeah,” Corbin stumbled.
“I wanted to ask you, your name is Corbin?”
Corbin nodded.
“Good. Well, Corbin, I heard from this bitch Aubrey
that they caught you trespassing in a rich neighborhood, to get at the peacocks
there, like you’re obsessed with them. Is that true?” The edges of Patricia’s
mouth thinned into a smirk as she looked down at him with dark-magenta-rimmed
eyes.
“Um, well, I—”
“Catch!” An object landed with a wet thud on a picture
near Corbin’s knee. Corbin leapt to his feet, gripping the shears about the
screw, when he saw what the object was: a bluebird carcass in the active stage
of decay. It had been pulled up from the damp grass that had grown entwined
with it. A family of sexton beetles scurried out from its ribcage, which was
poking through clumps of ichorous gore and beige tufts. Half a dozen cerulean
feathers remained fluttering from its stiff wings. Ants swarmed in the right
eye socket. Corbin winced from the heavy putrescent odor.
“Oh shit!” Patricia covered her nose and doubled
over laughing in the direction of her friend, Jasmine, who had thrown the
decomposing bird. Jasmine stood a foot shorter then Patricia and wore an
oversized Sex Spiders of Leng t-shirt that hung down to the cuffs of her black
jean-shorts.
“What’s wrong? Don’t you love birds?” Jasmine sneered.
Patricia snorted through her fingers.
Corbin held up the shears. “Stay away,” he warned.
As Jasmine put up her hand in defense, she raked
her palm over the shears’ tip. “Ow! What the fuck?” She showed her scraped
palm to Patricia as it began to bead with blood.
“I—sorry.” Corbin backed away and pinched the
bridge of his nose. His sinciput was stinging again, signaling a return of the
image. He turned and started off sprinting in the opposite direction, back
toward the expressway. He was still gripping the shears, but he had abandoned the
rest of his things at Patricia and Jasmine’s feet.
“Hey, get back here!” Jasmine yelled, but her voice
was already faint in Corbin’s head.
Corbin ran until his chest burned. As he ran, his
feet carrying him instinctively toward his destination, the shears hard in his
hand, he watched, in his mind’s theater, moth-sized snowflakes flutter down
around the peacock perched on the frozen lip of a tiered fountain. The peacock
raised its full fan. It shuddered in its empyreal radiance.
Seven minutes later, Officer Mandy found Corbin face
down in the roundabout. Pinned under his arched torso was a desperately squirming
peacock. She noticed blood on the lawn, in sprayed droplets and trickling rivulets,
near the peacock’s saddle.
Officer Mandy had been jolted awake in the microcar
half a minute prior by savage squawks like none she had ever heard from the
peafowl. She bounded out of the microcar toward the squawks. Most of the other peafowl
were huddled at the edge of the roundabout, poking their heads between the citrus
tree branches to peer out at their distressed comrade under Corbin.
At first it seemed Corbin had attacked the peacock.
When Officer Mandy pulled him over by the shoulder, though, she discovered that
the peacock was gripping his throat with its talons. As soon as the uninjured
peacock yanked its train free, it sprung off Corbin’s chest and took flight in
a low trajectory toward the other peafowl. A slit opened by the peacock’s spur ran
down Corbin’s sternothyroid muscle.
In his internal jugular gaped three puncture holes gouged by the attacker’s
toes. Blood pulsed out of Corbin’s body. Officer Mandy reached for the roll of
gauze in her belt’s trauma kit as she speed-dialed the paramedics on her phone’s
CB handset attachment. While she pressed the damp wad against the wounds and
waited for the ambulance, she noticed Corbin’s shears laying a yard away in the
grass. He had dropped them there before reaching for the peacock.
Corbin would remain in a hemorrhage-induced coma
for the next thirty-one hours. Soon after he awoke, following a successful transfusion,
he was less relieved to learn that he would suffer no long-term impact from his
injuries than he was to find that the urge to visit the peacocks had passed. The
intruding image was gone.
A green peacock is said to have once killed a man
in Bangkok, since a blood clot caused by the head gash it had inflicted
resulted in its victim’s death—and peacocks at public parks have been known to
wound small children and damage vehicles—but in its ferocity, the attack on
Corbin was unique. Not only was the responsible peacock in this case not
euthanized, though, but once identified and fitted with conspicuous bronze anklets,
the residents of Peacock Grove celebrated it as their prized defender. Sir Galahad,
as the peacock was known thereafter, spent its remaining days strutting between
languors among the citrus trees and dips in the tiered fountain and posing for
pictures with adoring residents and their guests, only occasionally charging at
them in truculent fits of wrath.
(c) 1.15.2018
