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-ow-ow!”
In study hall, Corbin’s eyes strayed from the “Common
Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook
to the 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 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 sight of a peacock compelled
hot urine to spread across his crotch as onlookers snickered. The prickling dread
brought on by this exercise finally 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 image 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 in 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 two covert feathers from the Grove
and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up an image of a peacock
perched on a headstone outside a 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 wistful curiosity from the back of art class. Patricia
assiduously cultivated an arch goth couture: she wore licorice-black lipstick;
her raven fringe lay straight across her pale forehead, above her sharp
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 zigzagging 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 crimson nail-tipped fingers.
“Peacocks. Love peacocks. Did you know that sometimes
the males will fake orgasms with the females to attract more mates?” Patricia
asked as 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
they caught you trespassing in the rich neighborhood to get at the peacocks
there, like you’re obsessed with them. Is that true?” Patricia’s mouth curled
into a smirk as she looked up at him with her dark magenta-rimmed eyes.
“Um, well, I—”
“Catch!” An object landed with a wet thud on the 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 decomposition, pulled up from the damp grass that had grown into it. A
family of sexton beetles scurried out from between the ribs poking through clumps
of congealed gore and beige feather tufts. Half a dozen cerulean feathers remained clinging
to the 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 decaying
bird. Jasmine stood a foot shorter then Patricia and wore an oversized Sex Spiders
of Leng t-shirt that hung over the cuffs of her black jean-shorts.
“What’s wrong? Don’t you love birds?” Jasmine
taunted. Patricia snorted through her fingers.
Corbin held up the shears and warned, “Get back.”
As Jasmine put up her hand in defense, she
raked her palm over the shears’ tip. “Ow! What the fuck?”
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