Sandra Arnold lives in New Zealand. She is the author of five books including The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell, Mākaro Press, NZ; Soul Etchings, Retreat West Books, UK; and Sing no Sad Songs, Canterbury University Press, NZ. Her novella-in-flash The Bones of the Storywill be published in the UK by Impspired Books in mid-2023. Her short fiction has been widely published and anthologised and has received nominations for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize.  She has a PhD in Creative Writing from  Central Queensland University, Australia.

Peacock feathers

Rainbow is a tense child. Everybody says so. Therefore she knows it must be true. She knows how she tenses up in her father’s presence, and at school in the presence of teachers and other children. She knows that the only time she doesn’t feel tense is when she feeds her pet magpie, Magic Flight, whom she rescued when he fell from his nest and a cat got his mother.

            Rainbow’s favourite time of day is when she can sit on the grass with Magic Flight on her shoulder, watching the clouds scudding across a sky so blue it makes her long to fly into all that blueness with Magic Flight on her back. At those times she blinks like her father says normal people blink. When she goes back in the house after feeding Magic Flight, she closes the door without patting it top and bottom three times. But if her father is home she blinks in the way he hates and that she can’t help and she pats the door three times top and bottom and the more he ridicules her and tells her people will think she is mentally deficient, the more she feels compelled to blink and pat. She always hopes he won’t notice. But he always does.  

            On her way home today Rainbow knows the school reports have been posted. She knows her father will be sitting in his chair waiting for her. As she trails up to the front door, lining one foot precisely in front of the other, her blinking is fast and furious. She does the patting of the door on the outside so her father won’t see. He looks up as she closes the door behind her. He is holding her report. His face is blood red. His eyeballs bulge. His voice is fast and furious.

            When he runs out of steam she slips out the door and runs over to the hay shed where Magic Flight will be waiting for her. She’ll feed him and they’ll sit on the grass. He’ll tell her about his day and sing to her. Her heart will stop thumping. Her hands will stop shaking. Her eyes will stop their frantic blinking.

            The hay shed door is open. She knows she closed it this morning. She calls the bird’s  name. She knows he’ll hear her voice and come swooping back from wherever he’s gone so he can greet her. She calls and calls, but he doesn’t appear. She runs around the field, calling and whistling. By night he still hasn’t returned. She knows she knows she knows he wouldn’t just leave her. She trudges home in the dark and opens the front door. Her father is in his chair reading the paper. He avoids her eyes. She stares at him. He doesn’t look up. And she knows.

            Next day at school she sees some peacock feathers on the nature table. Some with blue eyes at their tips, some with green. She picks up all the feathers with green eyes and holds them in front of the window, moving them this way and that, watching them shimmer and shine. She remembers her grandmother telling her a long time ago that when her mother was a child they lived near a wildlife park and her mother loved feeding the peacocks there so she could marvel at the eyes at the tips of their feathers and the rainbows threading their tails. ‘When you were born,’ her grandmother said,  ‘and she saw the colour of your eyes, she knew what your name had to be.’

            Rainbow’s father makes her leave school at the end of the year, saying education is wasted on her. He makes her find a cleaning job and says that’s all she is fit for. She has to turn the money for that job over to him, but she hides the money from two other cleaning jobs she does at night and a gardening job she does on weekends. She saves that money until she has enough to rent a derelict cottage by a lake, far from her father’s house. She repairs the cottage and makes it livable and builds a large pen in the garden. She buys two peacocks, a male and a female and brings them home in the back of her truck. She feeds the birds each day before she works in her garden planting vegetables to sell at the local market.

             She talks to the peacocks through the wire of their pen and they talk back to her. She loves doing this while the sun shines on their feathers and she tells them the story her grandmother told her about how she got her name. She tells them that when it is safe to let them out she will open the door and they can roam over the land by the lake. But the first time she opens the door the male swoops over her head and flies high into the sky. When Rainbow returns from searching for him she sees the pen is empty. The female has gone too, over the top of the closed pen.

            Six weeks later, her neighbour returns from visiting his daughter in Australia and rings her to say the peahen is in his pigsty with three chicks. He didn’t know they were there until his dog kicked up a fuss so could she please come round and collect them.

            The neighbour helps Rainbow carry the chicks back to her hayshed. The peahen follows them and settles on the hay with her three chicks beside her. Next morning when Rainbow goes out to feed them she finds the chicks still lying in the same place on the hay, lifeless. The peahen has not put them under her wing the way Rainbow thought she would. She concludes she is not the best person to take care of peacocks. Her neighbour finds her crying by the pen and tells her he knows a woman whose peahen has died and she’s looking for a mate for her peacock.

            When Rainbow arrives back home after delivering the peahen to her neighbour’s friend, she sees her answer machine’s red light blinking as fast and furious as her eyes used to blink. She listens to a message from her cousin telling her that her father is dying and he wants to see her.

            Rainbow walks down to the lake and watches the sun strike the water. She lies on the grass and watches birds fly across the sky. She remembers Magic Flight. She remembers the feel of his warm, soft feathers. She remembers his songs and the different ways he told her he loved her.

            Early next morning Rainbow collects peacock feathers from her shed. She holds them up and watches them glow in the early morning light. She takes the feather with the brightest green eye at the tip and lays it on the passenger seat of her truck. Then she climbs behind the wheel and drives all day to her father’s house. She parks outside, climbs out of the truck and picks up the peacock feather. She leaves it in her father’s mailbox, climbs back into her truck and drives away.