Please Tap the Peacock

He has been waiting all morning

He is closed. This is a temporary condition.

Nobody needed this. That is the first true thing about it.

The train is not the tail. The tail is a plain brown fan hidden behind, doing all the lifting, unthanked, holding the whole cathedral up. The train is the hundred-and-some feathers grown out of his back, each ending in an eye that is not an eye, and every spring he grows them again, and every summer he drops the lot in the grass, and every spring he grows them again, and he has never once considered stopping.

And when he opens, he shakes. Twenty-five times a second, the quills rattling like rain on a tin porch — and the eyes hold still. That's the trick. That's the entire trick. Hold the eyes still and let everything else go loud.

Go on. He's been practising.

Shown here: 46 feathers, which was already a lot to ask of one page. Grown in life: between one hundred and fifty and two hundred, depending on his year and his opinion of it. The eye takes four rings — navy, then blue, then green, then bronze — and no fewer. The bronze is the one everybody forgets and it is the one that makes it glow. He is not iridescent because of pigment; the green is a stack of tiny keratin rods bending light, which means the colour is not in him, it is something that happens to him, over and over, all day, for free.