The White Peacock
They call her the White Peacock. How long she has been here is anyone’s guess, deep in the heart of the Pasha’s sprawling palace, locked behind one of its myriad secret doors. If she was beautiful – which she’s sure she was – then they have forgotten. She sits, aloof, upon her golden couch, her aging thighs pressed against intricate patterns of twisting foliage hardly now reminiscent of first snow upon frozen autumn leaves. One off-white hand is raised to the nape of her sagging neck, her hair that once cascaded like the flowing waterfalls of the palatial gardens no longer reflecting the light of a thousand candles. She wonders why the dancing lights like the bright flames of her eyes are now so few. Her cage is not gilded, but mirrored on three sides, so that as she sits, she is refracted a million times into the depths of infinite worlds. The fourth wall is a fine lattice of bars, a thin veil that once shielded her eyes from countless male observers.
Strange things have come to her out of the mirrors of late, as she sits at the centre of the palace’s silent slumber. She finds, often, that she is being watched by an indeterminate number of eyes; eyes that open and shut at intervals, disappearing infuriatingly when she turns her head to look at them, making it hard to distinguish these from her own. At first she dismisses this as a passing fancy; but soon the numbers grow, multiplying endlessly in the darkness until they can no longer be ignored. But even sooner, she finds she has grown accustomed to them, these strangely staring observers – until it seems strange to think that they were not always there, looking upon her with their insistent gaze, and making her the centre of their twisted galaxies.
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