A Train of Peas
When Peacock was very young, heād assembled himself a train out of peas. Everyone around him had these majestic tailsāeven the turkeys on the next farm over.
As the years went by, his friends evolved: the eyes on their trains were exchanged for screens, their meat was swapped out for metal, and their quills came to serve as antennas that only received a signal when they pointed at the sky, allowing the nights to be quiet. Some of those antennas ended in blasters, ready to shoot in every direction.
Peacock still dreamed of his own tail, but in the current climate, no one would spend time on something as frivolous as a decorative source of personal euphoria. Heād have to come up with a solution himself.
He scratched and he tore, he cut and he painted, and finally he was ready. Without a long tail to bear him down, he was much lighter and could fly higher than any of his friends. Now, a large banner trailed behind him in the sky, sending a message to all parties, both directly and through the screens shared by all the other peacocks in the world. It might be that no one had ever been awed by his tail of peas, but theyād definitely be impressed if he were able to bring peace.
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[Image description: Photo of a colourful origami sculpture of a peacock with its tail on display. On the left in the background, part of a TV screen is visible; the rest of the background is mostly dark.]
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Atthis Arts has launched a new and important Kickstarter campaign today: Embroidered Worlds: an anthology of fantastic stories from Ukraine and the Diaspora, edited by Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Olha Brylova, and Iryna Pasko. Please consider supporting this campaign, as itās more important than ever for Ukrainian voices in speculative fiction to be heard widely.
