A Beautiful Day to go Nowhere

It was a beautiful day to go nowhere. The sun was shining, birds were singing, and spring was in the air. But Claudia and Martin were bored having to stay in the house for another long day of quarantine until…

All of a sudden, a lot of people outside started screaming happily.
They peered over the terrace wall, and what did they see on the ground just beyond the railroad tracks by the port but a peacock! And not just any peacock but one covered from head to tail with gold.

Martin said “We can’t go outside. Is there any way we can get the peacock to come up here? Wait. I know.” They wrote a message to the bird on a paper airplane and sent it soaring through the air.

It landed at the peacock’s feet, but the peacock shook his head and didn’t move.

“The peacock can’t read,” said Claudia. We’ll have to find another way.”

“I have an idea,” said Glenda. “What do peacocks eat?”

“We can look it up on the internet,” Martin said, and grabbed his grandmother’s phone.

FROM THE INTERNET: Peafowl are omnivores, which means they will eat almost anything—They like birds, including turkey and domestic fowl, small mammals, reptiles and insects, including ants, millipedes, crickets, flies, termites, locust and scorpions.

Since Claudia was a good cook, she made a stir fry with chicken cooked medium rare because she thought the peacock would prefer that, mixed with geranium flowers and a fly that Katniss, their cat, had just caught and dropped onto the floor.

“But how do we let the peacock know we have this delicious meal?”

Glenda, the grandma, noticed a pigeon sitting close by on the roof and, knowing that pigeons speak and understand other birds and also understand human language, asked the pigeon to fly to the peacock with a small sample of the food and to tell him where he could get more.

The pigeon delivered the food and came back to let them know, with gestures, that the peacock was excited but couldn’t fly very far or high, especially with all of that gold weighing her down. He had said that the peacock wanted to help, though, so he had decided to walk across the tracks and the road to their house and take the elevator.

The kids were excited to let the peacock in and show him the food, but the peacock explained to the pigeon, who had come inside to help (after making sure the cat was shut up in another room), that he was a special peacock and only ate metal. It couldn’t be gold, though, because gold was very bad for his health. It would give him a disease called diagoldis.

Glenda’s eyes fell on the metal iguana sculpture hanging on the wall and gave it to the peacock, who promptly ate it in three big bites.

The peacock burped loudly and said “That was delicious. Now what can I do for you since you have done so much for me?”

“Can you play hide and seek with us?” Martin asked. The pigeon looked doubtful, but the peacock said he would try as long as they had someplace big enough for him to hide with his long tailfeathers.

Claudia, Martin and the peacock found hiding places while the grandma, Glenda, counted to 20, but just then the parents came home. Nora, the mom, had been walking the dog, and Fernando, the dad, had gone to the bar he manages to make sure the freezer was still operating properly.

Nora had no sooner walked in the door when she said: “What is that funny smell?”

“Um, I just cooked something for an experiment,” Claudia said.

Nora looked in the skillet and said “That’s disgusting. Haven’t I warned you not to do any more experiments you learned on YouTube?”

Just then the peacock waddled out and said: “It’s not their fault. They were bored and convinced me to come up here to play and help them find new things to do.”

Mothers are never shocked although you never have their full attention.

“That’s nice,” she said and went to the refrigerator to see what she could find to cook for their lunch—other than half-done chicken, geraniums and a fly.

Just then, a call came in on Claudia’s phone, and it was for the peacock. It was his agency. It turned out the peacock was a superhero, and the agent was telling him he had another mission for him.

“We understand,” said Martin. “But could you make a list for us before you go of games and other things we could do today?”

The peacock dictated to the pigeon a list of 133 things, and the pigeon, with some difficulty, acted out the ideas for the children.

It took the rest of the day to do everything the peacock had suggested, but for all of those hours everybody forgot to think about the quarantine.

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By Claudia Rodriguez de Almeida, Martin Rodriguez de Almeida and Glenda Daniel

Author’s note: This story was written jointly, with Glenda, the grandmother, offering the first paragraph, and each co-author in turn providing the next idea to carry the story forward. (Initially it was thought that each would provide just the next sentence, but it turned out that more than one sentence was needed to explain each idea, so the plan was modified to allow that).