White Peacock
From It Happened. Make of It What You Will.
I wasn’t having a magical day. No full moon, no eclipse, no “the universe is sending me a message”. Just another drive through Norfolk: taking a shortcut on a narrow country lane, too little sleep, too many thoughts, hands on the steering wheel doing what they always do.
Then I hit the brake.
Because a white peacock walked out of a rye field and straight across the road in front of my car. Not a pigeon, not a chicken from some random yard.
A peacock.
Completely white, like it had been erased from a dream and dropped into my very practical morning, right there between rye on one side and corn on the other.
It moved slowly, one deliberate step after another, tail closed, head high. Halfway across it stopped, turned a little, and for a second one eye lined up with me through the windscreen.
No drama, no music, no message. Just me in a car on a quiet Norfolk lane, and a white bird taking its time between two fields.
Of course my brain instantly tried to murder the moment with questions:
Where did it come from?
Escaped from a zoo?
From some rich estate hidden behind those hedges?
Was it a sign? About change? About my life? About anything at all?
There were no subtitles. No explanation popped up in the sky. The peacock finished crossing, slipped into the corn on the other side, and the road was empty again.
Engine on, gear in, day continues. But that one frame stayed. It comes back in completely different moments: packing boxes into the car, changing countries again, when my body gets tired faster than my plans. Always the same still: me forced to stop, and something impossible walking straight through the middle of my “normal”.
I could decorate this with meaning. Call it a turning point and pretend I understood something quiet and precise right there on that road.
The honest version is simpler: an unreal bird walked through a very real day.
It didn’t fix anything. It didn’t break anything. It just existed, for a few seconds, in my line of sight. And maybe that’s enough. Not as a lesson. Not as a prophecy.
But that one silent second, where I simply witnessed something impossible and let it be real without needing a reason – that’s the frame worth keeping.
I stopped, looked, let it exist.
This is one selected scene from the book.