The Flight Feathers’ Tale
An autumn trip. Inside the house of numerous gardens. A passage indoors. Across a hall of mirrors. A walk in is a walk out. A concave one into a convex one. Dependent. On whether you breathe in or breathe out, as if you have not quite decided yet whether to start your life from the very beginning. Without audible pauses. With provisional stops. You take no advice as such seriously ever again. This garden is the garden of three peacocks, that move so pompously within the premises of the orangery, with such distinction around the place, that your life feels more pastel in contrast. Or more precisely, it feels as if your life up till now was not worth a penny, not a coin. It feels as if only from now, from this citrus tree, could it at last cast at least a shadow and bear any exotic fruit… as if only from now did it gain just as much signification as a retrice-feather signifies fallen on the ground. Like a snakehead in silhouette. And indeed. One does wonder. If, all this time, what exactly happened up till now, until you arrived at a garden entrapped by the curve of the peacock’s flight feathers, as if your entire afternoon was enclosed with no end. And the garden began its pompous courting, you.
* Agnes Lehoczky was born in 1976 in Budapest. Her first two short collections were published in Budapest by Universitas, and in 2008 her debut English language collection Budapest to Babel was published by Egg Box. She holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the UEA and is currently a research assistant at The University of Sheffield.