"The Terrible Peacock" by Djuna Barnes

Just who is this green-eyed, red-haired seductress in satin and silk? A young reporter sets out to expose her--and exposes only his own vain follies. Read by Scoot.

Those who are familiar with Djuna Barnes's experimental and opaque novel Nightwood might be surprised by this trifling, even flippant yarn with an O. Henry-esque twist. But if you know of her long, varied career, starting as a reporter herself, and continuing on through associations with the Provincetown Players of the O'Neill era and ex-pat Paris of the Gertrude Stein era might recognize something of the iconoclast within this piece, which is among her very earliest fictions.