When the kookaburra couple pulse with nonsynchronous monkey laughter in the aviary, I watch Jake heave a vertical crease between his eyebrows. I’d swiped right because he wasn’t topless and said he was decisive: so different to gym rat Carl from last month, and apathetic Tony the month before. Jake decided on the zoo, and the locations of our previous dates, so I guess he’s not a liar. I’m not sure what he is as he clings to the chicken wire, asking me why the birds are laughing at him, but I want him to say they’re laughing at us.
A boy, gaps in his smirk, says the birds think the hat is funny, pointing at Jake’s fedora with a peacock filoplume. Jake releases the fence, his top teeth pressing his bottom lip, the escaping eff speckling spittle at the boy’s face. I put my hand on Jake’s shoulder, say the boy didn’t mean it, that a kookaburra’s laughter is purely territorial. This land belongs to them. I take in the tarmac, wasps figure-eighting the overflowing bin, litter stirring in the Atlantic breeze. Poor birds.
Jake says they own nothing, that he could stop their noise by crushing them in his fists. The boy says the birds would peck Jake’s eyes out first. Would not, would so, would not, would so, and I screech for them to pack it in. The birds’ call changes from eight quavers of ooo, four crochets of ah. It becomes gentle, slow. More unified. Pitying.
is co-editor of The Phare and a Best of the Net 2025 nominee from Gloucestershire, UK. She has won the London Independent Story Prize and was short/longlisted for the Alpine Fellowship, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bridport Prize, Flash 500, Laurie Lee Prize, the Oxford Flash, and Quiet Man Dave Prize. Her stories have featured in The Brussels Review, Cranked Anvil, Fictive Dream, Flash Frontier, The Molotov Cocktail, Mslexia, Riggwelter, Shooter, Toronto Journal, and Writing Magazine, and have been performed at numerous literature festivals and on BBC Radio.
