Love In The Time of Bird Flu
A Flash Fiction by Gill O’Halloran
First Place WestWord Prize 2025
Summer 2022, we’d travelled the length of Scotland’s East Lothian coast. The trip to Bass Rock was to be the highlight of our holiday, to photograph the gannets at close quarters. If we‘d talked, we’d have agreed we needed a highlight, something bright-and-beautiful to offset the unease hovering between us since the start of the year.
But the skipper approached us as we took our seats on the boat, said bird flu meant he couldn’t run the usual landing trip, the boat would circle the gannet colony instead; we could still take pictures. We stored our disappointment beneath the lifejackets and gripped our cameras, not knowing we’d stow them unused in our pockets. Once on the open sea, the haar descended like a fallen angel, ghost-wrapping us into a liminal horror show as guano-dashed cliffs loomed through the fog. We peered into stranded water, the sting of ammonia fish-hooking our nostrils as rafts of dead gannets floated into view, their bloated bodies accusing us, gleaming white feathers now funereal-grey. Other gannets sulked on boulders, hospice patients waiting to succumb.
The word gannet comes from the Old English word ganot, meaning masculine. I’ll make someone a good wife one day, you’d say. It was a joke, but not misplaced. Masculine men are not my thing, I should have liked this. But I didn’t want a wife, or a husband. I wanted to dive in, arrow-split the waves at 60 mph, gorge myself on different men and women, digest the tasty parts, spit out the bones.
Male and female gannets differ in behaviour, not appearance; it’s the males who collect the nesting material. You’d begged us to have a baby, brought home cutesy baby-grows and knitted baby beanies. I didn’t trust you, went back on the pill, and hid the packets in a pot.
In breeding season, male gannets develop a turquoise ring around their vivid blue eyes. The sky was grey, the rocks were grey, there were dead grey birds in the rain-pocked sea. You looked at me, your eyes bluer than the gannets’, and I thought how, despite our dulled emotions, you were still so hot. You must have smelt my pheromones, your knee sidled against mine, and you cupped my chin. “How about we start over?” You turned my face to yours and dealt the death blow. “Let’s make babies tonight.”
People said we should’ve foreseen the risk of bird flu to the Bass Rock gannets, should’ve been prepared when it first emerged in a Chinese goose farm in 1996, or when it transferred to wild birds in Europe, or when it was detected in great skuas on the Shetland Isles, or when a man found his collie licking a dead gannet on Yellowcraig beach, but feared the dog would be put down if he reported it. But we didn’t, and a quarter of the world’s largest gannet colony was wiped out.
People said we should’ve foreseen love’s failure when I lost my libido in lockdown, should’ve been prepared when arguments were the only times we came alive, or in Edinburgh when you said I love you, and I said, I know. But we didn’t, and after Bass Rock we didn’t talk, we didn’t even make babies. I slept in the armchair, you were lost-n-little in the king-size bed. Next day we got up, skipped breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and out of the relationship. You were crying as you walked away, you said I'd killed your tender heart, you weren’t sure you’d ever be the same.
Some gannets survived. Scientists examined those that did: their sky-blue eyes had turned black. Last week, I saw you getting off the bus as I was waiting to get on. You wouldn’t look at me, I wanted to see the colour of your eyes.
Author: Gill O’Halloran’s stories are in Bath Flash Fiction Anthologies 2024 and 2025, and Oxford Flash Fiction Anthology 2024. She won first place in the Propelling Pencil Autumn 2024 Flash competition and is Editors’ Choice award winner for NFFD Anthology 2025. Online publications include SmokeLong Quarterly, Trash Cat Lit, Fractured Lit.
Stunning Gill - congratulations 👏