flamingos in fedoras by gill o’halloran

Strasbourg 5 am. A heron’s heavy row across a blue July sky, over green gravel lakes beside the motorway. We’re sixteen. Hungover French drizzles from our English tongues as we waste away with the wasters: Jean-Michel and Jean-Phillipe, heroin-numb, fumbling under our skirts. Liv has the dark one; I got the blonde, the one with dead nits’ eggs in his hair. We’ve been dancing all night to Led Zeppelin in houses without doors, and now we’re late for class, and non, we don’t regret rien. We’re too cool for school, and our parents are in London, which is on Mars. They’ve no idea, picture us practicing past participles while we’re having fun in the present.

Strasbourg 8.30 pm. Half a tab at half past eight, another at half past nine, and we’re arm in arm with flamingos in fedoras and a hundred sunken suns. I tell Liv my octopus toes are purple and the bag on my lap is breathing. Instead of leading me back to the main path, she runs alongside me on the narrow one, says she’ll buy me octopus shoes, and not to hurt the bag. After five weeks of getting higher than the highest grade in French, we spend the comedown stealing grapes from vineyards and practising lies for our return. When we leave, Jean-Michel and Jean-Phillipe don’t show up to wave us off; they’ve forgotten who we are. Who they are.

Back home, the new school year begins, but our grades are not inflated, just our egos. Our friends went fruit picking, went to youth club, went to the beach. They went on holiday with their parents! They ask about our trip, and we say they’d never understand if we could even be bothered to tell them. We swap plimsols for platform heels, roll up the waistband on our skirts and smoke in the toilets. Sir wants to speak to us after class.

“I invested in you,” he says, “so why is there no return? What’s with the attitude? You’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down. But most of all, you’ve let—”

We snigger; we shove thumbs in mouths then pop them out, enacting burst balloons. He says that’s it, gives us detention, but we refuse to write our lines. Instead, we lounge, we loaf, we louche like gouched-out French boys.

Sir throws up his hands.

“Where are the promising linguists I sent away on scholarships? Who are these insolent girls sitting in their place?”

We’ll leave school, and rebel a little longer, then we’ll both grow up and get jobs and get married and get sensible, and Liv will have three kids, and I will have two, and they’ll say, "Didn’t you ever do anything wild when you were our age?” And we’ll say, “We went fruit picking.” And we’ll worry: check their social media, WhatsApp them every day. We’ll never live on Mars whilst they’re away in France. They won’t stand a chance.

Gill O’Halloran’s a lido-loving Londoner and a Pushcart Prize nominee. First published by Trash Cat Lit, she won the 2025 NFFD Anthology Editors Award and features in its 2026 anthology. Stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, New Feathers, Does It Have Pockets, BULL, JMWW, Flash Boulevard, plus both Bath and Oxford anthologies. Winner of Westword and Flash500, her poetry collection was a Top 20 Small-Press Poetry Award pick. Find her @quickasaflash.bsky.social