Kinneson Lalor

I’m about to click the shutter when Henry-Robert ruffles his feathers again, the ripple of something in the space where his skin stretches between man and chicken. My wife mused she wasn’t sure if it was sadder Henry-Robert dressed like a chicken to hide who he was or that people wanted to read about it. I thought of the summer he and I swam in the swollen river and I saw his webbed feet and plump thighs, the way his nose hooked over the water. I had wanted so much to press my beak against his but I swam away, knowing he would always be the boldness of his russet-red plumage and I would only ever be able to envy him from a distance.

Kinneson Lalor recently followed a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge with an MSt in Creative Writing from the same institution. She is Australian but has lived in the UK for over a decade. Her work has appeared in The Mays and Tiny Molecules.