Author's Note: hi i'm back with another of my Creative Writing assignments! We're focussing on flash fiction at the moment so here is my piece for this task! Again in case you skipped over the blurb there is a trigger warning for inferred self-harm and mentions of attempted suicide, so if this will trigger you please click out of this story!!! I really love this story so I hope you will also :)
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The feeling of my feathers makes me feel trapped.
The soft brush against my bare arms makes me quiver, the feel of a breeze running through their downy layers makes me look outwards at this dark, dank, desolate place, at the opened door, and wonder which one will come to torment me next.
I don't know how long I've been trapped here. The hours slipped through my fingers like grains of sand, quickly turning days, to weeks, transforming the grains into this hopeless desert I'm surrounded by.
They take me from my cell, and I do not fight I haven't since the grains started piling up around me. They learnt from their mistakes and clipped my wings; I'm not flying out of here anytime soon.
They strap me to their tables, and they break me, again and again. I scream, and scream, the unholy sound careening through hallways.
Pain is a living thing; my nerves are burning. I black out and when I wake, I feel nothing, not an itch of pain, just the cold of the stone floor biting into my arms.
~
I know something has changed even before my eyes open.
It's warm and light, smelling of pine needles, and petrichor. I unfurl my wings and shudder as the feel of them leave my skin.
I'm in a wooden cabin, a glance outside tells me it's in a clearing in a pine forest. Sunlight, rich and warm, streams through the curtain-less window, and my sun-starved-self leans into it, closing my eyes, the heat seeping into my limbs.
I don't notice the person sitting in the corner of the room until they clear their throat. My eyes fly open, and I whip around. It's a man. His hair black and shoulder-length, half tied up by a length of leather. His blue eyes are trained on me. He can't be much older than I am.
"Who are you?" My voice is hoarse.
"My name is Ace," he says, looking into my hazel eyes. "What's yours?"
"Fern," I reply sitting up straighter. "How did you find me?"
He shifts in his seat.
"I've been tracking the scientists who took you for a month," he says. "They took someone important to me. She's like you."
He nods at my wings.
"When I finally caught them, you were blacked out in a cell. I grabbed you and a gazillion alarms went off, so I had to get us out of there. I didn't even have the chance to look for her.
"Now here's my question: was there anyone there with you? Any sign that someone like you had been there?"
I think about my cell. There was only one other, empty with no signs of life, just faint score marks in the wall.
"I was alone."
"I see... so, she's gone," Ace whispers.
The cabin turns sombre, as if we're both trapped inside a cage in our minds. I'm silent as if I may never escape, and maybe I won't but now is no time to think.
~
I know he wants to ask why I freak whenever I get more than a metre off the ground, why I refuse to show him my back when he massages my muscles, but he never asks.
It's the same reason I don't ask him whose bed I've been sleeping on.
"She was my sister," he says one day as we sit side-by-side on my bed. "She was thirteen when they took her. One day she was there and the next she was just... not. Both our parents have been dead since she was a kid, so it was always just me and her living in the forest. No one could hurt us.
"When I heard she'd been taken... it was bad. I didn't eat, didn't get up. I didn't see the point in... living anymore if I didn't have her, and I mean no one would miss me with her gone anyway...
"I did try, and I probably would have succeeded if I hadn't heard about researchers who'd recently gotten their hands on a girl with wings. Though I guess I was too late because she was gone when I arrived. I do wonder what would have happened if I had tried to save her instead of trying to end myself."
Tears are in my eyes; I place a hand on his forearm, my fingers feeling the scars inlaid there, and take a deep breath.
"It was just before you found me that I tried to escape. Before they could strap me down for their 'experiments', I knocked a few of them to the ground and flew as fast as I could out of there. I made it as far as my cell before two guards tased me. One tried to cut off my wings, and he would have too if one of them hadn't knocked the knife from his hand."
I reach for my shirt and lift it over my head, turning so my back is to Ace. I hear his breathing hitch.
"I came too close, but they still needed me with wings, so they clipped them to stop me from escaping again."
I replace my shirt and face him, tears in his eyes after seeing the wicked scar between my shoulder blades: an inch away from my wing.
Its then, tears rolling down our cheeks, his hand on my back, mine on his forearm, connected together by healed scars, that I realise we're going to be okay.
~
"I think that was your longest flight yet!" Ace shouts at me as I spiral down to the ground.
"You think so?" I ask running a hand through my brown bob. He's holding what looks like two full-body restraints. "What's this? You know I don't think of you that way." I flick the contraption with a wink and an eyebrow wiggle.
Ace rolls his eyes, fastening it over his shoulders.
"It's a flight harness, gutter brain," he says passing it to me, grinning. "We're going flying."
We're going flying.
Once mine's on, Ace hooks the back of his harness to mine, and I stretch out my wings, admiring the way the sun makes them incandescent.
There's no time to think as we take off, leaving the blanket of pine needles, the sun-dappled forest floor, and our little wooden cottage far below.
With Ace by my side up here in the sky, the feeling of my feathers makes me feel free.
YOU ARE READING
Eleutheromania
Short Story(TW: inferred self-harm and mentions of attempted suicide) Fern is held captive by scientists wanting to study her wings, and she can't escape (she already tried that), the days bleed to weeks and she loses track of how long she's trapped.. One day...
