Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 251

This week's photo was taken by a friend of mine on Twitter, BasDriver I felt it had a very start statement and offered up lots of options. 

A short heart wrenching tale to suit the picture. 

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here. 

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Clipped

I lay on the ground watching the clouds float across the sky, wishing I was up there with them. My eyes saw through the barbed wire that cut across it, reminding me I wasn’t free.  

The barb wire hadn’t been there since the beginning. Oh no, they added that later, after Galilee had tried to get out, when the confinement had become too much. They taunted us with allowing us access to the outdoor enclosure, where we could see the sky all the way to the horizon.

It had been devastating to watch him slowly succumb to the claustrophobia, but far worse to see how they punished him. And now he sat, catatonic in the corner of the enclosure, staring at his feet, never daring to look up again to a place where he could no longer go.

I could only dream of the day we would be free. I had to believe that we would, otherwise I would be like Galilee. And since the change of laws there was a sense of hope that eventually we would be accepted and allowed to go free and return to our home. A home that looked so glorious on a day like this as the breeze blew the clouds along at a steady pace. I could imagine our wings lifting up on the thermals and taking us back to the mountains and tree tops where we came from.

I only hoped that Galilee’s wings might heal by then; the clipping they had done able to be reversed. Without him our release would be meaningless. He was our clan leader and we needed him.

I sat up and crawled over to him, putting my arms and wings round him, and he fell into them, tears from his eyes falling into my feathers. I fed them through to his damaged wings in the hope they would speed up his recovery.

As we sat there cocooned, I looked up again at the barbed wire that covered the roof. It represented everything they were: harsh, cold, and barbaric. I was warmed by my rage as the sun began to sink low. Once it touched the earth they would force us inside to sit in a concrete box until morning. I could only hope for the day when I would wake up and find the wire gone, and we could go free.