Tears Of Freedom

• Wai Jo Jocelin Chan, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2012

It’s another lovely summer dawn. There is light on the leaves, on the grass and on everywhere life exists. The dew has just evaporated. The newly woken birds are not ready to sing a summer song yet. Everything has just begun. It is such an uplifting moment in this summer forest.

A panting and running noise disturbed the silence. It is escaping, I mean he is escaping. He is lost, sweating and shaking. He has no idea where he is running to, no idea of what he is going to do. He even doesn’t know why someone is chasing him.
“Shoot it! Shoot it! But don’t kill it!”
A huge bullet shoots into his flank. He keeps running, but then he runs no further. He cannot control himself. He falls down, looking at the unconcerned blue sky. Someone carried him to the truck, to return him to where he belongs.

Once again, he is put behind those bars. He has done nothing wrong. Once again, he is locked up by lots of bulky padlocks. He has hurt no one before. Once again, he is isolated. He has never felt any love before. He lies on the floor, could not move a single finger, looking at the sky through the tiny window, thinking of his past, where he was came from, why he is living in this world.

He has no father or mother. But he has lots of brothers, maybe a few hundreds, or a thousand. And he is the only lucky one who has succeeded in walking, seeing and hearing. Some of his brothers do not possess eyes, some of them possess six legs, and some of them can’t even breathe. He is the son of no one, he is just a product of one in a thousand. He is called a centaur, created in the laboratory by scientists, half human, half horse. Everyone knows him, he is William. But most of the time, no one calls him William, they just call him “that thing”, “it” or “the half horse half human”.

A man walks near the cage, puts down a bowl of cereal. The same breakfast again. He has no appetite. He has eaten this breakfast for the past 21 years already. He was born to be a test. Occasionally, scientists inject or feed him with different chemicals and see what effect these have on him. Mostly there is pain.

He does not know how long he still needs to suffer. Sometimes, he wishes he can be one of his brothers that can leave this world peacefully without suffering a lot. People who sometimes visit think he is cool, but no one knows what he wants the most. All he wants is freedom. He wants to run in the summer forest freely where he belongs.

The sun has risen into the sky. A squirrel climbs to the window of the cage, and jumps to the tree and runs away freely, leaving William behind.