The Vista

By Lauren

I wrote this story in half an hour. Complete with all editing. It doesn't yet have a title, so I've just used the prompt I was given when I wrote it. In case you were wondering, I wrote it at a writing thing I go to every second Monday. Georgia also wrote a story with the same prompt, which we'll probably put up in the next few days. I hope you like this story, please let me know if there are any errors, given that I did very little editing!

My home felt wrong. I couldn’t understand why, because it was the only possibility. But it still felt wrong. My food felt wrong too, it didn’t taste like I felt it was supposed to and left me feeling strange after I ate. My life seemed wrong, whenever I scrounged for food it was like I could feel my ancestors cringing. But there were no alternatives.

It left me feeling lost and confused. Why did I feel like trees should not be made out of metal and glass? Why did the very air around me make me feel ill when it was the only thing I had ever breathed? It was degrading when I pulled scraps out of the peoples’ bins but I couldn’t understand why. And when I sat in my home, why did the straws feel so wrong and uncomfortable against my feathers?

As my life went on, it only got worse and worse. I felt more and more ill by the day, but there was nothing I could do about it. Everything I was doing that I knew was necessary to survive only felt like it was killing me slowly. I hated my existence. My instinct was to fly high above everything else, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be able to fly and fly for miles, but I couldn’t. It didn’t make sense that I could see the cracks on the road in such detail when I really didn’t need to. And why when I saw a plastic bag blow across the street was my instinct to swoop down as fast as I could to catch it?

I felt trapped, like my body didn’t fit my life and it drove me insane. I couldn’t do this anymore; it was too much. The toxic air, the slimy food, my plastic nest in the monstrous metal tree. It was all wrong and it was just getting worse. I had to escape.

I flew and I flew, further away from my nest than I had ever gone before. The evil environment I’d lived my whole life in seemed to stretch on forever, but something in my gut told me that it didn’t. It told me that there was something better out there somewhere. That there was a place that felt right and a place where I would feel like I belonged.

So, I kept on going. And eventually, the metal trees began to thin out, they got smaller and as they did the air got sweeter. I saw splashes of green every now and then that I had never seen before. This was already so much better, but I knew there was more to come.

Finally, after hours and hours of travelling, I reached the point where the trees were not made of metal any more. It was here where I landed. This was it. This was where I was supposed to be. Here, the trees were beautiful, green and brown and sometimes orange. The noises around me were just as loud but so much purer. The ground was soft and didn’t leave me feeling slimy. For the first time in my whole life, I felt clean.

But it was too late. I had had toxic air in my lungs for too long, I’d been eating the wrong food all my life. I was just grateful that as I took my last breath and closed my eyes, the last thing I saw was golden light and a blue sky.