The Burden

Part One

It was dark. There was no window in the room. In the centre of the darkness stood a cage. His face was pressed against the cold bars. He sighed, breathed in the dust and coughed again. Had there been any light in the room, you would be able to see the crippled structure of his skeleton.

He had never left the cage, never ventured beyond the bars that cradled his existence. He was alone in the darkness except for a man who lived above him. They called him Solus. He had never seen the man, just sensed his presence and heard his heavy footsteps. Solus rarely fed him. It was surprising how he could survive off so little.

The one in the cage had nothing to live for, in his case it would be easier to die.

But he kept thinking, he kept believing, that maybe there was more than the cold bars that locked him to this tiny square. Maybe one day, the man would open the cage. Just let him go. Perhaps he’d wake up one day, and the cage was gone. Maybe he’d wake in the dark room, and he could run, run for eternity, into the blackness.

But of course, he could not run. He had not even walked any further than the small area that the cage allowed. Not in all his life had he known what it feels like to be running free. But still he hoped that there was something, something more.

He coughed again. The dust, disturbed by his movement, made him sneeze.

And he was tangled in a fit of coughing and spluttering. He coughed and caused the dust around him to rise and be consumed by his dirty lungs, and then his body reacted again and he coughed even more. He writhed and ached as his feeble muscles worked hard to keep the filthy dirt, dust, webs and insect carcases out of his nose and mouth. The air in the room began to turn grey with all the sudden movement. He coughed louder ad rattled the cage as he believed he was to choke to his fierce death.

The racket he caused alerted Solus, who sat upstairs, that something was not quite right. The man hobbled to the basement door and nearly tripped down the uneven stairs.

He was still. In the cage, hunched in one corner, his body tangled and twisted. The man opened the cage door, and reached out to him. He coughed again, spluttering and weeping.

Solus had left the door open so grizzled light filled the darkness.

But he still saw nothing. He started screaming, crying for a chance.

Solus reached out and grabbed his jaw shut.

He writhed at the man’s touch and clawed at the strong grip. His lungs ached and he needed air. He needed something he knew nothing of.

The man dragged the wrangled skeleton out of the cage, up the uneven stairs and out the back door of the decrepit town house.

There was a small garden, overgrown with the limbs of plants clambering up the fence to see the sunlight, where children had once played on a rusty swing set and dissolving trampoline. Solus despised the outer world and enjoyed the comfort of inside his rotting house. The elderly man hadn’t been in the garden at all since the children stopped playing there.

He took a startled breath as he realised he was not in the cage. Where was he? He could breathe and started to take quick breaths to clear his lungs. He knew that he wasn’t in the cage, but why could he still not see?

Surely there was something to see outside of the room, his cage was no longer his boundary and the foundations of what he believed in crumbled away. He was startled by a light breeze; he turned his head and clawed at the man’s powering grasp.

But Solus would not let go. The man felt him gingerly inhale and then swiftly exhale and he’d never been happier. To know that he would have died without his help made Solus feel proud of himself.