Other stories for this prompt

Half naked and desperate, the child climbed the thin bars of the door, her cage, staring at the world outside. Her right leg crooked over the horizontal bar as she tilted her body, dark eyes staring longingly at the world.

"Get down from there!" her father snapped angrily. "You're gonna hurt yourself."

"When can I go out, Daddy?" she asked, turning to look at him imploringly. "I want to go out! You never let me do anything."

"You don't want to go out there, babygirl," the man said gruffly. "It's a dangerous world. There are mean people out there that...

It was difficult getting to people to understand that actually you wanted to be in the cage. That the cage was the safest place at the moment.

The rest of the world had gone mad - or at least, it seemed that way. Maybe the world had always been like this, maybe there had always been something in a stranger's eye, maybe there was always something in the rain that made it taste funny.

Maybe the drugs were wearing off, maybe he was finally waking up to the reality. Or the drugs were taking effect, maybe he was devolving (he'd...

The first few days she hadn't noticed the bars. She'd noticed very little about her surroundings other than that they were wrong. As her head became less fuzzy and she began to understand why they were wrong, that this wasn't where she was supposed to be she tried to learn everything there was to learn about this unfamiliar environment.

It was on the tenth day that she'd counted, that the sun shone for the first time. Whereas it had looked grey and dreary outside, the glowing sunlight made it look full of possibilities. The bars were on the inside of...

My four-year-old son was out of control. He tried to climb EVERYTHING, he made crazy yelling noises all the time, he had about a ten-word vocabulary, and he slipped out of his room every night to sleep with his pet jungle cats.

And it was all his grandpa's fault.

I should have seen it coming the day my son was born. I held him in my arms, showed him to my father-in-law, and said, "Hey, Dad, ain'tcha proud?" And he just twinkled his eyes at me, and ran his hand through his dreadlocks, and grunted bemusedly to himself.

I should...