The wire ran the length of the farm. She knew, because she'd walked it 100 times, pacing back and forth to see if perhaps some small burrowing animal might have dug a hole under it, or some heavy animal might have pushed through it, or some ferocious animal might have snapped the wire. She hoped, and hoped, and hoped, but always she maintained her hopeless vigil over the fence. At the beginning of every day, after being fed her bowl of grits, she would go out and walk along the fence, slowly, studying every inch for some chance of escape. If she was still here in five years, there was a little tree that she thought might grow tall enough to go over the fence. She wasn't sure if she could break the fence conditioning by concentrating really hard on just climbing the tree, not on going over the fence, but she would damn sure give it a try.


Inspiration: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45588563@N06/7763997922/
Story Potential: Low.
Notes: Eh. Cloning, or forced labor--either way, nothing particularly new here.

The silver bird cheeped when she scratched the back of its head through the bars of the cage. "Hush, now, little one," she whispered, leaning close and sneaking it a piece of her biscuit, "we'll be free this afternoon. The Lord Marshall promised. He didn't just pretend, he gave his own soul's oath on it. We'll be free at last." She did not allow herself to think of the nature of the man whose soul's oath she was relying on. It had been him, after all, that had ruined her for marriage when she was fourteen. It had not been an act of bestial lust, but a cold-blooded calculation, executed without mercy but also without brutality. She was, once she understood, grateful for that at least. She knew that her sisters had not been treated as--impartially. At least two of them had hanged themselves afterwards, and she wasn't sure about the third--it could be true that, as they said, she no longer wrote to anybody or spoke, or it could be that she had killed herself--

Inspiration: birds outside
Story Potential: High, perhaps?
Notes: I find it interesting, pondering what this woman, broken in strange ways and isolated for almost her entire life, would do once free. And *why* was she held captive? Prophecy regarding her and her sisters, perhaps? Innate abilities that made her feared? Blood-ties to power dethroned?