I stood in my cage shaking.
The bitter air snapped at my paws and pierced my open wounds.
Memories of frolicking in the meadows were all but forgotten, my warm burrow was a world away.
With every breath, chemicals blistered my lungs.
I tried to remember the smell of the lilacs blossoming in the spring, filling my nose with their fragrant flavours.
But when I inhaled, baneful blight besieged my soul.
I sat in my cage shaking.
Acid corroded my bones and seeped through my arteries.
My eyes became volcanoes; scalding blood cascaded from their craters, rolled down and stained my once pristine fur.
Poisons electrified my veins like wires in a circuit, but the bulbs blew out long ago.
I lay in my cage shaking.
I could feel icicles forming around my paws, slowly inching towards me.
I managed to expose my eyes, and in doing so, I saw another being's husk withering in despair as the angel of death loomed above him, draining the blood from its near lifeless body.
The angel's cloak rippled silently like mist, patiently waiting for his victim to relinquish.
His presence emitted a sharp aura that instilled terror in all around him.
He looked up from his prey and I stared into his cowl; his faceless gaze paralysed me.
His slender fingers, itching to quench his thirst for blood, his skeletal arm extended towards me.
On his command, metal plates soared across the cage and right through me.
I squatted, unable to fathom the situation I was in.
I reflected on my life.
How did I go from being free to being sentenced to a gruesome death inside the walls of humanity's ignorance.
I shut my eyes, waiting for an end to the torment.
I died in my cage shaking.
An eerie silence blanketed the enclosure.
I held my eyes shut even tighter, waiting in anticipation.
The bars of my tomb burrowed into my flesh, the scraps of my last meal decayed beside me.
A frigid grasp snatched my condemned carcass.
I forced my deflated eyes open for one last time and looked into the eyes of death.
By Cameron Bayne, Year 11, Logan Park High School
