An allegory of awakening, told by one who once watched the world from both sides.
The fence ran the length of the hill, rusted and leaning, like an old spine that had forgotten which way the body was meant to stand. I had grown up beside it — born on the wrong side, they said. The side where sunlight was rationed between feedings, and names were not given, only numbers painted in chalk that the rain washed away before anyone cared to rewrite them.
I didn’t think about freedom then. I thought about the rhythm of chewing, the warmth of others pressed against me, the small, cruel peace of routine. But sometimes, when the dusk was long and the air smelled like rain, I heard something that wasn’t quite wind. It moved through the fence like breath through a flute — soft, hollow, mournful.
One night I asked an older ewe what it was.
She blinked, tired from years of lambing. “It’s the wild,” she said. “Best to forget it.”
So I tried.
But the sound returned each evening, threading through my ribs until I began to hum it back.
Then one day, the humans came with their trucks and their sharp voices. We were herded, numbered again, split apart. My mother didn’t return that night. Neither did the hum.
I pressed my head against the fence post until I bled. The rust tasted like salt and rain — a strange sort of honesty.
Weeks passed before I saw the sky open in a way I hadn’t known it could. The storm broke a section of wire clean from its roots. The ground hissed with electricity, and the smell of ozone filled the air. Every instinct told me to stay where I was — but something older than fear told me to move.
So I did.
The first step hurt. The second tasted like metal. The third felt like flight.
When I finally crossed the threshold, the hum I’d been hearing all my life became something else — a chorus. Frogs, birds, the whisper of wind over tall grass. None of it asked for permission to exist.
I ran until the hill became a memory.
The wild was not kind, but it was true. My hooves learned the shape of uneven earth. My body thinned, but my senses grew. I learned to read the direction of rain, to find water by the scent of stone, and to trust silence as much as sound.
I met others — the ones who had crossed before. They didn’t speak in words but in knowing glances, in the language of survival and remembering. We carried scars in different places, yet they fit together like puzzle pieces of the same story.
Sometimes, I would look back toward the hill. It seemed smaller now. The fence, even from a distance, shimmered faintly in the sun, as if remembering me.
Years later, I returned. Not because I missed it, but because something in me needed to see if it was still there.
The pasture was empty. The buildings had been torn down, their wood scattered by time and neglect. Only the fence remained — brittle, twisted, but still standing.
I walked along it until I reached the gap I had once slipped through. Grass had grown thick there, soft as forgiveness.
As I stood, I heard the wind again — that same haunting hum. But now, it didn’t sound like loss. It sounded like memory.
And in that moment, I realized the fence had never been alive until it held us. It had learned our songs through the trembling of wire, absorbed our fear through each shove and cry. It had carried both captivity and longing, and in its rust was every voice that had ever pressed against it.
The fence had not divided the world. It had recorded it.
Now, when others come — the fox who skirts the meadow, the doe and her fawn, even the two-legged ones who walk softly and whisper apologies — I lead them to the broken post.
Not to mourn it. To honor it.
Because every barrier that remembers is already halfway to being undone.
And every creature who crosses is a storyteller reborn.
Editor’s Note:
This story marks the debut of Fables from the Free Earth, a new creative fiction series within The Humane Herald. Through allegory and imagination, the series explores empathy, freedom, and the shared spirit that unites all living beings. Each piece invites readers to see the world not as property or hierarchy, but as kinship — where every story, like every life, matters.
The Humane Herald 