MultiColor Mashup | 2023 ✔️

Color #4 - Yellow Canaries

Round 2.1
Word Count: 1,500
Steampunk
Prompt: Write a short that is suitable for children up to ten years of age and from the first-person view of a toy

- - -

Morning light is few and far between. The light comes from the door, wooden planks lined in stripes. Similar to the shallow box I sit in, it's boarded up in an all too familiar way. When light does come, the glow is dim and drives indistinct colors of orange through the crevice that the old man has slipped.

Today is different. The boarded wall swings open with energy and lets a bang echo.

I stir, wings clinking. My pointed nose twitches upward in displeasure. I like quiet, and the short companion that rockets ahead of the old man is anything but.

Where the old man steps quietly, the short one's steps pound and shake my box. Where the old man never speaks, the short one spits words from his mouth. Where the old man works silently, the short one bashes and bangs into the unlively metallic companions I have grown to know.

"Here he is," the old man says, lifting my box with steady hands. "Modeled him right off of them canaries."

His movements I know well. The old man has practiced hands that work fast in this boarded palace. Since I opened my eyes, I have seen the wonder he works with the steam trains, zeppelins, and me. He is a tinkerer.

As the short one nears, I fear his hands around my box, a travesty in comparison to the tinker's, shaking me from my solace within.

"He's amazing," the short one says, mouth parting.

The short one refers to me, I realize, but I find the sight beyond the boards more amazing than I.

Morning light is plentiful and brilliant beyond the boards. Fair light dots the green land and songs reach me, a distant call.

"Go ahead. Try him out." Eagerness lights the old man. "He's magic."

The short one bounces, winding the key on my side. "I will, Grandfather!"

Fluttering my wings on command, a pull lifts me upward into the mosaic above.

"What? How does he do this, Grandfather? He was supposed to hop, was he not?"

"He's magic, boy! See, he's magic!"

My wings flap harder until I reach the top of the sticky greenery, never flapping over. A pull lays in my chest, ushering me to swoop and dive and weave in and out of the green cluster's embrace.

Up, up, up...

The feeling is new and makes the coals in my stomach fire faster. I'm pulled higher and higher, beyond the voices. Forces within me battle. My wings slow, but everything in me yells for me to flap harder, and soar higher and further than anything can reach.

I fly.

Voices boom behind me, not frantic but more amazed than anything, as if my flight higher is obscure.

I break the tips of the stickly foliage.

Brilliant blue with tufts of cotton pillow my surrounding, over and up and up. Downward, there are more pointed brown sticks with oval green flakes clinging to existence. Ahead I find tiny buildings. A white one. Brown ones. The largest of them all is paneled in a glinting metal. There, sounds of chaos peak my coals and compel my wings to slow. White and black spotted creatures stare up at my venture, and dusty blush-colored beasts make a disgruntled noise at my downward swoop. Cheeps gather my interest. I train my eyes to the high-pitched tweets, the noise calling to me distantly.