My Pet Human {UNDER SERIOUS EDITING}

Chapter Eleven: 'The Outside World'

"Where are you going, honey?" Lilly called out from the kitchen. Colton winced at the amplitude of her voice but tried not to show it when Ben looked over at him as he sat on his shoulder.

"Just to Mal's house, mum!" He yelled back. A smile bloomed on his face as he turned to Colton. "Ready?"

"Yes." He said, swallowing back his nerves. So this was it, he realised. For the first time in his sixteen years, Colton was about to see the real world. Sure, he'd been caged, abused, taught obedience and sold to Ben in his lifetime but not once— not even once had he seen the sky or smelt the fresh air of what lay beyond the Institute's walls. So it was understandable that when Ben placed his hand on the front door knob he asked: "What colour is the sky?"

Ben opened his mouth the same pained expression on his face as before, before he closed it again and sighed. "It's blue, Colt." He said. Colton wondered again what was wrong. Was Ben surprised that he hadn't been outside before? Wouldn't he have already known? His thoughts were interrupted when Ben shouldered the door open and light. Fresh, natural, clear light filtered into the room. That set him off.

Colton was crying again.

Whatever he'd envisioned the outside world as was a lie. A big, fat lie. For starters, he'd spent his existence dreaming of a world with a purple sky and strange blue buildings that glowed in the dark and changed colour and shape at will. He'd thought that all that would be out there were hundreds of symmetrical houses that were destined to be the homes of all the humans he'd met in the past. Back in the Institute, it was common to reminisce about life out in the open. Since none of his cellmates had any experience whatsoever with what lay beyond the walls of their tanks, imagination was all they had. And in this case, Colton's had been almost dead wrong.

As it turned out, the houses were symmetrical, each containing the same fences, the same gardens and the same structures and paint-jobs, but Colton hadn't expected a... road. Or cars... Or houses on the opposite side of the street... Or clouds that looked like fluffy marshmallows... Or the faint outline of a city in the distance.

Or, most importantly, nature.

Plants. Wild Pterodactyls soaring through the sky and perching on the rows of power lines. Each individual item, like a fence, or even a tree took Colton's already sore head a long time to fully register, but when he did, more and more tears fought their way past his eyes and down his cheeks in hot, salty droplets.

"It's beautiful." He breathed.

Ben nodded. "Yeah."

Ben knelt down on the footpath outside his blandly painted grey house and placed Colton on the scratchy concrete beside the grass surrounding the garden. As Ben stood to his full height, Colton really felt tiny. His owner's shadow cast an eerie darkness over him, that made the human swallow nervously. Colton tried not to express that fear too obviously as he began to walk towards the waist high blades of grass growing through the cracks in the pavement. The feeling of the leathery green against his fingertips made Colton go weak at the knees. He glanced back up at his owner, noticing for the first time the ball of fire that the Institute had labelled the 'sun' gleaming bright in the blue sky. Colton had never seen something so beautiful. He stared, transfixed at the greenery around him.

"Can you put me in one of those..." He took a minute to figure out what on earth the thing was... "trees?" He asked Ben with a smile. Colton felt strangely giddy inside as he watched Ben kneel back down and scoop him into his palm.

"Which tree?"

Colton pointed to a large oak tree with a tyre swing strung up on one of the thicker branches. Ben smiled and stretched his hand up to rest beside one of the branches near the fork of the tree.