neelwrites/Stresemannstraße/watchmeflyhigh/whatpegmansaw/200words/03/07/2017

Today Pegman takes us to Berlin’s Stresemannstraße in the former GDR.

Feel free to stroll around the area using the Google street view and grab any picture you choose to include in your post.

To enjoy stories inspired by the What Pegman Saw prompt or to submit your own 150-word story, visit the inLinkz button:

Hosted by J. Hardy Carroll at https://whatpegmansaw.com/2017/07/01/berlin/

COME, WATCH ME FLY HIGH

GENRE: HISTORICAL FICTION)

 

By Neel Anil Panicker

Tonight I leave.

Bid adieu to the oppression, the darkness, the madness that defines my life now.

They loved me. Or so I thought. At least that’s what they led me to believe.

As proof they came in hordes, watched me perform, cheered lustily when I flung myself high up in the skies, somersaulted, did the trapeze.

But it’s all over.

Now, I’m their enemy. They’ve clipped my wings. Grounded me. Banned me from performing. Stolen my breath and soul.

All because I asked for my due. Demanded be paid my worth, not the pea nuts that they hurled at me. In their eyes I’m a marked man for the few more Marks that I asked for.

And so I’m leaving; escaping my tormentors; escaping from a lifetime of servitude.

They have a term for what I plan to do. It’s called treachery; the punishment: instant, brutal death.

I know I may fall, those machine gun toting guards high up in the watchtower may riddle my body with a thousand bullets.

I don’t mind that; accept that as my fate.

I still want to escape. To fly high. To, hopefully, do the trapeze, but this time for audiences who love me, for real.

©neelanilpanicker2017 #WHATPEGMANSAW#FICTION #203words
(HISTORICAL BACKGROUND)

Trapeze artist Horst Klein was banned from performing in East Germany because of his anti-communist beliefs. So, he used his tightrope skills to flee to West Berlin. “I couldn’t live any longer without the smell of the circus in my nostrils,” Klein told newspapers at the time. In December 1962, Klein scaled an electricity pole near the Berlin Wall and, dangling high above the guard patrols, inched his way across a disused power cable. His hands numb from cold, he fell from the rope and broke both of his arms, but he had landed inside West Berlin.