How to Escape a Gilded Cage - Katherine Roberts
This summer, I've been thinking about different kinds of prisons and the various ways people find to escape them. Of course, first you have to recognise you are actually in a prison, since many are gilded cages in disguise. Apparently, we will all soon be living in a virtual Panopticon, whether we love gold or not... and how did THAT happen without anyone noticing? But I'm not attempting a dissertation on social engineering in this post; I merely write fiction to entertain the inmates. So before you all rush off to Google 'panopticon', here is a (very) short tale of mine from the 1990s, first published in an alternative women's fiction magazine called QWF. This story was inspired by ancient Greek/Turkish legend and, although I never name the characters, you should have little trouble guessing who the famous husband is. * The bars at the window were gold. The bed was gold. The single chair was gold. A golden blanket flowed stiffly to a golden floor. T...