Fragments. II. [Yani / 93rd]

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

★

Yani Izar

What could you tell them about your best friend?

“She’s stronger than she gives herself credit for.”

You’re the dream of any confectionary capitolite looking for ratings boost from a lower district interview: your unruly curls have been pressed bone straight with a hot comb so that they sit your shoulder; you in your mother’s rouge red lipstick for the first time; you a vision in a green taffeta sweetheart swing dress freshly pressed (reminding you of your quince).

When they’d said you’d be interviewed, there hadn’t been a question of if but when.

Not because you wanted to – the ring light is too bright in your eyes and there are too many people you don’t know loitering in your father’s office. A man holds a boom overhead and out of frame. He had asked you where he could get something authentic but not spicy before they’d all gotten started. Another watches the interview from a double chair behind a set of screens, still another at a computer, all chrome and new and far beyond the green and black screen that sat on your father’s desk.

A pair of men in white armor stand just in the hall outside the doorway.

They’d taken all his things out of the office and replaced them with velvet chairs and marble table decked with metal bowls and a vase dotted with chrysanthemums and peonies. Behind you is a collection of photos of boys and girls you didn’t recognize – perhaps famous elevens from long ago?

You hadn’t long before they’d whisked you from the door to the chair. It was as though you’d never been here before, in spite of the many days you’d spent hours doing homework alongside your father at the mayor’s desk.

On the opposite wall stationed behind the cameras and out of shot were the faces of every family member you’d ever lost in the games.

You try not to stare at Salome or Sarina who seem ready to cry out from their picture frames. Or Gabriel, whose face only brings guilt. You settle on Beñat, whose smile reminds you of your father’s.

‘You all were close?’

At twelve, Haizea Izar had come crashing into your life – or rather, you’d fallen like a star into hers.

All the calamity and heat of two young kids that knew nothing and perhaps everything of what it meant to be alive: summers were soda pop and star watching; winters spent keeping warm in the kitchen teaching all you’d learn from your grandmother about spice, salt, heat, and acid; spring for gardening and whispering about boys who looked a little too long; and the fall leaf piles and cinnamon apple cider around bonfires on the old hill.

“I spent every second I could with her since the second we met. She was selfless. Haze did the right thing, even when it might not have been the best thing.” You have so little time to wrap her up in such a neat little bow, but you’d manage. “I taught her where we came from and she taught me there’s so much I don’t know still.”

They hadn’t been wrong to choose you, had they?

The daughter of district eleven’s infamous Mayor Vasco Izar. Youngest child who’d lost a sister and countless cousins to the games. Still young enough herself to be reaped – or volunteer.

A girl who never said she could not because like her father, she would do best for the district, and her family, above all else.

In the face of defeat by the capitol, she, like all Izars before her, would meet the world with a dogged determination, unyielding hope, and a smile.

‘Tell us something you think we should know about Haze.’

In the little bag at your side sits a rosary that Marisol gave you when you were eight.

She’d never pushed you to believe in God, much less something organized to live your life rigid as to what was good, or right.

But she taught you stories of people who could struggle through adversity and still retain every bit of who they’d been. That we could be more than our suffering. That pain and grief were part of life but could consume us if we had nothing else to live for.

And above all that to courage was not stories of one person who rose above others, who faced down a dragon or army and did the miraculous.

Courage to you was showing up each day as you had before and attempting the impossible – of hoping for the best, and doing your best – to try to make the world a little better than you found it.

“She thought she never knew who she was. That maybe she was still learning all of that before she left.” Your voice is crisp enough that the man with the mic gives a thumbs up. “But I think that’s just how we’re made to feel. That none of us are good enough, or strong enough.”

Your words border treasonous and out of bounds. And yet a smirk cracks the corner of the camera man’s lips.

“Haze hasn’t gotten this far because of luck. She always knew who she was,” You lick your lips, throat dry, “She kept her heart open. It’s what I loved most about her. And people forget how strong that makes you, to know how to see the good in other people.”

She’d seen the good in you. She’d had to have for all the hours you’d dragged her around the district. Practically a shadow at her back, the two of you had found a stride that sang like a song; iced cream and gossip, tears over things easily forgotten, arguments over the silly and serious, you found a heart that hadn’t been meant to be missed.

“She was my best friend.” A pair of hands to hold on a Saturday afternoon when you’d been feeling lower than low; someone to laugh over dance lessons for your quinceañera; a shoulder that carried enough weight when you could scarcely hold any; somehow as definitive as the statement had been, would never do it justice.

‘And if - well - can you tell us what you’ll do, what you recommend – if she doesn’t come back to you?’

Your sister would’ve knocked the microphone out of their hand. Probably would’ve walked out of the interview. Your brother would’ve reminded them that exploiting your trauma let them into something they didn’t deserve. But you?

You stiffen your back and place your hands into your lap.

“They always come back.” You find the words, despite the heat on your cheeks or the lump at the back of your throat, as though you hadn't thought about the casket you might see, “Not always how you imagine. But you find them again. And yourself, too.”

‘And if you could tell Haze something right now, what would you tell her?’

You’d scared yourself the day she’d been reaped, tossed aside by peacekeepers for your little rebellion.

You were only in this chair because your father had pardoned what you’d done.

Just a privileged little girl who sat pretty for an interview that wanted nothing but blood and grief.

You’d pounded on the door and screamed like a child when they’d locked you in this same room that day, forbidden to see Haze until she’d long left for the capitol.

It was a wonder what concealer did for a black eye, wasn’t it?

“Te quiero,” You start, and you don’t hear your words then, the microphone cut, picking up only the English that followed, “Come home to us. Please. I don't know what I'll do if you don't.”

elegant

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

★

Yani Izar

She’s tired.

Her whole body aches. From the space between her shoulder blades down through her stomach, along her calves to her toes, she can’t help but feel that each of her muscles has corded up and rebelled against her. With every step an ache that pierces deep into her heart, pain enough to remind her that this is your life, Yani Izar, so show everyone what it means to grieve.

Show them that this is the same girl who has laid lilies on the graves of her sister, cousins, great aunt, and others, too. Because death has come to your life the same as the first fall of snow, ready to make the world anew and wipe away everything that had come before. But soon enough it would fade away, turn to black, and disappear.

But first she had to pay her penance, to walk the town square and bow her head as solemn as she could and apologize for her pain.

Whisper out your sorrows, girl, tell the world how much Haze had meant to you, her power, her strength, tell them what was robbed from this world. Ignore the blood she’d extracted from the boys and girls to do so, don’t look too closely at how for almost a hundred years, nothing has changed so much as the last names of those who have come before her.

And what makes you so special in your pain? What part of you lets your grief rise from this cracked earth like a sunflower, ready to burst yellow and black to shine? Who are you to speak as though your pain could ever compare to the mothers and fathers that have lost? Do you know, Yani, do you know what it means to bleed and die and yet continue to walk each and every day without a part of your heart?

Your father has lost his daughter, has been the Sisyphus of Eleven, turning back up that hill with his boulder. And he offers you the same kind words, his shoulder, his heart beating so close to yours when you cry that you feel as though you might dissolve into nothing.

If only she could disappear into the sun and stars and become nothing, because that was all there was here, for a girl of sixteen without her best friend. Without Haze.

Even if she survived to eighteen like her sister and brother, what life would she have if – to watch each year the same turn of the wheel, a different hand reaching into the bowl to pull out a name, to taste the ash of death when it comes back in a pine box or to have to bow your head to another who earned what your sister, your cousins, could not? What life was this, to go on and on without a change, to believe, in her heart, that the world would ever work out for someone like her, for her children, if at any moment it could all be burned to the ground?

Just as they’d done to Casco Viejo, flames licking the skin from her bones, the hallways of her home ignited, the ash pouring up into the air so that all that could remain were stories. Memories that lived, breathed, and died between generations.

She didn’t want to die as much as she wished the pain could kill her.

Kill me instead, she’d wept at the television because she was young and she could not imagine, could not fathom how she would get through this.

The lights had all been out, save for the television. Her father had been doddering in the justice building and her mother looking over briefs for court. Distracted from the bird’s circling overhead. Yani sat alone, cocooned in patchwork, left to watch each time Haze came across the screen.

And then, she died.

Violent, foul, and common.

A heart breaks. A young woman wails.

Mournful sounds that could summon the ghosts from a century ago shake the home. She is a magic that could raise them, that would raise them, if she knew a way. But her heart is firm, and her eyes have never lost sight of what was real. Her magic will always be what she can see in others, and the world, and find beauty.

Her bones still ache even after all the tears and her throat swells, scratched and battered. But she is not done, a fire now inside of her, to break and burn and destroy whatever could make this feeling this – the epitome of this panem – restless hopelessness.

For what could they do to ever pull the yokes from their necks, the same ones that, no matter how hard they tried to look up at the stars and sky, kept them pointed to the ground?

Burn, slash, destroy, maybe, maybe, maybe it could feel good to remove the aching energy.

Her hands spoke for her – tearing down posters in her room, smashing her boxes of rocks, throwing the movie tickets from their days together into a fire, heaving heavy glass bottles against the side of the house, she could not make them quake in fear against her but she could destroy. She was not hopeless, and she was not helpless.

She had grown up from the dry earth under a harsh sun and become that sunflower reaching toward the sky. And no matter all the wilted flowers around her, the heat, the horror, Yani Izar could remain defiant.

She’d spent so much time suffocated by the history she had never bloomed into her present, that her presence was both the accumulation of all those who had come before and herself, here, and now, daring to become what they could not.

She would not let yourself great sadness without ache. She would not forget what they have done. She would risk peace if it meant an end to this hurt (for everyone).

But first she would mourn herself.

And here she came to find the strength of the Izars: that no matter what had been said of them before, they could find the best of themselves in moments of darkness. Her father, mother, aunts, uncles, cousins were the web that kept tighter than a spider’s web on her fall.

Find strength in the common and casual, the moments that history could not record, save here and now.

Her mother brushing back the hair at Haze’s funeral (I love you, she whispers through tears); her father’s forcing her on a horseback ride out to quarry to watch a sunset; her cousin Alfer on the front porch with a blunt that let her laugh her head into outerspace; each one weaving tighter underneath of her, so that even as she fell into that darkness, she felt the soft place to land.

So that tears that could have soaked into her bones and left her brittle slipped past.

She could rise when she was ready, anew, full of flame.

elegant

[marguerite harvard d2a (zori)]

★

Vasco Izar & Yani Izar

Vasco Izar digs a trowel along the edge of a planter’s box to dispatch of the weeds that have sprung up around his budding tomatoes. Clouds tumble past the sun now and then casting shadows as he sweat through his tee shirt and jeans.

He favors working the land now, even if it’s been years since he’s had to pace the fields with his fellow districters. Ten years on the line would’ve ground his bones and done away with his knees; fifteen under the hot sun would’ve threatened his heart. He’d have died out there in those fields had he not won the election. Had he not stayed focused on each day as much as he had the last.

Yani drags a gloved hand along the topsoil.

Grief has not been burned to cinder and ash. No, as much as one might’ve expected to rise she would find that every morning was another familiar ache of her heart. A single look at a photograph could choke the back of her throat. A bite of cinnamon toast would have her think of breakfast with Haze, not for any reason in particular, a day before school had started – but her face crossed her mind all the same.

“I don’t want to be here.”

‘Oh. Well. Huh.’ Vasco leans up from the dirt and wipes a hand across his forehead. He smudges more across his face and scrunches his nose. ‘You could head inside then, maybe fix something to drink for us.’

“No, I mean,” Yani shifts onto her butt in the cool of the dirt and soaks in the shadow of clouds rolling by, “I don’t want to be here. In eleven. Anymore.”

‘Hmm.’ Vasco searches his daughter’s eyes. ‘Well, we can talk about it.’

“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m going.” Yani gave a shrug and shifted onto her knees. She grabbed a weed with her fist and gave a hard pull. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

‘Okay.’ Vasco is quiet. He knows not to take it personally, his daughter grieves as easy as she does because he has taught her so well. She’s comfortable saying exactly what she means, even if the edges were sharp when his heart was soft. ‘Okay, I understand. You want to spend some time away.’

“You’re not listening to me.” She’s sharper, still, and claws at more dirt, “I don’t know if I can be here. I just.”

He leans forward on his knees but doesn’t edge closer to her. She’s closed her eyes and he knows that the next move is hers.

“Everything about this place is miserable right now.” Yani’s voice is soft but the edges could cut him to the quick, “You know that?”

‘I know,’ Vasco could not disagree with his daughter even if he thought there was so much that they had that other people did not, and so instead he says, ‘I know.’

“And I feel like I’m coming out of my skin,” She shifts back onto her knees and rolls her shoulders, eyes still closed, “Like everyone is looking at me and I just,” She heaved a sigh, “I want to be somewhere else.”

‘You don’t have to go anywhere,’ Vasco says with a hush, ‘You can stay up a Marisol’s, she won’t bother you…’

She laughs but it gets caught in her throat.

“Emmanuel said you’d do this.” She throws his son in her face and Vasco can feel the sweat trickling down his neck now, “You want to fix everyone. You know that Dad?” She turns with one hand planted on the earth, “And I love you, but you just – every time someone gets hurt you rush in like you can patch them up and make them feel better. And maybe, maybe I don’t want to feel better. Have you ever thought of that? Have you ever thought that maybe I’m mad? That maybe I’m allowed to be mad?”

‘I – yes, I know, I just was saying,’ Vasco feels short of breath, unmoored by his daughter’s anger. ‘You don’t have to be alone.’

“And you don’t even know why, do you?” Grief could be ugly, too. She’d grown up swallowed by it, protected from it, shadowed by it, and now, she wanted it to consume her. She’d never felt so powerful as when she was angry. Angry about having to wake up early. Angry about how the other girls in her grade gossiped about the stupidest shit. Angry that her father bled and died for the people of eleven, and they’d just as soon crucify him if it meant an extra day’s bread.

‘Hey,’ Vasco lifts his hands in defense, quiet enough the wind might steal his voice, ‘I know you’re hurting. You can say what you need to say.’

“Don’t DO THAT!” Yani’s voice carries far enough that a stray chicken lets out a cluck. “Don’t. I don’t want you to make me feel better. I want you to be mad. Can you ever just be mad? Can you? Do you even care that they’re dying? Do you care?”

‘That’s not fair.’ He chews his teeth together, ‘Yani, that’s not…’

“They took her and she lived and she died, her life was miserable, do you know that?” Yani loves the fire, tastes the flame. Grief white hot. “You know, you always talk about how bad Elias is but at least she knew where she stood with him. He was always going to leave her to die. We just stood there and let it happen.”

He waited for her to be finished. He didn’t speak but watched how her hair clung to the sides of her face.

“People would have respect for you if you stood up to them about anything.” Yani moved to stand. She brushed the dirt off of her jeans and stared down at the shadow she cast. “But all you do is just enough – just enough to make things better for a little while, and it doesn’t change a thing.”

‘You don’t mean that.’ Vasco says through a whisper. He doesn’t let his blood boil – he’s had too many children who’ve been teenagers – but he is tired. He’s seen too many sunrises to bet that tomorrow wouldn’t be a new day. ‘Some things we can’t take back once they start, Yani. I’m trying to be the first, but not the last of us.’

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, Mayor Izar.” Yani strips the gloves from her hands and tosses them into the dirt. “Don’t step too far out of line for us. They might punish you.”

‘Yani,’ He whispers in a plead.

“They might come and burn our houses to the ground. They might, they might tell us what we can speak. What we can eat.” She takes a step closer. “They might come and kill us, too.”

‘Go cool off,’ Vasco says with a wave of his hand. ‘Go cool off and tighten up.’

“Don’t worry. They won’t take your daughter. Again. You’d have to do something that actually threatened them first.”

‘ENOUGH.’ He stands, then. The raw nerve struck, at last.

She’s surprised even at herself. She can’t speak, her throat tight. She doesn’t choose him, though.

She walks to the donkey’s stable to while away the afternoon burning.

elegant