Lethargy [open!]

[kneedles]

Falling from high places, falling through lost spaces,
Now that we're lonely, now that there's nowhere to go.
Watching from both sides, these clock towers burning up,
I lost my time here, i lost my patience with it all.

Crows fight over an exsiccated chicken carcass, though someone has already stripped it down to the bone and sucked away the marrow, abandoned tin scabs over with rust and the slabs of wood on a fence are peeling, and swelling with the last lingering traces of the rainfall, a picket hangs on its side like a loose, flapping tooth. Everything is waste. My hands have been scrubbed clean, red raw to remove the blood only I scrubbed too hard, ripping away at my own skin until tiny pin pricks of my own blood form on the surface of my skin. They shimmer and shine even though the sun is nothing more than a faint, buttery smear behind the industrial fog. It is fitting that the coins in my hand should be a little tainted with blood.

I slide a silver dollar, though it’s more a dull greasy slate colour now and battered now like a pipe on an assembly line, between my fingers. They are nimble as ever; twisting in this silly trick I picked up from my father, an illusion as the coin seems to flicker and disappear with each oscillation of my fingers. When you know the trick, the effect is lost somewhat and to me, my hands only appear heavy and clumsy. They fumble. Especially when it counts. I spread my hands apart and the coin seems to vanish, though of course I know where it’s gone.

There are excuses, of course, for my hands slowing. Sleepy dust builds up in the corners of my eyes the way that soot and tar travels through the air and blackens windows, my eyelids droop from an invisible pressure like two warm, thick fingers pressing down upon them and a thick knot of nausea coils and twists in my stomach the way that eels writhe in buckets. I am running a fever; I can feel it, the blood pulsing close to the surface of my forehead, broiling inside of my veins. There are excuses. But they aren’t enough. As I roll a cigarette and tuck it loosely into the head scarf raining in the frizz of my hair, a little damp and lacklustre with the sweat of the night’s efforts, a wave of something overtakes me, call it frustration, call it exhaustion, call it guilt or a fire building in my chest like a furnace, black smoke rising up through my wind pipe and out into the atmosphere. It’s a pathetic sort of sob, quiet and fleeting- a matchstick on a windy night.

“Quite a mess you made in there, my girl.” I hear a familiar rasp, an octave or two too low for the average woman. It sounds as desiccated and dry as the chicken corpse, slow and dripping with disdain as always. It’s almost comforting to know that however terrible I feel, my grandmother will always be there to make it that much worse for me. “If I were you I would have taken off.”

Turning to face her, I see my grandmother casually leaning against the little red brick wall of a house identical to the rows and rows of little red brick houses on little red brick streets, all in perfect lines, all like little red brick head stones in a graveyard. I grow weary of this little red brick life. My grandmother though, does not seem to care much about anything; she licks her dry chapped lips with a twitch at the crinkled and folded corners of her mouth that can only suggest that something is funny to her. There is a dribble of blood on the front of her floral, ugly smock pinny; she will have noticed it, but it will not have bothered her one jot.

I fight the urge to smash her face into the little red bricks. She would care about that at least.

“Coin, girl,” My grandmother holds out her wrinkled palm, the underside liver spotted and translucent, each blue vein standing out vivid and almost fluorescent. She cares about the money too, each dull grey and battered silver dollar, but honestly that is about it.

Sighing, I reach for my coin purse. It’s nestled in my carpet bag, which is fraying and worn at the edges, lurking underneath a stethoscope and a large bottle of antiseptic. Taking the bottom of the purse, I tip the money into my grandmother’s palm, hoping that a few coins will fall and I will get to look on with disdain as I watch my grandmother scrabble in the dirt for her blood money, pawing at cobble stones and frantically grab to stop a few pieces of silver from rolling into a rain gutter. I am denied this pleasure though as she curls her hand like the talons of a vulture and perfectly cups each coin like pearls inside of an oyster.

She doesn’t even look at the pile before shaking her hand impatiently under my nose, “And the rest.”

The ‘hmmf’ that escapes my lips is a feeble token resistance and I’m already reaching for the two coins stashed in the pocket of my pinny- ta-da, the coin hadn’t disappeared after all. It is nothing more than a routine between my grandmother and I, simply preformed mechanically to remind her that even though she bought me from my mother when I was a child that I am not a chattel, not her property but a person with thoughts and ambitions of my own. I’m not sure that my grandmother grasps this though as she snatches up the coins and squirrels them into her own bag greedily.

“Anyone would think I didn’t spend most of my wage feeding you.”

My wage, I think bitterly, but abstain from saying this for now. This last payment was hardly earned, in my eyes; there was a woman, but she’s dead now, a sheet stained with the swirl of blood like tipped crimson oil from the plastic refinery, there is a baby- who will remain in the present tense for but a short time, in a day or two I will be saying there was a baby. I fumbled and my grandmother knows this, I had a window and I failed to act in time when the sickly squall of blood played in my nostrils and in my mind.

“I’m trying to save up enough money to run away,” I tell her, my words phrased the way a sarcastic joke may be, though I am or course, being deadly serious. I wouldn’t even need to get far, I don’t dream of a life beyond the district walls, though I would perhaps take my chances with the wolves over my grandmother- I don’t care about freedom from the capitol, or about getting away from the thick clouds of tar and the lingering scent of burning plastics, at least not in a way that is achievable and realistic. I don’t even care about the Hunger Games. I just want to get far enough away from the shrivelled up shell of a woman in front of me.

Maybe if I wish hard enough I can sprout wings and turn into a bird, take off from the dim grey pavement and see what the smoke and the little red brick houses look like from above, rise above the smog that curls around our throats and surrounds us.

My grandmother’s mouth just twists into the grotesque approximation of a smile; ragged lips like a gaping wound drawing back to reveal teeth in autumnal shades of brown and yellow, jagged and at odd angles, like shards of bricks scattered onto the floor in no formation or pattern. “You think you’d have anywhere else to go, girl?”she retorts cruelly. Even though my fist curls into a ball, I know she’s right. My mother loved me less than the price that grandmother gave her for me and I feel strange and out of place among the people at school, like a loose fitting bolt hammered into a joint and bent out of shape. I have no one, and while the woman hasn’t fitted a tight chain to my ankle to stop me leaving her- she might as well have done, a physical manifestation of this emotional enslavement.

I smile sweetly, sarcastically at her but she knows that she’s got me, that her acerbic words have pierced my skin with ease, like the sharpest needles. In triumph, my grandmother reaches into my hair and takes my rolled up cigarette, slotting it into her mouth and striking a match, the smoke curling like blind worms.

“I’m going to market to buy bread and cheese. Go do something useful and try not to kill anyone else on the way,” she chuckles. Though it doesn’t show, I want to take a step backwards and clutch my stomach- it feels as though she’s punched me there and I’m winded, struggling to take in breaths. I want to open my mouth and gasp for air, and when I’ve recovered I want to seize a fist into her wispy grey hair, thinning at the scalp to reveal naked, infantile pale white flesh and tug and twist at the strands until parts of it snaps off in my hand like brittle dry twigs.

Instead, I make do with calling to the back of her retreating head, “And you should try not to fall and break every bone in your withered old body.” She hears me, but I don’t get to savour the look on her face at my comment; she doesn’t care enough to turn round. She doesn’t care about anything.

And though I try not to, I do. I care- too much if you ask my grandmother. You can try and close off, shut down like a sleeping boiler and ignore that ever present stench of death and decay, become cold and sarcastic and pretend that it doesn’t faze you when a woman or a child dies but, for me, this is only ever a complicated act, a performance and it isn’t real. On days like this, the curtain opens just a little and I get to glimpse the frail person behind it. I don’t like her much, though I appreciate her humanity after so much time spent with my grandmother who is as mechanical as any factory in the district.

Slumping against the red brick wall, my dress drags in the thin wet sheen glistening over the concrete and becomes muddy and watery. I roll another cigarette in shaking hands and light it, drawing my knees up to my chest. The end doesn’t touch my lips, a dry sob ventures from my mouth to meet it in the air in front of me. I want to go home, fall into sheets and curl my hands around my pillow, I have been up all night labouring with the dead woman and I feel as hollowed out and devoid of life as she is. The tears that begin to fall could be my spirit escaping my transient body, the choked sobs like a death rattle. I scrape my knuckles across the tarmac and wish for once I could feel earth beneath my fingernails.

I am aware of the exposure so I try and thrust my head into my knees, hunched over and turned in on myself like a tortoise retreating into her shell. From the outside, the shake of my shoulders could be with laughter. Though why anyone in district nine would think there was anything to laugh at is beyond me. Laughter, tears, genuine emotion- they are alien to the cold bite of metal, the heat of furnace flames, the mechanical workings of cogs and gears turning.

Maybe if I wish hard enough I can sprout wings and turn into a bird and just take off from the dim grey pavement, leave all this far behind me.

***

Where you been hiding lately, where you been hiding from the news?
Because we've been fighting lately, we've been fighting with the wolves.
With the wolves.
Red tongues and hands.

[semper]

Gavroche McCullie-St. Cloud

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It’s a slow day. A very slow day. Only a single soul has stepped foot into the tavern and by now, usually, there’d be at least ten or so people. But I guess something better has come up for everyone. I wish I could say the same for myself, but no.

It’s not that I hate the tavern – I love it, really; it’s my home – but sometimes I just want to get away. Be by myself for a while. Go explore the old hunting grounds. Can you believe that I’ve never seen the old hunting grounds even though I’ve been out of captivity for nearly three years? I haven’t been to a lot of places. But that’s alright; it just means I have more places to go discover.

I’m sitting behind the bar, elbows propped up on the counter and my head resting in my hands, when my Uncle comes the main room from the kitchen, saying that we don’t have any chicken. Instantly I perk up. ”No chicken?” I repeat, and he nods. That’s really not a good thing. The dishes that have chicken on them are usually the ones that sell the most. Uncle asks me if I want to head into town to get some – along with a treat for myself – and I nod. A trip to the District Square seems to be just enough to pull me out of the lazy doldrums of the day. He hands me some coins and I put them in my pocket. I run up the stairs to my room quick, put my shoes on, then head back downstairs and out the door.

Out on the streets, I’m careful not to get too close to anyone, even the little harmless kids. No matter how much I try to condition myself to it, I can never seem to get over my claustrophobia. I don’t know why. It’s particularly strange at home – the tavern, I mean – because I always leave my door and the window open, no matter what the weather’s like outside. It’s snowing? The window’s open. Hailing? Window’s open. Hotter than hell? Window’s open. The old rickety building doesn’t have any sort of air conditioning, so to keep us all from melting in absurdly hot summers, we keep the windows open anyway.

Once in the District Square, I weave my way around people, being sure to keep a good bubble of space around me. The place is crowded, but not as bad as it could be, so I’m thankful for that. The smells of all the shops and venders – sweets, leather, soaps, odd foods – all hit my nose and once. Combined, nothing smells too great, but as I pass individual shops and stands, their sweet smell s draw me in.

I stop at a sweet bread shop just to look around and admire the handiwork with the twisted breads and large heart-shaped outlines that are divided into three sections on the inside. Such an odd shape… I look at the label: Pretzels. The strange, yet oddly fitting name brings a smile to my face. Who in Panem would name bread such a thing?

[/color] I shrug the thought off and turn to look at the cinnamon buns, angel cakes, and pound cakes, feeling my stomach rumble. Everything looks so good and smells so sweet. In the end I get a loaf of twisted cinnamon bread, which I don’t hesitate to start eating as soon as I step out of the shop.

I then stop by a soap stand. My one-eyed uncle, though he refuses to admit it, loves scented soaps. Nibbling on pieces of the bread, I browse the wide varieties of bars: oddly colored ones, dark ones, white ones, ones with designs, and so on. I spot a particular bar that has what looks like pink flower petals in them. Picking it up, I bring it to my nose and smell it. Floral. My uncle’s a big, hefty guy, but he sure does love floral soap. I purchase the bar and put it in my pocket, heading off to buy chickens next.

The chicken stall smells horrendous to other people, but to me it’s normal. I gut and de-fur/de-feather all the animals we bring into the tavern to be cooked up. With the money that’s left, I buy four dead chickens. The seller straps all their legs together and then ties a rope to the strap to make for easier carrying. I thank the man, lay the rope over my shoulder so the chickens dangle at my back, and head for home, still nibbling the bread.

But this time, instead of going home the usual way, I decide to detour through the neighborhoods. The first one I come across is all red stones: the street, the houses, everything. It takes me a moment to soak it all in. I don’t think I’ve seen red rocks like this before… what are they?[/color] I look from house to house – they’re all identical. Completely the same in structure and coloring. Such a weird part of town.[/color] Not many people are on the streets either. I pass one scraggly-looking elderly lady heading toward town, but that’s it. No one else.

Things are becoming too similar. Did I already pass this house? No, I’ve been going in a straight line, I’m not going in circles.[/color] Even though I think I’m wrong, the thought is enough to make me stop and stand still. To gather my surroundings.

All the houses are still red and rocky. The street hasn’t changed one bit. I’m as good as lost, really. I only know one way back to the tavern. What was I thinking? I can’t go exploring by myself, I don’t even know my way around.[/color] I start to turn around to head back to town when something out of the corner of my eye catches my attention. A girl, maybe? I can’t tell. The person is hunched over, so I can’t see their face. They don’t appear to be moving – no, they’re shaking. I can see their shoulders faintly moving from where I’m standing. Are they alright?[/color]

I take a quick glance around. No one is wandering the streets. For a moment I consider leaving the person alone, but what if they’re hurt? What if they’re hiding from someone? Maybe I can help.[/color] I can hardly help myself, but maybe I can help them.

Cautiously I make my way over to the person, being sure to approach slowly. You can’t ever be too careful around strangers. ”Excuse me,” I say, sounding more timid that I had hoped to reveal. ”Are you alright?”

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[kneedles]

I am only asking for a moment. One instant to come unravelled at the stitching like a worn out sweater before I have to pick myself up again and go back to work. But the moment is as fleeting and transitory as everything else, especially the punctuation of these quieter spaces in my life, a comma, a period holding all of this misery in parenthesis. The space in the monologue where you’re supposed to breathe. The moment is gone, I’m simply mortified on my hands and knees in the dirt, the show is starting again and I’ve forgotten my lines. But bear with me a second and they will come back to me.

The tip of my cigarette dulled and dampened out as I was crying, so I relight it again and mutter around the tip “My hero.” My nose is bunged up, dripping a little with the salt of my tears so I wipe it on my sleeve along with my eyes and cheeks; it makes my voice sound more nasally than usual, an octave or two too low for a woman as well. I sound a little like my grandmother with all this hurt and smoke in the back of my throat and that is far from a comforting thought.

Shifting a little, once I am satisfied that my face betrays no indication that I have been emotional in any way, I allow myself to look up. The nonchalant way I release a curl of smoke from the smallest gap between my lips has been studied from my grandmother. Look at me; I don’t even care enough to exhale properly. Beneath the veneer I am splintering. I have to look up quite far; the boy is a never ending totem of legs and straggly sinew and I wonder, as I always do, what his birth weight was. Strangely enough, it is impossible for me to separate grown people from the squirming infants they have been long ago. My mother laboured for a long time with me and I was long overdue as a baby- perhaps a primitive knowledge, inherent in the womb but long forgotten under a wave of adult information, meant that I had already decided that this life, this place was not worth hurrying to. I was reluctant to leave the warmth and safety of my mother’s body for the cold air and the heady smell of burning coal and bubbling plastics.

Pulling myself off the ground, I fight not to release a guttural groan; my bones age faster than anything else, like poorly oiled hinges and I imagine the coppery tint they have taken on like rust. There is a little brown bottle of fentanil- one of the medicines we use in difficult, long labours (like we can afford morphling here in district 9!)- in my carpet bag and it is singing to me, sugar coated on the outside and ready to slip down easy, it’d dull these red brick houses and the throb of pain in the back of my head.

“Just resting,” I tell him, close enough now to his height to make out the whorls and rings in his eyes just beneath a curtain of black hair like a burial shroud, their colour is fresh but I can tell that whatever innocent there was there has been washed away, colours on cheap fabrics slipping in the rain. “I was looking at all this broken glass and rubble and I thought to myself, this is an excellent place to take a quick nap.” It’s supposed to be funny. It isn’t. My brain is murky, the lights in my synapses lost behind a fog. I was comfortable enough, though after years of interrupted sleep I am as fitful in rest as a rabbit, on edge even as I lie, always waiting for my grandmother to come in and throw my carpet bag at my head saying quickly, “we’re on in five, girl’. If I sleep tonight, it will be bathed in crimson, permeated by the gargling cries of the dead woman and the dying baby. Fentanil, fentanil, fentanil.

“Sorry, I haven’t slept in about fifty hours,” I say sheepishly, thrusting my hand into my hair and knotting my hand through the tangle of curls the way I am prone to do when I am uncomfortable.

That’s enough girl, I hear my grandmother say in my ear. She gets as sharp with me in the streets as she does during labour if a male shop assistant lingers to make polite conversation or a father tries to talk to me when payment is handed over before a birth. The words ‘that’s enough, girl’ usually imply the subtext, ‘don’t be a whore, like your whore mother’ and then, sometimes it isn’t subtext and she simply barks that at me in full view of whoever is present. My grandmother is sly and secretive and discreet whenever the price is right, but when it comes to humiliating me, of course she will call my mother and me a whore on a busy market day without batting an eyelid. I wouldn’t even claim my mother was a paradigm of virtue, but when it’s my grandmother saying it I almost have to bite my knuckles to keep from scratching at her eyes. The rest is ludicrous; my mother was beautiful and I look like a spider.

A knot of rebellion compels me to stay and talk to this boy just for the hypothetical notion that if she were here, she would be angry with me. It has gotten to the point now where this woman informs everything I do even if she isn’t present. Every action is considered with her in mind, usually hoping that, whatever it is, she wouldn’t approve of it. My grandmother has twisted though my brain like bindweed, rope or chains.

But, oh, just look at him as timid and as dark haired as a chough venturing out for grubs and seeds. It was a tentative question, more to politely check I wasn’t on the verge of death, not an invitation for a presumptive girl to start a conversation. I am hungry for interaction away from my grandmother, more to check that I actually exist and am really not just one of her limbs, or an object like a stethoscope in her bag than anything else. I think therefore I am, but usually I think what grandmother tells me to. I blink and the street seems wispy and frail, like a formation in the clouds shifting into a different shape before my eyes. I should stop bothering people.

A duck of my head, in thanks and a garbled, “I have to go now.”

Only...which way was it that the old bat went? These streets have always looked the same, and it was dark when we got here. My father read me a story once when I was a child, from an old book and a far off world about a brother and a sister lost in the woods. They used gingerbread crumbs to create a trail (or am I confused, the memories of my father are muddy at best) that they could follow home. There is broken glass, chicken bones and candy wrappers here but nothing to lead me home. Casting desperately around, I realise I am lost in the labyrinthine world of little red brick houses, my head still swimming with my fallen tears and the heavy curtain of lethargy.

I almost want to pitch a tantrum, drop my carpet back and let my face crinkle up as I wail at the sky. But I don’t. The effort of sucking effortlessly on my cigarette and folding my arms coldly is a momentous one.

“You don’t know the way out of this place do you?” I ask in a dry voice, “Or I could just wait until the North Star comes out and navigate.” I haven’t seen the stars shine through the smog in district nine in about four years, to me they are the kind of made up things you find in story books like dragons, mermaids and happy people.