Nora Haskell // district two

[Deleted]

[atrb=border,0,true][atrb=cellPadding,0,true][atrb=style, border: 937D86 solid 2px; width: 497px; padding: 0 0 0 0px; border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px 0px;][atrb=cellSpacing,0,true][atrb=width,500,true][bg=000000] The piano is not firewood yet But the cold does get cold So it soon might be that I'll take it apart, call up my friends And we'll warm up our hands by the fire

[/i]

In kindergarten, I learned that black isn’t a color. Honestly, I might as well have just skipped directly to first grade. Everyone’s favorite unit was the rainbow unit. Our teacher told us that there were seven colors in the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, but she was wrong and I knew she was wrong because my mother told me that every existing, visible color is in the rainbow, even colors we can’t see! One day, we were supposed to make a picture that captured all seven colors in the rainbow and of course, most kids made fields full of vibrant flowers or houses filled with decorations; but I drew a black hole. Nothing but

Black.

“Black’s not in the rainbow, silly,” Ms. Rosenberg said, leaning over my shoulder to take a glance.

“Black is the rainbow,” I retorted with such fervent enthusiasm. My mother said that when you mix every color in the rainbow together, it makes black, and I trusted my mother more than any kindergarten teacher.

“Nora, I think we need to listen to directions more often.” She handed me a new sheet of paper. “How about some flowers? Let’s draw a pretty picture this time!”

And I spent recess crying because no one could see that my hole was beautiful. [/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

I learned more from my mother than I did from four years of elementary school.[/i] Even to this day, I always carry extra copper in my purse, and I must accredit that idea to my beautiful mother. We used to walk the extra-long route to school just to pass the less fortunate streets of District Two, every beggar getting a portion of the change from my mother’s pockets. [/i]It was an everyday ritual, and sometimes I wonder how much money we’ve lost if you count all the pennies up.

Not enough.[/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

My parents brought my sister home in a fuchsia blanket that so accurately matched the vibrant eyes she wore. She had curly dark brown hair and bright blue eyes just like me. They named her Ramona and it made me sad to see her shorten it to Mona in the years to come, as if she didn’t expect people to have time to pronounce a full two syllables;[/i] but I promised her I always would.

♦ ♦ ♦

Our parents tried to put us into games training at an early age, just to see if it was provoking any sense of interest; but Mona was too small and I was just a wimp with no excuse.[/i] My mother wanted us to pursue something we loved, so while everyone else in my school carried that perpetual ambition of being victor of the Hunger Games, I dreamed of being a teacher with a red apple on my desk. I sat back and listened as my friends complained about training or their parents and I was generous with my advice because I liked my little corner of the world.[/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

My mother loved the color cerulean. She hung cerulean drapes around the house the instant we moved in. When I think of her, those cerulean drapes are the first image I see, the strongest of all colors, and yet the most sad. I always thought of my mother as the sky, where birds fly and stars take people’s dreams and craft them into hope.[/i] Despite her broken wing, she continued to soar for I never saw her cry, even when my father spat words at her faster than a lemon yellow lightning bolt striking the earth;[/i] and each night after that happened, she’d sit next to my bed and tell me that sometimes you just have to give people what they want, you just got to let things run their course because there’s no use fighting it. You gotta be strong,[/i] she said. You gotta keep going. The few times my mother did fight back it ended in physical violence, but she told me not to say anything. She told me she was working it out. If only I hadn’t believed her. [/i]

My mother was the strongest woman I knew and even though I cried every week beneath my peach bed covers for her, I did what she told me to do.[/i] I didn’t argue with my father; I just let things run their due course. It was the worst decision I’d ever made because when I was ten, she didn’t come home from her trip to the market. The more we searched for her, the more distressed I became; who was my mother to abandon her family? I could hardly believe it; because then that cerulean sky, which had seemed so strong, nearly crumbled to the ground. Sometimes, when we look up at the sky, we see this beacon of strength full of things that fly and stars that sing, but other times, we’re looking for someone we lost.[/i] Although I’m not religious, I still look up at that cerulean sky and squint, trying to make out her face in the clouds or her voice in the wind or something – looking for some hope that her story didn’t end without an ending. [/i]But I know she isn’t up there and I wish the stars would stop lying to me. Ramona sat down at the piano that week and she learned our mother’s favorite song: the one she’d always play while dinner sat on the stove. I listened silently from my room, wishing that the music could fill more than just the gaps in the silence.[/i] At this point, I didn't know anything more than my mother's name.

♦ ♦ ♦

I wish there had been a funeral because everyone wears black to a funeral. Someday, I bet all the world’s colors will come together to form a black hole that will entrap the world – the same black that appears at the very end of a movie, just before they start rolling the credits.[/i] People think black is a dark color, but it’s just the color of an ending; and we all need endings, despite the often unfortunate outcomes. Without any ending, we’ll be stuck on page 274 for the rest of our lives without ever knowing the words of another book; yet, there was no end in my mother’s story, no colors coming together to give anyone the answers they wanted.[/i] Instead, I felt like I was drowning in the white of blank pages, an entire lifetime of truths erased. Blank people I’d never seen before came and went, trying to comfort me with words like, “I’m so sorry, Nora. Such a nice lady, your mother was.”

But the nice people are the ones destroying the world, letting men walk all over their feelings and leaving their children scarred in the end. Nice people are liars with smiles, sucking the meanings out of real words and using them to merely cushion the ground beneath their own fall.[/i] At my funeral, I hope that people don’t cry over the loss of a nice lady. I hope they cry over the loss of an honest, confident, strong, considerate woman who had more to contribute to the world than just a false sense of security.

So when Mrs. Burbanks told me about my nice mother, I responded with, “Nice? You know what, Mrs. Burbanks? You’re nice! You’re so very nice and I sure hope you take that as a total dishonor to your character!”

Just kidding.

It went a lot more like, “Thanks, Mrs. Burbanks,” and then another stream of tears as I leaned against her shoulder because I used to think cerulean was a pretty color. [/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

My new life looked like a sepia photograph. When the peacekeepers found out about how my father had treated my mother, they removed Ramona and I from the house and placed us in the community home. Sepia walls, sepia halls, so contrasting to the cerulean drapes and the walls the color of grapes. Outside of the rusty window near my bed I saw beggars with cardboard signs, but I had not a copper penny to give. [/i]We did our chores and we ate our meals and there wasn’t much else to say about those first couple of months, until the day I woke up and Ramona had spontaneously gone missing: another series of white pages when all I wanted was a black sky.[/i] I snuck out several times to wander the district, but the world was too big and I was too small. I searched every inch of the community home until I found a quiet storage room full of quiet boxes and a quiet chestnut piano, buried beneath the silence. I opened it up and the world wasn’t quiet anymore. [/i]

And I learned the song that my mother played, that Ramona played.

♦ ♦ ♦

It wasn’t long until a girl with vanilla hair, probably just a couple of years younger than my sister, wandered her way into the storage room. There was something wrong with her head, something that made it difficult for her to speak; but she seemed fascinated by the piano, fascinated enough that I taught her the couple of things I knew. For too many years, the girl, Fanta, was the only pleasant company I had, and I took care of her because I was too lonely not to. [/i]Then, just like everyone else had seemingly walked out of my life, I had to walk out of hers.[/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

When I was little I wanted to grow up and be a strong woman like my cerulean mother, but I learned to be even stronger the day I turned eighteen and walked out of my sepia world. [/i]With the funds from my mother’s trust, I was finally allowed onto the pistachio green grass that was now the road to my new life. I went to college, I bought a house, I survived. [/i]I became a therapist, ready to take on others’ problems having mostly gotten over the many disappearances that had saddened my past.

But I was happy, so happy that I covered the walls in canary yellow and decorated the house with antiques. When I wasn’t tumbling through files and files of information on my clients, trying to psychoanalyze all of it and create some sort of big picture that supposedly explained the world, I was finding something beautiful and spontaneous to fill my time; but almost always something lonely -- beautiful and colorful and lonely.[/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

At some point, I realized how huge a mistake I made leaving Fanta, the girl with the vanilla hair, in the community home without any family. When I went back, she was gone; had she really reached eighteen? I couldn’t imagine such a broken girl surviving the real world. Then again, I guess it’s just how you rearrange the pieces. [/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

As of today, I am a twenty-six year-old female therapist living comfortably in District Two and yet I’ve never kissed a man before, never had a sip of alcohol, and the only date I’ve been on was completely accidental. I don’t go to parties or big social gatherings; I’ve never enjoyed big crowds, especially when all they do is stand around and fill the silence with words that soon lose their meaning.[/i] I like to understand people, not just see the surface layer of their morals; because I only saw the surface layer of my mother and look what happened there. Too many people have disappeared from my life, but I won't be next to disappear from theirs.[/i]

I live through other people and their exciting endeavors. I listen to their issues and try to shape their decisions so that my mother never happens again. I don’t want to be like everybody else: I feed squirrels in my backyard, I make chalk drawings with the kids next door, and I play the piano once in a while, but one thing I don’t do is let people walk all over me. [/i]I’m not a nice person; I might be considerate, kind, and patient, or at least I hope so, but never nice.[/i]

I don’t know how I feel about marriage; white is a frightening color, especially having spent so much time trying to cover it up by filling the blank pages with a sea of color.[/i] After years of being cooped up in the community home, I don't where I'm going most of the time, but I don't need a buoy to hold onto; I can learn to swim by myself.[/i] Never will I let my marriage to end like my mother’s did.

♦ ♦ ♦

I realized that you can’t explain the world in just but a few colors. Sometimes our hearts are painted with a little cerulean or a bit of magenta or even salmon.

If you wanted to define the world, you could do so in black and white. Black is the end and white is the beginning.[/i] However, if you wanted to explain the world, you could use an infinite number of existing colors, not just the seven that my kindergarten teacher taught me.

Which is why I’m not waiting for cerulean to be my favorite color again.[/i]

♦ ♦ ♦

codeword: odair

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[charade]

Vivid.