the aftermath // mylee, train blitz

[Deleted]

|| JACINDA ZEMBORI || DISTRICT EIGHT ||

♚
i'm a ghost of a girl that i want to be most ,

Momma didn't come to say goodbye. Maybe because she knows that I'm a lost cause, or maybe she couldn't hold herself together well enough to say goodbye. The reason why she didn't say goodbye to me doesn't matter. The bottom line is she didn't come to see me one last time. A million apologies from her would not heal the wound she has created in my heart.

I feel abandoned, empty, and alone, although I am in the company of my district partner, Owen Bowers-Fox. He is a stranger to me, but I can't help but feel comforted that we have one thing in common: we are sacrifices. We are going to the Capitol for the Capitolites' entertainment. We'll let them dress us up like dolls, cheer for us, control us, and then mourn for five minutes over our brutal deaths. I have that in common with all of the tributes, all but one: the Victor, the lucky one that gets to live.

My dark thoughts summon tears to my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I won't let myself look even weaker than I already do, especially not in front of a fellow tribute. I look like I'm a younger child than I am, about fourteen or fifteen, with my ridiculously short stature and noodle-like limbs. It wouldn't be very difficult to divide me into two with a weapon.

I fight back the tears with all of my might, but despite my efforts, a fat tear streaks down my cheek, but I wipe it away, hopefully before Owen saw. My legs are trembling like crumbly pillars during an earthquake, and my heart is pounding in my chest like a bird desperately trying to escape from a cage. I'm on the train to the slaughterhouse, and there's no going back. I'm trapped like an animal in this metal, snake-like form of transportation.

When the train begins to move, the urge to cry is greater than ever. My heart has been violently wrenched out of my chest by the absence of Momma, and taking a final glance at the gray, polluted District Eight only reminds me of my abandonment. I want to curl up on the strange, expensive furniture in the train and bawl my eyes out, but I can't, not here, not now.

I try to distract myself by talking. "That was brave," I blurt, glancing at Owen. My words come out quieter and more high-pitched than I intended them to. "What you did . . . volunteering for Duncan. Is he your brother?"

All I can think is, I wish I could be that brave.

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owen {♔} bowers-fox I figured that Duncan wouldn’t bother to show up, as he wouldn’t know how to answer my stares and sighs. However, no sooner than I had sat down in one of the wooden chairs, in he came, with a heaving chest and trembling hands. He didn’t say much, just sitting down in the chair opposite me and staring until he could no longer hold my gaze, at which point he cast his eyes to the ground. I could hear him crying, each tear accompanying his heavy breathing, and I reached across the gully of silence between us to lay a hand on his back. He was supposed to be comforting me, but again the roles were reversed, and I was going to have to carry the both of us. I simply can’t do it—wasn’t saving you enough? What more can I do for you? Our time was ticking away and it was going to be wasted by his confusion. He didn’t realize that my worry for him hadn’t only begun with that slip of paper, no, it began when he started walking out of the house as the sun fell from the sky. It started with nights where I tossed and turned for hours because I was worried about the baby brother that refused to listen to reason. It was going to end here; it was going to end as soon as I stepped on that train. This was a domino effect that would only end with my death, and neither of us had to be good with words to realize it. He put up no fight as the guards came in to tell him our time was up. He only put his hand out, and his grip was weak as I began to shake it before pulling him into one last hug. “Take care of Cody, and Mom, and Dad, and please Duncan, if you do anything for them, stay with them after I’m gone; they’ll need you more than you realize." The train’s rickety motion jolted me from my daydreaming, as did the words that came from the silent girl that sat across from me. ”That was brave, what you did… volunteering for Duncan. Is he your brother? The answer slips my mind for a moment, as I pause to ask myself if he really is—was my brother. I’m not going to be to come home to call him that anymore. “Yeah,” The word feels wrong, like a lie slipped from the mouth of a child when asked if they stole the last cookie from a cookie jar. “He was my youngest brother, and I had to show him th—that he mattered. That he wasn’t as uncared for and unappreciated as he made himself out to be.”

[Deleted]

|| JACINDA ZEMBORI || DISTRICT EIGHT ||

♚
i'm a ghost of a girl that i want to be most ,

I wonder if letting go hurts. I have had the privilege of never having to let go, up until now. I have to let go, I know, but I am torn to ways. One half of me wants to hold onto everything—my mother, friends, morals, and mercy—but the second half of me wants to shoot it all to hell. I am in a tug of war between the first half and the second half of myself, and I don't know which side to pick.

My world will be pain in one week from now. I will be trapped in the Arena and forced to pick of cold steel and slice the delicate skin of my opponents. We'll all be fighting for the same thing: our lives. It's kill or be killed, and I still wonder which one I will choose I do not want to die, but I do not want to take another person's life to save mine. It is a selfish, monstrous thing to do, but desperate people will do desperate things without dwelling on their horrible actions after the evil deed is done.

Will this boy choose to kill? I wonder. Will I?

But I have no answer.

Once again I have wandered away into my swamp of thoughts, and I am grateful when Owen interrupts my thoughts with words. I despise stressing over what my future will look like, what choices I will make. Owen's response saves me from disappearing into my own hell.

"Yeah. He was my youngest brother, and I had to show him th—that he mattered," says Owen. "That he wasn’t as uncared for and unappreciated as he made himself out to be."

It would be a shame, I think, to see Owen's face in the sky, after what he has done. He saved someone—doesn't he deserve to live?

We all do, for now, at least, I remind myself. We are children, but not for long. Soon we'll be monsters.

"Do you think dying hurts?" I ask. As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I regret them. "I'm sorry. That . . . that was rude."

My question was meant for myself, I suppose.

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owen {♔} bowers-fox The girl sitting in front of me reminds me strangely of Duncan. She’s got this same look of being conflicted that I occasionally saw cross Duncan’s face when he was sure that no one was looking. He would scowl as soon as he saw me glancing in his direction, and he’d storm off. I was sure that Duncan was stuck under a rain cloud that none of us could see, for he hardly seemed happy, or even content, whenever he was home. I never knew what we did to upset him so badly, and I would often stare out the window in confusion as he stormed off to some unknown destination. It was pointless to go after him, as the one time I had bothered to follow him I got distracted by a girl whose name I never even found out. All I remember was that the way smoke curled from her lips was more than magical, and I watched it drift high into the sky while the thoughts of following my brother drifted away with it. Her words catch me off-guard, as my words had been followed by a silence that hung heavy in the air. However, now she seems quick to fill it with something—anything, and I suppose that’s why she blurts out the question: “Do you think dying hurts?” Which is quickly followed by: “I’m sorry, that was rude.” But the question doesn’t strike me as rude at all, it strikes me as realistic. I know what my stand is on the topic, but I fumble over trying to put my answer into words, whereas Duncan would already be halfway through a page long spiel on the effects of death and the emotions they bring about. “I believe that it depends on the situation. Like, say you’re bleeding out on the ground from a deep gash? I’d say that hurts pretty badly, as you have to sit there and think about how you’re going to die and who you’re going to lose. But if you were say, decapitated? I guess that wouldn’t hurt at all.” The thought in itself scares me, and my mind immediately drifts to the fact that I may be in that same position in just a few days, bleeding out and having to realize that I’ll never feel Cody’s hand on my back as I lay sobbing over my drawings, or that I’ll never see my stupid baby brother as he slams our bedroom door. It’ll all be gone. That in itself is more dreadful than the thought of having to kill another, and for the first time since I heard my brother’s name called, I let a tear fall from my watery eyes. I’ve never been the strong one, and I can’t fake it for long before everyone realizes that I am, in no way, a hero.

[Deleted]

|| JACINDA ZEMBORI || DISTRICT EIGHT ||

♚
i'm a ghost of a girl that i want to be most ,

I expect my district partner to stare at me like I'm a headless chicken. If I were in his place, I would brush it off by saying, "I don't know," or maybe I would take a moment to contemplate what plunging into oblivion will feel like, and then start to sob.

But Owen doesn't do any of these things. Instead, he gives me a straight, serious answer. "I believe that it depends on the situation. Like, say you’re bleeding out on the ground from a deep gash? I’d say that hurts pretty badly, as you have to sit there and think about how you’re going to die and who you’re going to lose," he says. "But if you were say, decapitated? I guess that wouldn’t hurt at all."

I try to make my mind conjure the scene of my death, but I can't quite picture it. There is a blurry image in my mind of a dark haired girl, mangled and bloody, lying in someone's arms. I can't make out her features, but I'm almost certain that this corpse is me. The image slowly becomes clearer the more I focus, but as soon as I begin to recognize my own face on the dead girl's body, I allow the image to fade.

A tsunami of tears is rioting inside of me and threatens to spill over the rims of my eyes, but I hold my tears back with all of my strength. Thinking about my inevitable death only summons more tears to my eyes, but I can't help thinking about how I'm going to go. I know that there is no escaping death and that when I die, everyone's going to forget about me. I will be just another face in the anthem, a face that will have no meaning, a face that will fade from the memories of people over time.

"That makes sense, I guess," I say softly. My voice is shaky from the tears that threaten to fall, but that doesn't stop me from talking. "I wonder if there's something after . . . after death. Like some sort of afterlife. Maybe we just walk around in the dark for eternity—that's how I've always imagined afterlife."

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owen {♔} bowers-fox If I had a choice, I don’t know whether I would’ve preferred the conversation at hand or complete silence. The clamor of the train and those scuttling about were enough to keep me content, for I could focus not on what was inwardly occurring but that which sat just outside the panes of glass that held us in. They were thin, a boundary so deceitful that it would seem to be very simple to break out and run free, lost in a world that I didn’t know anything about. However, that was when we were closer to our destination, passing though districts one and two. As we had left eight, the scenery got a little nicer, but not much. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a shock, for we had heard of the lack of rain that plagued pretty much everywhere, but it hadn’t hit close enough to home for us to realize the real extent of its damage. However, no matter how much I wanted to sit in silence, it wasn’t the same choice of option from the girl across from me—Jacinda, I believe? She was contemplative, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that if Duncan was on a ride of this sort—ripred forbid he did, he would be following the same train of actions as this girl, asking questions and not letting silence fill the room for more than a minute at max. I had done my best to give this girl a straight answer, but I’m sure that the words I spoke only troubled her more than comforted her, for my words have always come out in a manner of lesser comfort than I intend. So my spiel about death, my thoughts on the way life rushes from a body, were not intended by any means to cause her concern, rather than lay to rest the undeniable truth that dying most likely will hurt, and it’s a pain both of us will experience in the future. She begins to talk about what she believes to be after death itself, but I can hardly pay attention as my mind’s caught in voids of other places. Halfway through the end of her thoughts my mind snaps back, and I realize that I should be formulating another philosophical response to her question. But this time, I don’t have one. I’ve never thought about death because I never imagined it to be lingering at my doorstep at my age, but apparently, it’s been creeping to my door for the last year, waiting for my two words of heroism to turn into my own death sentence. So as she finishes her thoughts, I do her the courtesy of glancing her direction and nodding before looking out the window and saying to myself (or the world just outside), “Yeah,” and even quieter than the proceeding word had been, “I guess we’ll find out when we get there.”