catamaran 'cat' stowe | d4

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

catamaran 'cat' stowe
district 4
eighteen

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

This is how you wound up crawling through a dark tunnel with no light at the other end, scrapes and bruises on your knobby knees, while the whole earth trembles overhead from mortar shells marring the surface:

➣ You are twelve and the only one who fits.

➣ Desperate hands dug the tunnel from a root cellar, under a trapdoor, under a rug, under a bed, all the way outside of the siege lines. You never knew whose. The couple who lived there always looks relieved to see you. And sad.

➣ Your cousins' houseboat — if you can call it that; it's more of a pontoon shed with two-stroke outboard motor on the back — moves down the coast and up the rivers at a reasonable clip, unassuming, unaffiliated.

➣ Someone needed to fill the holes in the splintered supply chain.

➣ Everyone had the good sense not to ask where the goods dumped on the dock had come from.

➣ Not a week after your aunt's militia moved to the frontlines, your brother ran off to play pirate with the Strangways boys.

➣ You have three consecutive birthdays without so much as a stale piece of saltwater taffy.

➣ Your parents, both longshoremen, were disappeared during that strike ('Wildcat,' a voice calmly tucks you into bed, 'just like you') before the first blood of war was even drawn.

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

It was never just stuff.

Your cousins, peddling ammunition and provisions, brought salvation to the people. Tangerines, bubble gum, cigarettes — you dealt in humanity.

It wasn't profiteering; how worthless was gold to someone dying of thirst? You were messengers, all of you Stowes and Runners, smugglers tying the shipwrecks of society together. What good was a box of bullets on a dock in Four if the fighters on the frontlines had nothing to load in their rifles? A captured grain silo means nothing to a hungry child halfway across the country.

Quick on your feet, or maybe just young enough to avoid scrutiny, you were always the best at talking your way out of trouble. The way you could look any authority in the eye and lie, despite what was at risk, has only ever been an asset. Besides, even when the whitecoats were poking through your packs with the muzzles of their weapons, there was no reason to be nervous. You were ten; you were invincible.

Was it cowardly, the way you made sure you were never the one holding the best and the worst of your haul? Or was it just a matter of logistics? It was too much to ask of you to make sure that things like dynamite and gunpowder made it into the right hands. Let your cousins worry about the serious stuff. Besides, you'd made a habit of trading for trinkets.

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

You remember exactly when your fascination with wartime treasures started:

It was the fourth drop, some captured medical supplies bound for District Two. Closer to the start of the war than the end of it, you suppose, although the way that time passes when you're traveling it's impossible to say. You'd paced all the hospital hallways, made eye contact with sick kids losing their lunch at the nurses' station, and even gotten scolded for mashing all the buttons on the barren vending machine as though you might hit the right random sequence to summon snacks from some secret stash in an alternate universe. You didn't need another sweet; you still have half the tiny bottle of maple syrup from your trip to Seven some months prior. But it seemed like it was worth a shot anyway.

Banished by an administrator and your cousin both, you wander around the ER lobby looking for anything to entertain yourself with. The sad fishtank against the far wall, drained of everything save for a sunken plastic pirate ship and a mountain of aquarium rocks, holds your interest for awhile, until a girl your age tugs on your sleeve. She shifts the crying toddler in her arms from one hip to the other to hand you a set of comic books. They're almost a decade old, but it doesn't matter because you've never read them before. It's not like any kind of comic is still in print these days. You take a seat and tear into the comic, stealing occasional tastes from the syrup bottle in your pocket. It's not until you've devoured the first issue in its entirety that you think to share.

Half an hour passes, flipping through the faded panels of explosions framed with barbed wire, a masked antihero who monologues in poems and riddles, faceless shadows with guns, a damsel learning not to be distressed. You pass the syrup to your new friend. She takes a sip, studying you before handing it back.

"Orphan?"

You shrug. "Who isn't?"

She shrugs.

Your cousin comes to collect you right as you get to the good part.

"Keep them."

You try to hand the comic books back to your new friend, the fussy toddler now demanding her full attention.

"I've already read them a dozen times. Keep them."

Grinning sheepishly, still uncomfortable receiving something for nothing in these dark times no matter how many times you've given more for less, you tuck the booklets inside your jacket. In an impulse you commit to an exchange, swapping the syrup for newer treasures.

The way she beams is worth it. She gives you a shy "Thanks" before your cousin tugs you towards the door, failing to mask her impatience. Three more stops on this excursion, and the houseboat is a sitting duck in the river this close to the headwater. "Yeah," you agree over your shoulder, reciprocating her smile, "you too."

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

It became a compulsion after that. The weeks blurred into war-torn months, bled into bloody years. Your cousins delivered the invaluable — a sack of cornmeal, handfuls of iodine tablets to make water potable without starting a signal fire, sweet potatoes with purple sprouts bursting from their eyes, bullets of every caliber, the odd tin of antibiotic ointment. You swapped rarer goods. A rebel soldier with a trench war buzzcut that left her ornate mahogany comb useless, traded for the very last clementine you'd see for years, traded for a pouch of stale tea leaves, traded for three birthday balloons, traded for a fistful of butterscotch candies an old man fished from his sweater pocket, still wrapped in tissue so rumpled it was falling apart at the edges.

Some people gave you extras as thanks — you understood that proud impulse and never refused their handfuls of dried peppers or nips of cilantro-infused moonshine or dented harmonicas. You always tried to pay it forward. With so little in life left to indulge on, you felt powerful to make someone else feel special.

Sometimes you wish you'd kept a ledger, tracing these small exchanges across the country. There was something about knowing there were invisible threads that tied complete strangers together that felt deep in a way that you, at thirteen, could not quite articulate. You liked knowing. The syrup from the old man in Seven became comic books in Two, became a bar of rosemary-scented soap in Nine, became a handful of gum balls distributed to children in as many districts. Tinned sausages became cigarettes, jars of spices became a set of dominos, a mostly-unused tube of lipstick became a copper bracelet, and so a series of strangers were bound together with only you performing the rites.

Even after the war, pinned down to your district and the ocean beyond, you ease yourself to sleep retracing the paths aloud. Mittens become marshmallows, you murmur aloud to the lighthouse searchlight casting spiderweb shadows on your wall through the damaged window, as though this is incantation to be performed by moonlight. Marshmallows become lip balm, transmogrification of the desperate sort, lip balm becomes toilet paper, or did swapping one luxury for another not qualify? toilet paper becomes pearl earrings, Even years appraising dispensable goods, you don't know how they compare. Pearl earrings become half a chocolate bar. How do you rank things that are so different? Chocolate becomes toothpaste. It's all subjective, circumstantial, variable down to the minute of the day. Toothpaste becomes puzzle cube. Puzzle cube becomes coffee. You could keep yourself awake forever shuffling the exchange order. Coffee becomes key limes. It wouldn't change anything. Key limes become dreamless sleep.

[gm bourgeois decadence [aya]]

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