fawn granger, district seven } fin

[4m dagger thane 🗡jay]

fawn granger.

fourteen
district seven

[4m dagger thane 🗡jay]

This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.

[4m dagger thane 🗡jay]

I remember when the sun used to rise, when it peeked over the crowns of the evergreens and kissed my rosy cheeks with its light. I remember when I was five and perched in my father's lap while he held my pudgy little hands and painted secret pictures in the watercolor sky that he said only I could see. I remember when I begged and begged my dad to buy me this tiny tea set with pretty purple butterflies on them and he used the last of his paycheck on it as long as I promised to invite him to the gaudy tea parties I would have. I remember when Papa took me to the forest where he worked and we danced on fallen tree trunks and sang the songs he taught me since I was born at the top of our lungs.

And I remember the way he held my mother and I the first night that gunshots started to echo and tear apart the sky. I remember when all I could smell in the air was ash and gunpowder and I felt like I was suffocating. I remember when the picturesque town streets I used to play hopscotch on with all the little neighborhood kids became a war zone. I remember when my father's friends came to our house one night and put a rifle in his hands. I remember when he clutched me tightly to his chest with his trembling hands and teary eyes and whispered, "I'll be back soon, little doe. Everything will be ok." I remember that he lied.  I remember that he left that night and never came back. I remember that the last memory I have of him is when he cried an ocean of tears in our living room and left for the last time with a gun tucked between his arms.

I remember that we had no body to bury.

I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember. I remember.

It all comes back in flashes. They haunted my dreams like a phantom and clung to my heart like a shadow — eating, living, consuming inside of me. It was as though my own heartache was a parasite, dripping poison through my veins and making my heart fracture into a million little pieces over and over and over again till I felt nothing.

Till I could no longer recognize the girl whose hollow reflection stared back at me in the mirror.

I was twelve when I took my father's old guitar that was caked in layers of dust from the years in sat in the corner of our house and played the songs that he used to sing to me every night before bed. For the first time in years, I could feel a warmth spread through my fingertips as I strung the chords and the melodies he used to sing fall from my lips. It was like Papa was there, guiding my hands with his own with each hum of the strings. I went home empty-handed and heavy-hearted, dragging myself home with tears threatening to well up in my eyes. The night I got home was the last time I saw my mother feel anything since we buried nothing in the ground after the war - she saw his guitar in my trembling hands and cried a river for hours through the night.

And I woke up again and did the same thing, playing his songs every day after school for anything I could get - I was so hungry that my stomach felt like it was eating itself. And I woke up the next day and did it again and again and again.

And each time I could feel him there, by my side the entire time.

[4m dagger thane 🗡jay]

L△LIA

[L△LIA]

Accepted! <3