d8f 🐀 setta furey / fin!

What's the point of  these Games? Kids are still dying out here everyday anyway, Ma asked. She spat out her tobacco. It landed splat next to my foot. I shrugged. She said it all with the straightest face you can imagine that first year they put the tributes interviewing on T.V.; she didn't give a fuck about the kids on screen, whether they were from Eight or not. Wasn't sure she cared about the kids on the street either. Not like Ma was really from Eight. This is just where she got stuck. I was four when the war ended. Ma was twenty. As she tells it, the war itself was already punishment enough.

They took everything from me, baby, she used to tell me. She used to stroke my hair when I was small, but her grip always got tighter the longer it went on. Then they left me with you and I was supposed to be happy. I took it that she wasn't. 

Ma, was daddy a rebel?

Ma, was he a Peacey?

Setta, your daddy was a ghost.

I didn't know what she meant at first. For a while I was scared I was half haunted or something, until she started seeing men again. Ma brought them home but they were always gone long before then. When they actually left, she drank like a fish, blamed me for it. She called them her boyfriends, but I figured out they weren't. 

Ma, I said, screamed, It's your own fault they all go! You piss away the money you're supposed to be giving them!

She tossed me out that night. It didn't stick. Two weeks later she was tearing apart the city looking for me, and when she found me, she wrapped me up all tight, brought me home. The place stunk, like normal. My blanket stunk worse than usual, but I let her wrap it around me anyways. The next day she was back to ignoring me again. She had a shitty little walkie that she used to talk to the woman two floors down, who was just as bad at her except she had no daughter of her own to blame it on. Ma just talked to her all day, even when she said something meant for me.

Setta won't stop getting into fights. Useless girl. Comes home covered in dirt with roadkill in her bare hands. Disgusting.

But once I had it cleaned up and cooked, she ate it anyway. I liked watching her eat it. I think it was the only time I liked her. 

I made my own money from then on by poaching animals, skinning them, and selling on their pelts. Ma insisted I was from Eight because she had me here, but I always felt like maybe I was from wherever she was before, whatever place she forgot.

.

Just like last year, Ma watched the interviews chewing tobacco and mending her work clothes. I sat on the floor, stretching a badger skin over a frame to dry. Same again, she asked what the point was. I didn't answer again, though this year I knew. I taught myself the answer, one so-called piece of roadkill at a time.