Lethargy [open!]
Apr 5, 2012 12:12:52 GMT -5
Post by kneedles on Apr 5, 2012 12:12:52 GMT -5
Falling from high places, falling through lost spaces,
Now that we're lonely, now that there's nowhere to go.
Watching from both sides, these clock towers burning up,
I lost my time here, i lost my patience with it all.
Now that we're lonely, now that there's nowhere to go.
Watching from both sides, these clock towers burning up,
I lost my time here, i lost my patience with it all.
Crows fight over an exsiccated chicken carcass, though someone has already stripped it down to the bone and sucked away the marrow, abandoned tin scabs over with rust and the slabs of wood on a fence are peeling, and swelling with the last lingering traces of the rainfall, a picket hangs on its side like a loose, flapping tooth. Everything is waste. My hands have been scrubbed clean, red raw to remove the blood only I scrubbed too hard, ripping away at my own skin until tiny pin pricks of my own blood form on the surface of my skin. They shimmer and shine even though the sun is nothing more than a faint, buttery smear behind the industrial fog. It is fitting that the coins in my hand should be a little tainted with blood.
I slide a silver dollar, though it’s more a dull greasy slate colour now and battered now like a pipe on an assembly line, between my fingers. They are nimble as ever; twisting in this silly trick I picked up from my father, an illusion as the coin seems to flicker and disappear with each oscillation of my fingers. When you know the trick, the effect is lost somewhat and to me, my hands only appear heavy and clumsy. They fumble. Especially when it counts. I spread my hands apart and the coin seems to vanish, though of course I know where it’s gone.
There are excuses, of course, for my hands slowing. Sleepy dust builds up in the corners of my eyes the way that soot and tar travels through the air and blackens windows, my eyelids droop from an invisible pressure like two warm, thick fingers pressing down upon them and a thick knot of nausea coils and twists in my stomach the way that eels writhe in buckets. I am running a fever; I can feel it, the blood pulsing close to the surface of my forehead, broiling inside of my veins. There are excuses. But they aren’t enough. As I roll a cigarette and tuck it loosely into the head scarf raining in the frizz of my hair, a little damp and lacklustre with the sweat of the night’s efforts, a wave of something overtakes me, call it frustration, call it exhaustion, call it guilt or a fire building in my chest like a furnace, black smoke rising up through my wind pipe and out into the atmosphere. It’s a pathetic sort of sob, quiet and fleeting- a matchstick on a windy night.
“Quite a mess you made in there, my girl.” I hear a familiar rasp, an octave or two too low for the average woman. It sounds as desiccated and dry as the chicken corpse, slow and dripping with disdain as always. It’s almost comforting to know that however terrible I feel, my grandmother will always be there to make it that much worse for me. “If I were you I would have taken off.”
Turning to face her, I see my grandmother casually leaning against the little red brick wall of a house identical to the rows and rows of little red brick houses on little red brick streets, all in perfect lines, all like little red brick head stones in a graveyard. I grow weary of this little red brick life. My grandmother though, does not seem to care much about anything; she licks her dry chapped lips with a twitch at the crinkled and folded corners of her mouth that can only suggest that something is funny to her. There is a dribble of blood on the front of her floral, ugly smock pinny; she will have noticed it, but it will not have bothered her one jot.
I fight the urge to smash her face into the little red bricks. She would care about that at least.
“Coin, girl,” My grandmother holds out her wrinkled palm, the underside liver spotted and translucent, each blue vein standing out vivid and almost fluorescent. She cares about the money too, each dull grey and battered silver dollar, but honestly that is about it.
Sighing, I reach for my coin purse. It’s nestled in my carpet bag, which is fraying and worn at the edges, lurking underneath a stethoscope and a large bottle of antiseptic. Taking the bottom of the purse, I tip the money into my grandmother’s palm, hoping that a few coins will fall and I will get to look on with disdain as I watch my grandmother scrabble in the dirt for her blood money, pawing at cobble stones and frantically grab to stop a few pieces of silver from rolling into a rain gutter. I am denied this pleasure though as she curls her hand like the talons of a vulture and perfectly cups each coin like pearls inside of an oyster.
She doesn’t even look at the pile before shaking her hand impatiently under my nose, “And the rest.”
The ‘hmmf’ that escapes my lips is a feeble token resistance and I’m already reaching for the two coins stashed in the pocket of my pinny- ta-da, the coin hadn’t disappeared after all. It is nothing more than a routine between my grandmother and I, simply preformed mechanically to remind her that even though she bought me from my mother when I was a child that I am not a chattel, not her property but a person with thoughts and ambitions of my own. I’m not sure that my grandmother grasps this though as she snatches up the coins and squirrels them into her own bag greedily.
“Anyone would think I didn’t spend most of my wage feeding you.”
My wage, I think bitterly, but abstain from saying this for now. This last payment was hardly earned, in my eyes; there was a woman, but she’s dead now, a sheet stained with the swirl of blood like tipped crimson oil from the plastic refinery, there is a baby- who will remain in the present tense for but a short time, in a day or two I will be saying there was a baby. I fumbled and my grandmother knows this, I had a window and I failed to act in time when the sickly squall of blood played in my nostrils and in my mind.
“I’m trying to save up enough money to run away,” I tell her, my words phrased the way a sarcastic joke may be, though I am or course, being deadly serious. I wouldn’t even need to get far, I don’t dream of a life beyond the district walls, though I would perhaps take my chances with the wolves over my grandmother- I don’t care about freedom from the capitol, or about getting away from the thick clouds of tar and the lingering scent of burning plastics, at least not in a way that is achievable and realistic. I don’t even care about the Hunger Games. I just want to get far enough away from the shrivelled up shell of a woman in front of me.
Maybe if I wish hard enough I can sprout wings and turn into a bird, take off from the dim grey pavement and see what the smoke and the little red brick houses look like from above, rise above the smog that curls around our throats and surrounds us.
My grandmother’s mouth just twists into the grotesque approximation of a smile; ragged lips like a gaping wound drawing back to reveal teeth in autumnal shades of brown and yellow, jagged and at odd angles, like shards of bricks scattered onto the floor in no formation or pattern. “You think you’d have anywhere else to go, girl?”she retorts cruelly. Even though my fist curls into a ball, I know she’s right. My mother loved me less than the price that grandmother gave her for me and I feel strange and out of place among the people at school, like a loose fitting bolt hammered into a joint and bent out of shape. I have no one, and while the woman hasn’t fitted a tight chain to my ankle to stop me leaving her- she might as well have done, a physical manifestation of this emotional enslavement.
I smile sweetly, sarcastically at her but she knows that she’s got me, that her acerbic words have pierced my skin with ease, like the sharpest needles. In triumph, my grandmother reaches into my hair and takes my rolled up cigarette, slotting it into her mouth and striking a match, the smoke curling like blind worms.
“I’m going to market to buy bread and cheese. Go do something useful and try not to kill anyone else on the way,” she chuckles. Though it doesn’t show, I want to take a step backwards and clutch my stomach- it feels as though she’s punched me there and I’m winded, struggling to take in breaths. I want to open my mouth and gasp for air, and when I’ve recovered I want to seize a fist into her wispy grey hair, thinning at the scalp to reveal naked, infantile pale white flesh and tug and twist at the strands until parts of it snaps off in my hand like brittle dry twigs.
Instead, I make do with calling to the back of her retreating head, “And you should try not to fall and break every bone in your withered old body.” She hears me, but I don’t get to savour the look on her face at my comment; she doesn’t care enough to turn round. She doesn’t care about anything.
And though I try not to, I do. I care- too much if you ask my grandmother. You can try and close off, shut down like a sleeping boiler and ignore that ever present stench of death and decay, become cold and sarcastic and pretend that it doesn’t faze you when a woman or a child dies but, for me, this is only ever a complicated act, a performance and it isn’t real. On days like this, the curtain opens just a little and I get to glimpse the frail person behind it. I don’t like her much, though I appreciate her humanity after so much time spent with my grandmother who is as mechanical as any factory in the district.
Slumping against the red brick wall, my dress drags in the thin wet sheen glistening over the concrete and becomes muddy and watery. I roll another cigarette in shaking hands and light it, drawing my knees up to my chest. The end doesn’t touch my lips, a dry sob ventures from my mouth to meet it in the air in front of me. I want to go home, fall into sheets and curl my hands around my pillow, I have been up all night labouring with the dead woman and I feel as hollowed out and devoid of life as she is. The tears that begin to fall could be my spirit escaping my transient body, the choked sobs like a death rattle. I scrape my knuckles across the tarmac and wish for once I could feel earth beneath my fingernails.
I am aware of the exposure so I try and thrust my head into my knees, hunched over and turned in on myself like a tortoise retreating into her shell. From the outside, the shake of my shoulders could be with laughter. Though why anyone in district nine would think there was anything to laugh at is beyond me. Laughter, tears, genuine emotion- they are alien to the cold bite of metal, the heat of furnace flames, the mechanical workings of cogs and gears turning.
Maybe if I wish hard enough I can sprout wings and turn into a bird and just take off from the dim grey pavement, leave all this far behind me.
***
Where you been hiding lately, where you been hiding from the news?
Because we've been fighting lately, we've been fighting with the wolves.
With the wolves.
Red tongues and hands.
Because we've been fighting lately, we've been fighting with the wolves.
With the wolves.
Red tongues and hands.
