The boy and the bog (standalone)

Out past the farms that lined the horizon, the land was flat and often marshy even in the driest summers. There was a site that Scutcher’s father used to take him to where farmers would discard their old, broken down equipment which was so thick with slick wet mud churning into quagmire that they said that you could throw just about anything into the bog, from a rock to an entire threshing machine and it would never be seen again. The earth would just swallow it up whole and hold onto it. As though those marshes were alive and always hungry.

“See you don’t fall in,” he remembered his father saying, strong hands wrapping around a broken water tank and hauling it to the edge of the sinkhole. “But if you do, don’t struggle. You’ll sink faster…just stand completely still and I’ll come get you.” Because Scutcher’s dad had cared back then, or at least the little boy had thought he did (now Scutcher wasn’t so sure), he’d believed him. Taken those words to heart. Don’t struggle, you’ll only sink faster. I’ll come get you.

When?

Scutcher was up to his ears in the sinking, slipping mud, simply waiting with all of the struggle, all of the fight and all of the fire choking in the muddy waters. But a brave resignation to all of this sinking wasn’t the right turn of phrase for it. That suggested acceptance, that hopeless strange exquisite calm that washes over a person faced with an abyss. For Scutcher, there was only the sinking; every thought in his head getting swallowed up somewhere that Scutcher couldn’t get at it, never to be seen again.As though he was both the bog and the boy drowning in it.

It made things hurt less, it made it easier to get things around the farm done and if he didn’t struggle then perhaps he could go on gasping at air for a little longer, without the feeling of choking and tightening around his windpipe the way that Scutcher could so vividly recall, hand tracing those burnt on welts around his skin like sinister tattoos. But it was hardly living was it?

What a pathetic little life you have, Scutcher, he could hear the marshes whisper, tickling at his ear with the slurry.

Perhaps that was why- in his own strange, sad way- Scutcher was looking forward to the interviews even if they were the portents and the signification of the beginning of the end . Noreen was slowly sinking into the mud too, the bad time and the reapings but also all of the good things too; like her smile, how soft and kindly she would speak to him and the way her name felt when you spoke it. Nor- the long ooor sound pulling his mouth round and into something questioning, the answer in the long eee of een that drew the lips up at the corners so that you could never say it without smiling. Noreen.

He’d changed his shirt when Tallow came to fetch him, picked out one of the cleaner, freshly pressed ones that he almost never wore around the farm. Don’t ask him why. He knew that he’d be able to see her but she wouldn’t him, but somehow it felt right to do it.

His sister seemed oddly strained even if she smiled at him, taking his hand and wrapping hers tightly around it, “We gotta go, Scutch,” she said hurriedly though they still had plenty of time to take the walk into town, marching with a purpose from his bedroom, dragging Scutcher along with her with enough force to pull his arms off. “Mom and Dad, are they…” he started, feebly, enquiring why they weren’t stopping to wait for their parents. The interviews were mandatory for everyone, after all. But it wasn’t so out of the ordinary, to Scutcher; Tallow preferred not spending much time with their parents after all, probably just wanted them to stand together to watch it, away from Mom and Dad.

What was out of the ordinary however was that she led him to the bottom of the yard, through the thick mud and out to the pig arks, opening the gate that kept them penned in and to the edge of one of those old tin can pig houses, turning to autumnal shades with their thick coatings of rust that had stopped being safe places for Scutcher some time over the last few days. She stooped down and was swallowed up by the darkness, after a few minutes poking her head out to say in a clipped voice, “Scutcher get in here.”

He couldn’t think why but when Tallow spoke like that it was normally far easier just to do as she said. Crouching onto his knees, sinking into the mud, he crawled into the pig house as Tallow struck a match and lit a lantern that she must have brought down, because it didn’t belong in the pig ark normally. The glow rose through the pig house and where it should have been warm it only seemed sickly and jaundiced. In the light he watched her organising straw and hay, making him wince at how easily she could disrupt the pig’s home which they liked to keep very tidy indeed; even though people thought pigs were dirty. But people were always wrong pigs.

“What’s happenin’?” he asked. “I thought we were goin’ into town.”
Tallow turned to him, very seriously and placed her hands on both of his shoulders. “Aint no one gonna make you watch nothin’ you don’t want to, Noodle, I promise. Mom and me got it all worked out, and we can hide out in here until it’s over and mom says it’s safe.”

Frowning, Scutcher couldn’t understand what she was saying, why Tallow and his mom were doing this. They’d always gone to watch the interviews in town, right back to when they were both babies; fussing and being very bored with standing around and simply watching people talking. They’d always gone and now more than anything he wanted to watch them, wanted to see Noreen, so he just couldn’t understand why Tallow was making out like this was for him.

And she loved the interviews, always said so. Yet if she hadn’t, it was always obvious- even to Scutcher as her eyes lit up watching all the dresses and the outfits. More recently she’d even started bringing notebooks to the interviews, frantically scrawling in her unreadable chicken scratch and drawing in the pages, always smiling on the way back home, talking and talking and talking excitedly in a way that she didn’t do all through the rest of the year. It didn’t make any sense.

“I want to go,” he insisted. But Tallow shook her head.

“No you don’t.”

He started to get agitated; seriously worried that Tallow really was going to keep him in the pig house all through the interviews, that he’d miss the only chance he’d get to see Noreen again. There came that sinking feeling again, only this time the mud was in his nose, tickling at his eyelids. And the instincts of self preservation started to take a hold. He couldn’t wait any longer, and even if it meant sinking faster he couldn’t help himself but start to struggle and flail wildly.

“I want to go!” he said hotly, frustrated that she either wasn’t understanding or simply choosing not to listen to him.

“Don’t be a fuckin’ child, Scutcher,” Tallow snapped. “You and I both know you’re better than that. Look how worked up you are already; There’s no way I’m letting you go and upset yourself.”

Upset himself? Scutcher didn’t see what the problem with that was, he was allowed to be upset about this wasn’t he? And he just wanted to see Noreen and so Scutcher mumbled mutinously, “I thought you liked the interviews.”

Watching her expression soften, Scutcher worked out that for once he must have said something right, hoped that this meant that she was going to relent and let him go after all. “Oh, Noodle,” she breathed out sadly. “It’s okay, really. I don’t mind staying with you. I’m okay with sitting this year out,” was her disappointing response. She just didn’t get it.

“I don’t care about you! I want to see Noreen.”

Scutcher regretted his words as soon as they had left his mouth, great clanking things that bounced off the walls of the pig ark. Of course he cared about his sister, no two ways about that and, at the end of it all more than anyone. But Tallow would still be here tomorrow, still alive and always just down the hall from him. Noreen wouldn’t be. By all rights, she may have already taken her last breaths of air in District 10, walked through the garden that was blooming in almost every single place that she’d touched it. Scutcher hadn’t been back there since the reapings, half expected to find it all wilted and rotten, the colours fading into shades of brown and black.“I’m sorry,” he garbled, “Tallow I didn’t mean…”

She looked like he’d just slapped her, threading a hand through her hair, flaring her nostrils to stave off tears. “Okay…you wanna go see your precious Noreen? Fuckin’ go. Just don’t expect to hang around me. Not that you’d give a shit apparently.” She stood up as tall as she could without banging her head on the pig ark and started to leave. As she did though, she turned once more.

“If you had any idea what I’d do for you…what I’ve already done for you….while that cow never did nothing.”

“Tallow!” Scutcher was after her as soon as he could get his head around what had just happened. She marched briskly, too briskly for Scutcher, so he just called out to the back of her head, her name and I’m sorry over and over again. He started to jog to try and catch up with her along the dirt road that they always took into the centre of town, but Tallow must have heard his footsteps, accelerated too until she was sprinting away from him. Her thin, willowy body made it easier for her to keep up her pace- Tallow had always been quicker when they played as children and not much had changed.

Once she was sure that he couldn’t catch up to her, she slowed her pace and the distance between them remained the same all through the walk into town; a wisp of hair on the horizon, always in view but always just out of his reach.

The screens probably couldn’t really capture it properly, Scutcher guessed, the way that photographs reduce the world into something flat and faded because try as anyone can you can’t capture a moment like you might a butterfly or a glow worm in a Mason Jar, can’t pin it down and try to hold onto it but because what’s left is only a frail and dying approximation. All the same though, Scutcher thought, the bright lights, the colors he’d only ever seen in the garden and brighter still than those and the sounds were all in another language that the people around him, all of these hard living, mud stained farm folk, couldn’t understand. He couldn’t reconcile the world that flashed before him with the idea that Noreen, picking weeds with her hair in her face, was living in it right now.

Through the hard faced careers and the kids from the other districts who could only be scared and confused, at having to learn and live this whole other language Scutcher stood alone. When they smiled and made easy jokes, which Scutcher couldn’t even do at the best of times, making the brightly colored birds in the audience of the capitol laugh he could only wonder how. How they could part their lips and make any noise come out at all, let alone these eloquent sentences. How they didn’t through their heads down in despair. Because they have to, He heard Tallow’s voice say and he knew that they were all of them going to try and be very brave. They were all going to fight, for strangers standing in districts that he didn’t know, to get home to strange places and alien lives. All of them stood shoulder to shoulder sinking into the mud, playing the game, standing still, seeing who could gasp at air for the longest. Scutcher couldn’t hate them; who’s to say that the pretty girl from district six who loved her brothers but was rude to Caeser Flickman or the boy from the same district who had volunteered and was missing someone very badly didn’t deserve to go home to the people they loved and who loved them? But Scutcher couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop thinking that Noreen deserved to come home more.

The dreamy girl in the pretty white dress from district four made Scutcher scan the crowd for Tallow; just to catch a look of what she thought,of a smile that she needed to do more often. And she wasn’t hard to find, with a rag-tag group of kids, some from his class making subtle nuisances of themselves, snorting and rolling their eyes, wafting smoke into the eyes of the people around them. She was still looking intently at the screen but had allowed a boy that Scutcher didn’t know to twine his arm around her and grip her close, tightly in a way that the big brother inside of him didn’t like. But she wasn’t alone. She had friends and people around her. And that was the way it had always been; he needed her more than she needed him.

He felt lonelier than ever when it finally came time for the district 10 interviews, watching Elon and finding it difficult to picture him living in ten at all now, finding it difficult to really pay attention with all of the anticipation building up inside of him. She’d be on soon and Scutcher had no idea who they would have turned her into and how she’d be. Picturing her smiling and laughing the way that most of them had was almost impossible.

As the crowd applauded Elon, Scutcher felt a small, cold hand reach softly around his own and looked down to see Tallow, not looking at him, her eyes forward and on the screen. “Tallow,” he started. “I’m sorry I said I didn’t care…I shouldn’t of and I really really do.”

“Shh,” Tallow pressed a finger to her lips, but she was smiling behind it. “It’s starting.” Tallow squeezed his hand at the preamble and kept a tight hold on him as Noreen stepped onto the stage.

Scutcher’s heart started to hurt. He’d been wrong to think that they might have made her look like a stranger speaking in another language. She was the same as she always was; the same as she had always looked to Scutcher.They’d dressed her in pale pink colours like the soft petals on a camellia, the top of her dress lined with golden flowers that could only remind him of the bedraggled little heartsease he’d pinned to his shirt that had ended up in the dirt and his vomit on the reaping days. More than ever she looked like she belonged both to the garden and to nowhere at all. She’d always been ethereal, she’d always been out of reach. And now she was more than ever.

“She looks pretty,” he said reverently but massively understating the matter (he didn’t have any better words, and even those probably wouldn’t come close) to Tallow who nodded her head, her lip curling ever so slightly.

“Lucky bitch,” said Tallow under her breath.

“Don’t. Please.”

Noreen wasn’t lucky, she was a flower in the darkest of places doing her best to bloom despite everything and it wasn’t fair, because with the right care and water and sunshine she could have been so much more. He couldn’t see Noreen’s belly, but the dress was so large and floaty in the front that Scutcher assumed the babies were still in there. Scutcher wished that he could have gone in her place, wished that he’d been a girl so that they would have let him; of course she deserved to be home more than he did, started forward with a sharp intake of breath when she tumbled as though he could be the one to help her up, but Tallow’s hand kept him anchored.

“She’s fine. Just a bit too much dress to handle is all, can’t pull it off.”

Scutcher ignored her sister, and chewed on his lip, waiting for her to speak. She wasn’t Noreen Lyvers any more, she told Caeser, the crowd and everyone in district ten. Noreen Lexington. That would have made her happy; Scutcher told himself, one last very nice thing to happen to her before all this mess began. So he was grateful of that, the comfort of the ring and being loved must have given her. And yet in the lowest sunken pit of his stomach he felt the quagmire churning. She was going to die Mrs Lexington, Jack’s until the very last.

“I notice you look a lot different than the last few times we've seen you. Do you want to tell us about your little bundles of joy?”

Scutcher’s mouth grew slack and opened as besides him Tallow muttered in disbelief “Oh shit! they made her have them!” He remembered the first time she’d told him, ‘Noreen you’re gonna be somebody's momma’ and how wonderful he thought she make as a mother, despite the curling jealousy that she wouldn’t spend time with him when there were babies on the scene. That twisted guilty inside of him now, made him feel like the mud had gotten into his throat. He wished that the babies could have all of her time forever and forever, even if he never got to see her again. But that wasn’t the way that it worked; and now none of them would have her.

That poor little boy. That poor little girl. Scutcher gripped onto his sisters hand; hoping they would come to know how important it was to look out for each other, hoping that they would love each other and be loved by everyone they ever met a thousand times over- though even then it would be a poor trade for losing Noreen. I could tell them about her, if they wanted me to, he thought and -though he had never met them- felt a kinship with these twins, born into a strange place in another language or a sinking quagmire.

Would they have her eyes? Her hair? Her nose? Would they love the quiet and gardening too? Noreen had said that she couldn’t wait to take them there. Scutcher pictured himself older and balding like his dad, still living with the pigs and his Mom- Tallow would probably be married and have new people to love her- showing the twins the garden, both of them the very image of her- hardly a scrap of Jack to be found. It would be beautiful, the way she’d made it and they could feel close to her. He was going to go back there, Scutcher resolved, and keep it living, keep it thriving and filled with all the colours in the world for them. It was theirs now.

The interview continued, she talked about her score- and everyone said it was good, but Scutcher wasn’t really listening to what she was saying, just how she was saying it, taking in every last second before it was time for her to go, maybe for forever.

Her parting words came and she talked to Jack, to his parents and her children, resolving that they would be proud of her. At ‘everyone else’ which was how she said it his head raised to the screen which she was looking directly at, directly at him. Because who else could she mean? Oh, he wished that he was right, that he wasn’t just deluding himself. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” he whispered. Just like he’d shouted at her at the reapings, though she’d never heard him- he’d never gotten to say goodbye to her. “I’m really sorry.” And he was- more than she would ever come to know.

It had to be him she was talking to.

Had to be. Wasn’t it?

Scutcher hated the camera for cutting away from her retreating figure and back onto Caesar Flickman so that he couldn’t watch her leave right up to the last second, hated the capitol for cheering for the next tribute that came along as though none of them were any different, as though Noreen Lyv- Noreen Lexington wasn’t the most special person on the planet. He started to back away, wanting to go home now that she was gone but Tallow held him fast and shook her head.

“We gotta stay for eleven and twelve. It aint over yet.”

But, as far as Scutcher was concerned, it was.

They headed home together, Tallow rolling a cigarette and staying far more quiet than she usually was after the interviews. Maybe it was for him, but he wished she wouldn’t- the silence felt like he really had sunk all the way down into the mud so deep that he couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. “I didn’t mean what I said,” he started again in case all of this quiet was because she was still mad at him.

“I know, Noodle,” said Tallow quietly. “We gotta look out for each other, no matter what, you know.” Like Noreens twin’s, a brother and a sister. Poor little boy, poor little girl. Scutcher knew how lucky he was to have her. Tallow would still be here tomorrow, still alive and always just down the hall from him even if Noreen wasn’t.

She was smart too so Scutcher had to ask her the question that had been plaguing him since he’d heard it at the interviews. If anyone knew, if anyone would tell him the truth then Scutcher could always count on his sister.

“Tallow, you don’t think,” he started slowly, rubbing awkwardly at the back of his head, “…she said… ‘to everyone else I’m sorry’. That meant me didn’t it?" There was a hopeful inflection at the end of his sentence, a desperation playing in his eyes as he waited for his answer.

Tallow looked up at him, took a thoughtful toke of her cigarette and paused for a moment that felt like a lifetime.

“No, Scutcher, it didn’t,” Tallow said gravely. “I doubt she’s thought about you once since the reapings. She wasn’t your friend at all…she didn’t like you,”

“Oh.”

Oh, was all he could tremble in the weakest of voices, suddenly feeling very small and very submerged indeed. All of the memories of Noreen, of her smiling in the garden were gone, eaten up by the marsh and they would never be seen again, like a rock or something so huge as an old broken down threshing machine. Perhaps before, he would have said that Tallow was wrong…but in the swirling quagmire it was hard to remember. One of the only clear thoughts in his head was that his sister wouldn’t lie to him. That she was the smart one and she must have seen all the things that Scutcher hadn’t, that he’d been either too confused and too stupid to pick up on. It didn’t change the way that he felt. It wouldn’t change him going to the garden tomorrow and clearing away whatever weeds had grown in since reaping day.

But, oh, was all could say sadly, sunk in the ground when even refusing to struggle, waiting patiently for rescue hadn’t helped him. Tallow stopped and stood on tiptoe to take his face in her hands, eyes very wide and very serious.

“Forget her, she’s forgotten about you. I’m your only friend, okay? All we got is each other, no one else. Especially not Noreen Lexington. You remember that, Scutcher- whatever happens tomorrow.”