Last Night I Heard Everything In Slow Motion[Onyx]

Last night, I remembered something my mother once said to Eternity, back when she was healthy. I was ten or so, revelling in the pain of my little sister, showing no remorse when she was bullied in her first year at school.

I was a forgotten child, and I knew she had to suffer for me to be happy. My mother told her that when it gets dark, you shouldn't ever be afraid. Life is like a cave, and you think you must be cautious with every step. It is always dark ahead, my little infinity, but don't despair. She should have been telling this to me. A little boy, eligible for Reaping within a year, ignored as a baby to the point that I was mutilated for life, crippled even when I lay rotting in my grave, hated by my parents, surviving only on selfishness, paranoia… All you have to do is strike a match and light a candle, and the cave doesn't seem so threatening after all. Eternity didn't understand it, but she stopped crying all the same. I didn't understand it either. It was such a flawed metaphor. For what about when, like Clement Lordthorn, you cannot live without fumbling in the dark? How can a candle show you every loose pebble? I tripped and fell, constantly, my fears growing. I could not summon up a candle to light my way through the dark cave, and so it always remained just that. And my mother died too soon to show me how to turn the cave into a tunnel.

But now, when I have lost everything except the neverending fear and my cave seems darker than ever, I finally begin to understand what she meant. A candle isn't given to you in life, you must mould it yourself. It is only you who can determine how easy it is to hold on to, how long it will be before the wax drips on your hand and burns you, how much time you have before it splutters out and you are left alone, once again, caged by the merciless claws of fear, agony and sorrow. But now, I can make my candle last for Eternity.

And so now I make my way, once again, into the cold woods and towards my sister's special cave, in order to, literally, light it up by candle. If death is dark, her memory can stay warm and light instead. If death is dark, I am living to find this tunnel for two people now, instead of no one. The pain in my thigh that came on like a storm last night has subsided in the same manner, drifting away on a wind of realisation. The weather changes fast, and though this may only be the calm canyon between two cliffs of chaos, I have to make my move, strike my match, before a hurricane comes back to blow it out forever.

There seems to be an actual shift in the air the closer I get to the cave, almost as if the forest is mourning her too. The silence hangs limply, with the potential to break under the slightest sound, and I stay silent out of both respect and some unexplainable caution as I limp on this well-trodden path. The cave is hidden as it always was, behind a curtain of ivy that tumbles just as her hair did. Until the interview, where she came on with barely any hair at all. What happened to her? My beautiful little sister was gone, replaced by a beautiful, vulnerable, insane nightmare. I never showed her how much I loved her, and now I can't. I can't ever. Is what I'm doing right? Is this not an invasion of her privacy?

I push my way through the ivy and am instantly drowned in a flood of sickening sorrow. The air in here is too warm, and the dripping of water sounds almost like the movements of another person. But who would dare come in here but her? Me. I supress this thought that rises like a cork in the bottleneck of my throat and mind, and put my cane aside on the mildew-daubed rock of the wall. Painfully, I lower myself gently to the ground, muscles trembling in my arm and vein protruding on my forehead. It is so dark in here, Eternity. My fingers fumble for a moment in my pocket, but finally I manage to grasp the long wax candle in one tremoring fist and push it firmly onto the floor until it sticks. I put all my force into lighting the matches, though it takes me one, two, three times to make a flame cackle into life at the head of its slender body. My face is illuminated for only seconds before it is out once again, tinkling over the ground as if it were shattered glass. I grasp blindly at nothing, wishing away the spots forming in front of my eyes. I must try again

Finally, I get the candle to light, and it begins to glow with a fragile light. As fragile as her bloody body as it was trampled by other, desperate tributes on their way from the brutal killing party comprised of two Fours, a Three and a Two. It was the Two that ended my Forever, but even she is dead now. But vengeance was never what I wanted. My eyes begin to adjust to the semi-monochrome world around me, and I take a moment to marvel at the paintings on the roof of this place. She loved it here more than I can ever understand. And she was running constantly, running like time, forever. And she still runs now, in a place where no one can stop her or slow her down.

A single tear meanders down my sunken, stubbled cheek. Now, for the first time since she was taken by death, I let myself cry and grieve for her. But then I realise why the water sounds so much like a person. Some little shit is in my her cave. I hastily scratch the tears away, hoping to take this wounded mask with it and leave me looking strong again. I acknowledge the face of a boy who could be a man, with a strong jaw and large, frightened eyes. But I recognise him. A face from the television, that huge screen in the middle of the District Square, where I watched Eternity getting torn to pieces over, and over, and over. Why would the Capitol producers do that? Why would they reply the District deaths from all angles, and at all speeds?

My voice trips on this thought and cracks as it reaches him: "You're the Malloc Brother. District Six. So what are you doing here?"