:: ANJA [WARSAW] :: D10 :: DONE ::

What do I look like? How should I know? It's not like I've seen a mirror for a couple of years. When I was younger, my hair used to be the palest of straw-blondes, but now it's mousier, although with age or with grime, I can't tell. My face is... well, face-like, if a little grimy. Dainty features, blue eyes, nothing out of the ordinary but nothing particularly special.

I'm skinny, but that's a given. More food would have been welcome at any stage in my life. I'm shorter than average, and look younger too. My skin's pretty pale, but also pretty scarred, because I've taken a tumble trying to get away from an angry shopkeeper more than once. Been caught more than once, too. And the one thing is that through all the uncleanliness and hard food I've put them through... I'm remarkably proud of the condition that my teeth are in. They're bloody nice teeth.

They tell me that I'm not supposed to remember my mother, but I can. No, I can, I'm not making it up, I swear I can! They say that I was too young, that my brain didn't function enough at that stage, but my brain has always been a little different to others. I remember being pressed close to her, her the only thing that I could see in the ocean-like night, as it was to my infant self. She didn't smell of how I've always imagined mothers to smell. The scent of gingerbread and roses and bleach is what I've always imagined capital-M-Mothers to smell like, squeaky clean and right. She, however, stunk of stale bread and grease and that pungent smell that sticks its hand down your throat and grabs at your stomach. Maybe the smell that I've attached to her is the one that I have adjusted too after a lifetime of homelessness, but there's something about the grey, brutal honesty of this memory that makes me really believe that it's real. Surely, had I made up an image of my mother, she would have been sweet and clean and the way that I have always wanted her to be.

There was, for a short time there, Aunty Mabel, who was not my aunt but rather the lady who looked after the orphanage at which I was dropped as a baby. She looked as if she was supposed to be overweight but had not had enough food, with drooping jowls and sad breasts. Kindness, however, was not as lacking as her weight, and she was always ready with a hug if you were feeling lonely or upset. There was never enough food to go around, but what we did have she would take off her own plate and give to one of the many kids that came and went, lost sheep looking for a Shepard.

Most of the food that we did have came from Mabel's garden. A wonder, that garden was, full of strawberries and carrots in the summer, and enough pumpkins and potatoes to last us all winter. She could make food grow from the driest of dirt, and that is a lesson that I have taken from her - that there is always a way to grow in the most parched of situations.

By the time I was four, I was the kid that had been at Mabel's the longest. I was the first infant she had taken in, and most babies after me found a home fairly quickly. By the time that she had ten children in her clan, she had found a way to make money out of putting our hands to work. We'd pick flower seeds off the wayside each autumn, along with blackberries and mushrooms and whatever other treasures we could find there; getting in trouble for trespassing more than once. The next spring, Mabel and I - the only child she trusted with her precious blooms - would carefully plant the seeds, and water them and care for them and later in the year watch them blossom. I loved these flowers in the way I had always wanted a mother to love me, not in Mabel's professional, fair way, but in an irrevocable yearning, and unspoken and unjustified connection, just because she was my mother. In the summer, when it came time to lop the smiling heads off our wildflowers and sell them to those in town with money for such niceties, it was like decapitating my own children. For them to brighten someone's room for a couple of days, until their petals yellowed, curled, let go and drifted on to the carpet: to me, it was torture.

And so, my floral obsession grew and grew. I tended the blossoms with passionate fury, scolding myself bitterly if I were to do anything wrong. Soon, it was too much for me to kill off my precious. Those that helped my dysfunctional family stay alive still were slaughtered en mass, but I had my own patch, too - the best of the roadside, and then of the cheap shelf in the shop, and then that I could steal from the houses. It worked brilliantly for a while, as my garden glistened, and no one missed a couple head of pansies or petunias. It worked brilliantly, until it didn't. Who'd know that Victors liked gardening too? That they would notice that specimens from their collection of Capitol-modified fruit-scented orchids with rainbow petals were missing. And who would know that the Peacekeepers, having run into me once or twice taking a handful of seeds from a shop, would know that I was the culprit immediately?

That was the end of my gardening career. Mabel, fair enough, could not afford to have a child who was breaking the rules. And so I, streetwise little ten year old me, had to learn to be a rat. How to stay out of sight, to eat what I found, and sleep where I lay. The markets were a good enough source of scraps to live off, and when you've only got a small body it's not hard to find a cranny to crawl into next to someones fire. I was and still am looked after by the men who slept under bridges and by the women who slept in other men's beds. I wasn't living comfortably, and I cannot remember what hot water feels like, but the truth is that I'm resourceful. I know how to make do, and to get what I want, and I can make the best of a bad situation. I'm not afraid to steal, if it means that I live. Morals are crap, because we're human, and we were made to survive.