Persia Deima Keeni -- District Six

If you could only see the beast you've made of me
I held it in but now it seems you've set it running free
Screaming in the dark, I howl when we're apart
Drag my teeth across your chest
To taste your beating heart

“ i o n c e w a s t o l d o f a n o t h e r s t o r y ”

m y f i n g e r s c l a w y o u r s k i n | persia deima keeni
t r y t o t e m p t m y w a y i n | perry
y o u a r e t h e m o o n | eighteen
t h a t b r e a k s t h e n i g h t | female
f o r w h i c h i h a v e t o h o w l | district six

“ o f a g i r l i n a l a n d w i t h n o f a i r i e s ”

You knew the minute Pyrian trotted (yes, trotted — you were glad you didn’t have to hear him talk or else Fear would have to hold you back from ripping his throat out. Some side of you wished you weren’t so primitive and impulsive and downright unpleasant to wishing someone — and most of all your brother; half-brother, whatever — had his larynx torn away, but you do what you always do: blame it on the alcohol) and gave you this small leather bound notebook that only something so horrifying any hormonal pre-teen could write down those pages (it’s you this time.) You crinkled your eyebrows in confusion, racking your brain for any sort of clue to what this notebook might hold. You have a crapton of notebooks already, most if not all already scribbled with chemical equations and thoughts to remember when you’re close to sober, and like any self-respecting bed-grasshopper (well, that’s a fitting comparison, but contrary to popular belief you do not throw yourself to any Johnny or James that goes along the way) you don’t remember what could be a remnant of the past, another year or two embedded between those pages. You sneered at his retreating form, full lips curling upwards — and could have been beautiful, let’s be honest, but you believed beauty was a child’s foolish fantasy. All you see are ruins dolled up and painted in beautiful colors, and you’ve devoted ever single second of your life in separating yourself from the dumbasses (or as you liked to call them, dumbmasses, as you howl at your own ingenuity), standing behind the margin line as you shake your head in condescending pity.

You open it, and on the minute you see the words ‘List of Things Persia Hates The Most,’ you are plummeted back in time, the time when you just discovered how disgustingly addicting beer was (you were fourteen), and by some work of the Holy Ghost you thought The Capitol was off to some world-denominating scheme (they always are — but don’t they already have the whole word? Or maybe they don’t. Maybe there are more countries than — shit, there you go again, and there goes another theory and another week spent so focused in yet another conspiracy) and in the near future we would all be transformed into mindless drones (aren’t we already?) and have our memory erased (you were standing on a precipice now, torn between the many advantages of having your goddamn past erased and the other advantages of living as a snarky drunk with your horrible past as your kind-of-acceptable excuse. Guess what you chose?), and of all things you thought would be important to transcribe in safety for the future, you thought of the things you hate. Of course. A low chuckle escapes you (your voice has always been low, you believed those with high pitches were either doing that on purpose or genetic abominations of human kind) as you think of yourself referring to yourself in third person. You lower yourself and sit on a chair, a smile playing on your lips and your eyes crinkling up, dull brown eyes already a step up from being as attractive as a puddle of mud. (You think otherwise, actually. You weren’t Floreal with her light hair and feather bones, no Gypsy with her large eyes but you’ve got valleys and mountains enough to make anyone stare.)

One, freedom. Already from the beginning you cringe, the traces of coming-of-age angst in the air that you actually remember writing this, smelling cheap beer in your breath with every drunk giggle that you make, droning on about how ‘this is brilliant! Future Persia will have to build a time machine to give me a hug’ (you wished you had a time machine to give her an almighty slap across her face instead.) But you were always a queer one, and while most believe that when you’re a Keeni, you’re already born weird and tragically offbeat, you didn’t think it was strange at all to not want what every teenager would want. Sure, you wanted nights all to yourself and space that yours without any parental nose sticking in, but freedom was a whole different concept to you. It didn’t mean a wild night spent drinking and smoking and having a fleeting meaning of fun, it meant being set free from your cage and dumped into a bigger one. You believed that we all may grow out of time-out, curfews, school rules, but while religion and etiquette is practiced there is no such thing as freedom. Ever since the death of your faith you eyed every man and women (you didn’t even spare the children) and even more the religious ones, only to look away in disgust because they’re bound in a belief another man has crafted to make toy soldiers out of all of us, but most of all the ones the ones bound to the past, the ones left with every waking moment ridden with guilt or fear or anger. (It didn’t help that you were one of both, too.)

Two, whenever someone says fresh air. Joshua (you knew the minute you heard his name that you were polar opposites determined to create hurricane — Joshua Joshua Joshua; if it was anyone, it would be you to know that it’s another book from the Bible and the last thing you needed was a walking reminder of what used to be a blissful era of innocence and hope) would say otherwise, yapping on about plants and how they give off fresh oxygen and — by that time you’ve thought of six ways to get rid of his body, only you never seem to come up with the first step: how to kill him. But you’ve got more important work than ridding the world of another pest (and you like to think that even though you were set straight on a path for devastation the minute you were alive, you were far better off than resorting to the knife-to-the-ribs-and-twist method and instead resorted to the glare-and-be-a-bitch life plan.) You believe that air isn’t fresh — nothing is fresh if it’s recycled. You didn’t get how people could ‘wake up for a fresh new day,’ because it wasn’t. It was the same sun; it’s the same earth that holds a billion corpses right underneath, the same air that the people you hate breathe. You call ‘starting all over,’ bullshit, too — unless someone becomes the other Son of God to break the law of conservation, believe all you want that you’re a brand new person but you’re still made of the same particles, made from the past you’ve been through, believe that you’re better than the person you were but we all know you’re just the same scared, confused girl who once believed in the fairytale of salvation everyone knew.

Three, (if it wasn’t obvious enough) optimists. You didn’t call yourself a pessimist (they made you describe whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, but you answered that it was neither until you could calculate the approximate volume of the water and the glass ‘till you noticed they were glaring at you for complicating such an easy question. You laughed, because there was no such thing as easy), but rather a realist and a blunt one at that. You didn’t believe that the Sun ‘rests,’ that someday the world will be a better place, that babies were from flying storks, that the ones who passed away would be at some faraway place, resting and happy — they’re six feet underground and if they’re any close to ‘resting,’ it’s the maggots resting on their corpses. They all look at you like you’re a sadist of some kind (you knew well enough that you were not, because you sure don’t find any joy in waking up in goddamn five in the morning) but you think of it as a favor they will all be grateful for sooner or later (you wished sooner so you wouldn’t look like the bad guy so much), popping the bubble early on before they go flying off and the bubble bursts and they come crashing down in a heap of broken bones. (But if there’s one exception then it would be Fear, someone who you’d gladly protect from the harsh reality you’re already treading upon — then one look at fear and you question whether if it would be worth it after all, when she already seems so broken.)

Four, morning. Or simply put, any kind of light. You didn’t know how your mother gave birth to a vampire but there you are, glaring at any source of light like you could make it go away. In fact, you believed the reason you cried so loud the minute you were born was because the hospital lights were too bright and your mother’s uterus was already a fine, dark place to stay. Your siblings would always scrunch up their nose and immediately dart for the nearest exit to leave you and your awful sense of humor alone (you thought otherwise — you’re fucking hilarious!) Your sense of humor even involved pulling out a gun from under your pillow, pointing it to the person who would be so much of a prick to wake you up at seven in the morning. (It was a fake one, but you never tell that to anyone, not even Fear. You like to keep the wonderful secrets of Six’s dark alley stores to yourself.) Anytime before ten o’clock was the devil’s gift to all us (and any morning person was the spawn of the devil), and they joked saying it was your gift to all of them. You don’t mind being called the devil, but if they disturb you anymore you sure will turn into one. (If you aren’t already are. They call you the pale-skinned demon, hair as black as your heart — which makes you smile because the last time you checked, you don’t have one.)

Five, death. You hoped death wasn’t the ‘blinding vision of white’ everywhere because then you’d be clawing your way, desperately reaching for any footholds to let you back in reality. You didn’t mind peeling wallpaper, placing your foot at the right places so the floor wouldn’t fall through and your siblings would see your foot sticking through the ceiling, and you sure didn’t mind having to wake up to a pile of paperwork and assessments and more calculations because you made it yourself. You made yourself an endless conundrum, trapped yourself within an insatiable need for something — anything — to let you float off this hellhole (and to think this isn’t even Hell in the first place, they’ve sure made it seem a lot worse than eternal damnation), never mind if it came as a pungent liquid (if it’s vodka then it’s clear, and the amber would be beer! — it’s your own personal prayer that you know will send you in the clean, white walls of an infirmary, but you’ve known nothing but disaster and, well, that’s what you are) that you’d gladly chug down or an infinitum of numbers written down in your notebooks, calculating anything: from the inevitable chance of having a Keeni Reaped to the number of years Snow has left. You’d find something new, fingers twitching and stomach burning while your eyes scour for a new kind of distraction that you’d accept anything that comes along the way (while simultaneously pushing aside the drunken boys that always stray by your lab — you may be the daughter of a whore but God damn the day you become one.) Other may see this as an attention deficiency disorder detected but left untreated, but you know very well that it’s all you can do from forever stopping and just rotting away, each new day another footstep to your end. You don’t hate death as much as you’re scared of it — you’re scared of not knowing what’s going to happen next, whether there’s heaven or nothing (but most of all of finding nothing when you’ve expected salvation and unconditional love from a Father you’ve never had.)

Maybe that’s why you bury yourself in self-made calculations, because it’s something you can control, and maybe this is why you don’t even try calculating Pyrian and Gypsy’s odds among the rest, even if they made the right decisions and the right attacks: death is coming, and it’s unstoppable.

c o d e w o r d | odair
a n d w h i l e h e r f a c e | daisy lowe
r e m a i n s t r u e , l i k e s t a t u e | keeni family plot
i t b r e a k s | howl by florence + the machine

i f w e l i s t e n | narration; 6f7595
w o u l d w e h e a r | speaking; c2b7c5
h e r c r i e s | others; a084aa
t h a t b u r y t h e m s e l v e s | emphasis; acafc4
i n h e r m i n d ? | thoughts; 4b4253

a n a u t h o r ' s n o t e | well aren't i the earliest keeni