Edith Moreno ♥ District One

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INFORMATION

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BIOGRAPHY

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Six pills on the table, four blue and two pink. My lips curl; distaste and rebellion reject the chemicals that promise to fix what is not broken. Instead, I take a cigarette. It's my breakfast, the fuel that powers a trembling body, and yet the fire that feeds it must leap from my fingertips before it can ignite my kryptonite. A shallow breathe fights to hold calm; soon enough, my lungs are allowed to put out the threat and leave me in the early morning darkness, alone and without the dangerous flicker of fire to taunt me. Only, I am not alone. Perhaps the kitchen only holds the bloodstained benches and glossy floors - spiderwebs catching on the windowsills with dewdrop kisses balancing upon their silk. But I am not in the kitchen, not really.

Castle of dreams, Seven calls it. And I know on the outside they pretend it is the Moreno House, where only the fighters dwell. (But I am not a fighter, I am just afraid, I think perhaps after six long years they might know this. But it's too late to take me back.) In case of monsters, I carry a knife. They say that I must always wait with wide eyes and a ready pounce to preserve both life and sanity, but I have lived long enough to know that neither really belongs to me. Countless humans breathe within the walls of the palace and each of them is at war for the very same, flawed affections of the King and Queen. I care little for this praise - the lands beyond my own feverish mind fade in and out of relevance. Sometimes, they are simply mismatched voices and shapes. Why would I lay down a single ounce of my energy to such an unstable way of being?

I take a slow drag and exhale smoke; it burns my throat, and down turned eyes light up just a little. A glance in the mirror is needless, and yet I do it anyway - rehearsed and unavoidable, I prefer to check I still exist before I make my way outside. My hair; dark and windswept waves are forever wild and unkempt. The last time a brush was dragged through them was the morning I was adopted, seventy-two full moons ago. (Seventy-two is also my friend, not a moon but a girl with two perfect braids and sweet cheeks, rosy and plump in comparison to the hollow, yellowing skin I can't seem to shift.) Blue eyes look right at me, and I wonder who they belong to before the mirror swims into view and the pieces click. My eyes blink through a heavy mist that I can see but not feel - it does not sink into my pores like midnight's fog.

Instinctively, I reach into my pocket to check that the charcoal is with me. Fingernails dig into it, collecting dust beneath their bitten beds. It calms me, to have a smouldering cigarette in one hand, the ashen stick in another and a blade forging security in my pocket. I leave the pills on the bench, not caring if they find their way into the stomach of some nameless sister or brother. (The blood in my veins joins only with the empire of unseen lands and not with the humans who spill lies around me.) As I leave the house and slam the front door behind me, someone calls out from a window upstairs, hollow-voiced and bleary-eyed. "That'll kill you, you know," they say, and I glance upward and blow a careful ring of smoke. "Exactly."

Beside me, the invisible boy has decided to let me see him. I nod, courteous, in greeting. (He's not real to them, the doctors, the adults. But they aren't real to me.) Twelve is brave, but he hides his thoughts behind bars like a captive dragon, while I air mine for all to see because the walls of the skull are there to protect the brain, not confine it. The morning is bitter, but I prefer it this way. When I close my eyes, I see nothing and pretend that the last part of my life was never lived; that still the hard pavement beneath my feet is my home was it was for three endless months. Then, it was Edith and the sky, with her crown of broken glass and throne of barefoot wanderings and no bedtime and and a downright refusal to ever change. (Running away, they said, wouldn't release me from the tangled grip of my problems, and it didn't. But it made me one with the pulsing dream of night and day, from sunrise to sunset. I was the brick walls, the graffiti, the rundown alleyways and the abandoned buildings. For three months, I was the cracks in the sidewalk. It's all I've ever wanted to be since.)

I chase Twelve - they ask me why they have numbers for names, and I raise my eyebrows and question why they have names for names - and then I wonder what he is running from. A glance over my shoulder proves cause for regret - the monsters chase us, villians in a hurricane fairytale, nightmares in my waking dreams. And fear bites, fear that I will be caught followed quickly by the fear that I will grow up and forget. (Because this entire world is beautiful, brushstrokes that cannot hurt me and yet line the edges of everything with scarlet breaths, softening the sharp edges of reality. I live here, in this vivid wonderland, hiding from the world of loud noises and cruel looks and biting words. And 'childish' suggests that in time I will lose what I have.) So I reach up with the charcoal and begin to draw in huge, hurried movements. I can't afford to lose the race with time and lies.

Always they have said that I draw well - seemingly random, violent strokes come together to show the solid ones my sacred lands. It started when I was small, perhaps five or six. They pressed a crayon in my hand and told me to put the friends they swore they could not see onto paper. Confused at their ignorance and blind eyes, I did. Friends and foes found their way onto the crisp white sheets, one after the other, in clumsy, childish script. But as the visions became clearly, more set apart from what I know in my heart is the truth, panic set in. What if this slow departure from the space I swear I was born is my final voyage? Am I leaving them? Or are they deserting me, in one fell swoop spread out slowly over my lifetime? (Growing up, is this it?) It was then that I began to fill notebooks - hundreds of them, until my mind became too big for my canvas. So the chalk and charcoal came out, and the walls of the community home held onto my secrets. The old ones shouted, the children cried. Me, and Twelve, and Seven, and the monsters; we smiled.

Now, I do the same. My eyes almost burst, so wide they are with trepidation and desperation - for I must cling to this with every ounce of what I am. To lose my monsters would be to lose my knights in shining armour. And although I don't mind being secluded and alone - even odd - it is only because I always have someone else to turn to. A brick wall without the shadows of my accomplices would never do. And so in the middle of the street, I bring the terror in my fingertips to life. Burned wood upon brick, I sketch, making a figure of what was once plain and bare. I hear nothing; perhaps voices call out to me, but there is in this moment no human more important than my own crusade to preserve my fragile mind. (They ask why I think I am so special, and I reply that I am all there ever was.)

The Queen bent down beside me on the day of my first reaping - I was one of many of her prize warriors, and all she wanted was glory to befall her own hapless crown. "All good things come to an end," she said, her words a mirage I cared not decipher. Was she suggesting that perhaps my stay in the Moreno household should be over? Or that her run of training children as Victors ought to be over after one of her many charges was chosen? I remember simply shaking her hand from my shoulder, hating it's weight upon my skin. (Touch makes me skittish, and I prefer to be apart from the warm stability of mankind. Smoke and mirrors is preferable in every sense of the words.) But Queen Moreno spoke the truth; my chosen instrument, the charcoal, runs out.

And that, I suppose, is when the entirety of both realities collapses, heavy and merciless. I can barely breathe, and for a fraction of a second I drown in air so thick it forces me to choke. (I remember when I was very small I learnt that all problems must be solved myself, and so I pull myself together in a shaky, broken kind of way and remember that the recipe for charcoal is simple.) Fire. It's easy. The delicate plumes explode from chewed fingertips, as far from my control as my own thundering heart. Only when they begin to devour the very fabric of the earth - starting with building that holds the incomplete recording of my enemies - do I remember my greatest fear. It is fire, and I stand before it no more fearless than I ever was.

There is a space in everything where time falls away - it does not slow or stop, but simply cease to exist. I gaze upon the crumbling world I have created; a third dimension, set apart from my own fantasy land of patchwork, lucid ramblings, and away again from the world of Victorship and houses where you cannot sleep for fear of murder. (Even before I came to be a Moreno, I prefered the company of the streetlights in my sleep over and above the blankets.) In this split second that cannot be called a second, the melted, twisted knot of regret in my stomach, I tremble. What I have done is irreversible, panicked, a decision more reflex than actual choice. And it's beautiful - blossoming flowers of flame eat away at what was once sturdy and structured, proving that spontaneous passion will always rule over the rigid and secure.

But still I cannot escape the creatures in my head. The moment ends, and I am on the street once more, an antagonist just like those that pursue me. Without waiting, I toss the cigarette into the debris and do the only thing I have ever been certain about: run. (Run away from what is real and what is false, run away from both human and hallucination in a hopeless and never ending bid to be alone.) Just like always, the flames follow, in one form or another.

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COMPLETE

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