Another {wo}man's treasure [Arx]
Aug 9, 2013 16:35:17 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Aug 9, 2013 16:35:17 GMT -5
[/color] Pull away at the word like it were a flower, she pressed down to its root. Woman, a gender, and though closely tied to her biological sex, it was the expression of which had become solidified by the District—by Panem—that she was forced to admit. Outside of dresses, make-up, flirtation and coquettish foolishness, Dolli saw woman in the same vein as a mask for what she wanted to project. For here were women that were powerful, strong, that put in rivets and melted steel. There were those like her that marveled at circuitry and the power of simplicity, of little pieces that made a part work together in unison with other simple, little parts.•••One little song
Give me strength to the leave the sad and the wrong
Bury safely in the past where I've been living
Alive but unforgiving
Let me go, let me go, let me go, let me go•••
Dolli Tsonga had reasoned when she was little that the world was not as bright and full of colors as had been concluded. There was the black, the white, and the many shades of gray that spread throughout the districts. The colors that lit up the screen when they saw images of the capitol, this was as fake as the wooden nickels the drunks used to pay for their trinkets down on Bowery Avenue. Being fifteen years of age and all but a woman, she’d started to notice a blossoming in those around her. While District Three was not laden with careers, it did not stop the girls from straightening their hair with heated coils, and boys from putting pomade in their hair. And she, a girl more at home in shadow than in the light, had all the moribund curiosity she could muster of such things. Lipstick and curled hair had never suited the girl that looked like a bean pole. Grease stained her clothes, not foundation; a head wrap was protection against sparks, not an accessory.
The night air was unusually cool for August. Dolli had come to one of her favorite places, the junkyard not two point three miles from her house. It was where all things useless to the larger manufacturers of the district were discarded. By and large the hunks of metal that sat in heaps were unusable, whether for their rust or the machinery it would take to remove them. Mounds lifted up and into the sky like old funeral hills, and a great beast belching smoke sat at the edge of it all. The incinerator was the only light besides the stars when night fell. At intervals between three and six minutes, huge red flames would surge up and into the air, and an acrid twinge of sulfur told anyone before they came within a quarter mile just where they were wandering. Along the edges of a razorwire fence were little lanterns of light, but they stretched only so to light along the fence.
Maybe if she’d had someone to learn from—a mother that doted on her and showed her the ways of a woman—she too would curl her hair and color her lips. But at this thought Dolli wrinkled her nose. Wasn’t she a woman already?
A stirring hiss from the incinerator had her turn her head in its direction. She’d come to the junkyard because she’d been working on another project inside her father’s workshop. He was a tinkerer, and a master of putting things together that should not have had any right to go together. He made a set of gears for a clock out of spare parts from old sheets of metal. He rewired an engine with his share of copper, grit, and grease so that it could power one of the great machines destined for a capitol. Best of all he helped Dolli to make a set of lights that turned on at specific times of the day. In the mornings they would burn brighter and brighter, forcing her to open her eyes even when the skies were still black. At nights they would burn down to nothing, signaling when she should have been tucked away underneath her covers. She was still a child (though arguably she would never be anything else to her father[/color]). The next great fix could wait until the following day for her, or so her father argued.
There was nothing more powerful than finding that singular, beautiful piece to add to her collection of whozits and whatsits. The junkyard was indeed her treasure trove. She thought the ills of the world were a direct result of people’s willingness to discard what they no longer wanted. They would never find the beauty in the used, the fragile, or the broken. How could they? The capitol burnished ideas that what was new was wonderful, and to be wonderful they had to be new, too. These rusting bits of junk were ugly, lonesome things. Dolli moved close to one of the piles, and placed on a thick pair of gloves. She pushed away at the bits of dirt and through the bits of trash that dotted along the torn metal bodies of old machines, long since dead. This was more a graveyard than anything else. She should have been more melancholy over the dead, she supposed, but she was here after all to give them a new life.
Not that Dolli believed as much in deeper meanings. No one would catch her proclaiming about the thoughts in her head. They were secret and sacred to her. She pulled out a cord of copper wiring into her hands with a grunt. There was some give, and she yanked a few yard’s worth. It wasn’t exactly what she was looking for, but it would do. She turned again at the sound of the incinerator. A harsh rush of sparks plumed into the air. She continued to stare at the red smokestacks. A sound of crunching metal could be heard in the distance, and Dolli calmly and carefully reached around her back. Just because she was young, she wasn’t stupid.[/color] She retrieved a metal crowbar to hold in her hands and stood, back to the pile of rubbish behind her.
“It’s a nice night to go junking,” She said quietly. “But I hope that’s all you’re doing here.” Dolli narrowed her eyes, and searched the surrounding piles for the source of the noise.[/justify][/size][/blockquote]
