Stella Calloway -- D11

I am stranded on an island, far away from home (wherever that may be.) The sand feels coarse against my feet, catching in the spaces between my tanned toes. The roaring waves lap at the land’s edge, misty sprays of seawater stinging my face. The billowing breeze sends my brown hair flying around my face, carrying the scent of the brackish ocean to my nostrils. Inhaling the salty air too quickly, I feel the fine particles catch in my throat, making me cough and splutter and squirm around on the sand-crusted ground.

It was no place for a simple field girl from District 11.

Nor were the snake-infested plains where a terrified tribute would take her final breath before leaving the unfortunate world she had been forced to grow up in.

Perhaps Belle would have enjoyed the Lake, and the clear stretch of water presented to her. If only she had passed onto her next state of being, there, she could have been calm for one final time in her life. She lived for the moments where the calmness would envelope her body and cleanse her soul. Where she was once water, I was a blazing fire. The carefree days when we would play together in the barren wasteland we called ‘home’, fire and water existing in harmony, have long passed, and I know there will never be a time like that again. A time where I could be Stella, and Belle could pretend to be the big sister she wished she could be.

My legs are folded meticulously as I sit on the dusty floorboards, staring at the television screen in front of me. I hate the figures dancing on the monitor. I despise them. Silent, murderous thoughts buzz in my mind, making my ears ring with the cacophony of simple contemplations.

District 1 – you killed my sister.

District 2 – you made it home; my sister did not.

District 3 –

The scene suddenly shifts – a flashback – and past thoughts are abandoned with the forthcoming of a new setting. The Lake is projected once again, and I imagine myself there in the moment, as Ezra, taking his final breaths on the shore, particles of sand and water mingling together, with the sick stench of blood. Death. The camera lingers one final time on the fallen tribute before warping once more – this time into a terrifying muttation with bared teeth and all the things nightmares are made of. A soft scream of chiming bells and horror escapes my chapped lips, and as I peek with terrified eyes through the shield created by my hands, I hear the snarl from the screen and shut my eyes in an instance, not wanting to continue on this horrible journey down Memory Lane.

The television is switched off within moments, tears stinging my eyes, the bitter taste of the saline air lingering in my mouth long after the moving pictures on the box have disappeared. Shifting footsteps, a small cough. Her first movements in weeks. For once in a long time, I allow my hopes to rise to the surface as I swiftly turn around to face my oh-so-fragile mother. Perhaps we could share a cup of tea, or I could help her cook an actual, edible dinner. We could be normal. The desire to relive past memories is so great that I barely hear her speak as I am springing, leaping, soaring to my feet and towards the door where she stands, a small round remote in her hand. It takes a moment to register her real words.

‘You should be working.’

You should be working. I should be working. You say, I should be working, but you should be working, not me, not me, not me…

The tumbling thoughts are all things I would say to the stranger in front of me (if only I had the courage to break her poor heart, already so broken, perhaps never to be repaired.) I wish to scream at her to wake up, and plead with her to be a mother again (but was she ever a mother in the first place?), and cry in front of her so I don’t have to hide my tears any longer, and whisper to her that it’s not just her who hurts, and…

And…

And hurt her for hurting me for fifteen years.

Yet.

I.

Don’t.

Do.

Anything.

It’s oh-so-difficult to walk away from someone you wish to say so much to. But it’s for the better (isn’t it?) The steps towards the outside realm are painfully heavy, my feet two lumps of lead that weigh me down with each stride. I am met with a humid afternoon breeze, the blazing sun scorching my skin.

The broken, withering crops give easily as I pick them from their place on the ground, as if they were the shattered pieces of my heart. Belle taught me the proper way to do the job – a twist one way, a pull the other, repeat. An independent woman, protecting a dependent soul in every way she could, becoming the mother she never intended to be.

It is a difficult task to make another person’s life happy and cheerful when your own life is falling apart (though I couldn’t realise that at the time.) A victim to emotional and mental instability, Belle lived for the moments she could escape herself, only to waste them on me (though I couldn’t realise that at the time.) It was a peculiar situation from the beginning. A father who disappeared at the arrival of a second daughter led to a mother falling into a state of incessant depression and heartache which led to a broken teenage girl bringing up a clueless child in a cruel world. She played her role well, throughout the production of the Calloway life.

In the form of shimmering specks of starlight falling from the colour-changing sky, the act was eventually bound to rub off of Belle and settle atop my weak shoulders.

The first time the hallucinations began were two days after she was taken away from us.

They say if you don’t think about things, they can’t hurt you. That is what I do. ‘Travelling back in time to an unhappier place only emphasises the horrors of a former life.’ ‘Living in the present and future is much better than existing solely in that which is known as the past.’ Gems of wisdom offered by sympathetic families who pity the fool with nobody left to love her bar a hallucinogenic mother, waiting for Death.

Focussing on the future, plotting ways to perhaps one day avenge my sister, producing plans to perhaps one day harm those that dare to mock and laugh at me, it is almost easy enough to part with the negative emotions if only to make room for newer, fresher ones. Yet I cannot forget the ever-lasting pain of grief and the side effects that come with increased mental uncertainty. The rattling sensation in my bones, the difficulty breathing as oxygen struggles meekly into exhausted lungs, the nonsensical words playing like a broken record in my mind, the shaking and horror before there is nothing, nothing left at all. They are burdens I will be forced to face for the rest of my life, however long that may be, no matter how hard I try to escape them.

Just like Belle.

Although I could never be allowed the superfluity of normal, for a long time, I was happy. The times were easier, and I remember living a child’s life, feeling free. Gradual changes happen over time, little by little; they sneak up on you. It wasn’t long before I started becoming everything Belle had wished I would never become – a girl who is faking happiness on the outside, and struggling to contain a monster on the inside – perhaps worse. There was never the need to discipline an ever-growing avalanche of emotion that could rapidly lead me down a path of destruction. (Yet here we are.)

Everyone knows the only way to tame a monster is to feed it what it craves. It is a good thing that is exactly what I plan to do.

oDair