coma : {told me i was} like the dead sea : hartmyre family

PART I.     DEATH

The pills felt sweaty in my hands. It was my palms, however, that shook. Until this moment, I never understood how rigid coffins are - my back is forced into a wooden straightness, as though I am a porcelain doll in an unopened box. I carved it myself. I know for certain that this is the most beautiful of all my artworks - I can't count how many hours I spent hunched over the wood, carving knife in hand, drowning in a world of my own. It's perfect in every way - each inch of the outside is embellished and patterned without a single flaw. On the inside, however, it's bare and cold. I ask myself why I left the core of my tomb hollow and unfriendly. The answer, of course, was that I expected to be dead when I was set down to rest. 

Instead, can taste life. It's my breath in my throat, the tightness of my lungs, the pulse in my templates and the heartbeat in my chest. It's the way my hand can't hold itself still while I lift it to my mouth; the way I spill some of the precious capsules and they scatter across the floor, sounding like raindrops and looking like despair. Hurriedly, I swallow the rest, one after the other like a frantic chain smoker determined to finish an entire packet before he's to cold to stay outside. I expected to lose consciousness quickly - to fall headfirst into death, plunged underwater and drowned all at once. Instead, I faded gradually, growing tired and then wandering the line between sleeping and thinking, drifting all the while. I can't put my finger on the moment when everything was finally gone. 

I thought of my mother. I'd be glad to see her soon - despite my pretences as the strong protector of the family, I fell apart as much as everybody else when the flames took her away. (And this is me doing anything for her to hold me in her arms once more.) My sister, too, wandered into my mind. Florence never will sew my funeral attire. She wont comb my hair and push my eyelids closed like she used to do for every passing customer. I'll die raw and devoid of beauty without my sister to give it to me. I tell myself that I'll see her soon, too. (Perhaps in the afterlife she's finally gotten what she wants: to shrink away to nothing until she's no longer big enough to hold.) Nonetheless, I want to grip her tight and never let her go, because in the end it was her who killed me. 

It wasn't her fault, of course. The blame shifts around in my mind, moving from President Snow to my father, to my twin sister Beatrice, to Esther, who's already a ghost and could have easily taken her place. In the end, the weight lands on my shoulders. It is I who vowed that nobody in our family would ever die before their time. The coffins, all lined in a row, waited. They were preparation. And I made sure to save them from everything - from rebellion, attack, food shortage, floods. Everything was in place. I did everything I could. Orion told me that last night. "It wasn't anything you could have prevented." But Florence Hartmyre ended in flames, turning to ashes in the tar pits of the 63rd Games. I failed. 

And I - Teddy Hartmyre - am making one final promise. Giving my family one last gift. I will not burn like they did. My mother, Esther and Florence all perished in a blaze of light. All alone, I die in the darkness. The coffin is uncomfortable and cold. The dead do not care for luxuries. 



PART II.     LIFE


I'm alive. At the same time, I am not. "Excuse me, please, can someone tell me if I'm dead? What is this place?" I do not know much. (My name is Teddy Hartmyre, I am sixteen years old and I have nothing left but the solice found in darkness.) I am somewhere, but it is not heaven. Nobody answers my questions, for I am completely alone. 

The world is barren and ruined; everything is blackened and smouldering. Buildings lay in rubble all around me and the sky is hidden beneath lays of smoke and clouds. Beneath the destruction, however, I am standing in a familiar land. I am home. District Six unfolds around me in every direction, devoid of life and having undergone the very same fate I always dreaded. War, perhaps. A bomb. The end of the world has been here, and I missed it. 

"Somebody, please-"

"I don't want to be here anymore."

"Take it back! Take the pills back!"

"Is this hell?"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"Please?"

"I want to go home!"

I am greeted with a silence that tells me loud and clear: you're home, Theodore, at long last.