The Reaping [D11]

Reapings did not terrify me in the same way they once had done.

I suppose that is what happens when you lose your only friend to the Hunger Games.

Perhaps that is why I do not feel dread nor fear like the other district children undoubtedly do. When you’ve lost your moon and stars, there are neither good nor bad days, and weeks turn to months turn to years in an undecipherable blur of wasted youth.

It’s not something I’m proud of.

Reaping Day lurks behind every corner, and each year, I cannot help but silently pray that it will be me who is pulled from The Bowl Of Death. Perhaps, then, Belle and I could be reunited – if only in death. That didn’t seem so bad.

When the morning of the 68th Reaping falls, I struggle into my faded dress, make my way to the District Square, clutching at mother’s hand (who needs the guidance more than I do) and stand amongst unfamiliar faces I have no interest in. I stand. I stare. I wait.

‘Valkyrie Wilde!’

I do not realise I have been holding my breath until I am overcome with a sense of dizziness and the need to breathe becomes apparent. Gulping down mouthfuls of air, I look around the bleary District Square, searching for a face I did not recognise. Whilst a hushed silence falls over the gathered crowd, I struggle to distinguish the tidal wave of emotion rising within my chest – as if the intertwined feelings were tangible, living things, struggling to force their way out of my frail body. It is no use. My attempts at classification are fruitless. So, I wait.

I wait for the stranger to take my her place.

Time passes in a peculiar way in the lead-up to imminent death. The rise and fall of my heart does not speed up nor cease, and yet the world around me slows down, crawling sluggishly through time, struggling to leave one second in the past as it makes its way to the next.

When the girl is upon the stage, staring out at the sea of blank faces that do not care if she lives or dies, ready to accept her death, the time lapse is finally broken by the sounds of deafening panic.

Why do I panic? I do not know this girl. She is a nobody. All District 11 tributes were. They were never remembered, for they never made it out alive.

Not even Belle.

The familiar sensation of crippling anxiety intensifies with the thought of a forgotten sister’s name. Belle. Five simple letters to send my heart into a frenzy, cause my hands to sweat uncontrollably, where no amount of frantic wipes on my crinkled dress could stop the unpleasant wetness in my palms. An overwhelming frenzy of mania takes over, clouding all sense of judgement and filling my veins with bubbling adrenaline that urges my feet to take steps forward – slowly, at first, before they come fasterfasterfaster and all too quickly I am there, standing, shaking at the edge of the crowd, opening my mouth as the words leave my mouth in a tumbling mess of vowels and consonants that not even my racing pulse can match.

‘I volunteer!’

I do not know what it is that compelled me to be exposed to the shocked expressions that fall upon me from every direction possible.

I do not know where the strength to utter the death sentence comes from.

I do not know what the future holds. Nor do I care.

I do know that:

I cannot speak.

I cannot move.

I cannot think.

I do not know why that is. But I know why I am standing in the place of a girl I’ll never know - never know, not really, for a simple stare and a few fleeting, empty blinks do not warrant aquaintanceship - and that is all that matters.

I do not do it out of mercy for the next victim to meet her demise in the arena, nor do I do it due to a desire to be something special, something important, something so much more than a peasant girl from District 11. These are the traits mother would associate with my name, my face, my entire existence, if she still possessed the ability to construct intelligible phrases from her world of jumbled thoughts and unreachable sanity. Despite a buried desire for one of her girls to not grow up to be a complete, miserable failure – a girl who grew up to love the Earth and sky and stars rather than spend her days trapped in a vicious cycle of negativity and mental illnesses – it is none of these prudish characteristics that once embodied a Stella of the past that I do this for. That girl was long gone; she disappeared with the onslaught of insanity that gripped a broken old woman – no longer able to be called mother – when the wondrous world she had spent so long believing in came crashing to a contradictory halt.

No. The girl who lived for stories woven by Belle from imaginary fibres of a slowly unravelling universe was long gone. She no longer chased butterflies through the cracking fields of a District that no longer felt like home, would never feel like home again. She no longer felt that the world had something worthwhile to offer her, for all that she had needed had been taken away, long ago.

She makes her way to the stage fuelled by a rotten flame burning her insides. A flame she did not know existed until the death of her sister five years ago. A flame that had not stopped burning, not once, nor planned to cease its fiery path of destruction anytime soon.

She does it for vengeance.

For Belle.

Always for Belle.

[stella calloway volunteers holla]