Micah Bridges :||: District 7 :||: FIN

Micah Steven Bridges

AGE :||: 18
DISTRICT :||: 7
GENDER :||: Male

PART 1:
If I had to have one job, it probably would be something protection related. I was a weedy fellow, looking more like a twig than a branch, and yet I knew how to fight. I was smart, usually able to figure out what my opponent’s weakness was and use it to my advantage. Papa had taught me that. Still, at first glance, I didn’t look like the kid who wouldn’t go down without a fight. The bullies at school had always told me that I had a punch-able face, to which I didn’t disagree. Even as I grew older, my face didn’t seem to and I always looked rather young. I was always covered in bruises, though, and it seemed to do a good job deterring other people from beating me up, probably because they assumed it was from the “many fights” I was involved in. What they didn’t know—and they didn’t have to know—was that the bruises that covered my body were from the fearful fists and kicks of my parents. I rarely used my own fists unless I had to, and I much preferred using the skill for good, for protection.

Being tall helped the look. Papa was pretty tall as well, but it became obvious once I grew past him that somewhere in our genes was an advantage for height, probably from some distant ancestor because Mama was pretty darn short. The skinniness came from the lack of good food at the table, but after I met Alex, I started seeing more meat on my bones and finally the day came when my punches did some real damage. Born in a family of dark and tan coloring, I was born a lighter shade of tan but darkened easily with the amount of time I spent outside. With the time outside also came the weathering of my skin until I could see dry patches and it would crack during winters if I didn’t keep my skin covered.

I started protecting myself in the schoolyard, but the first time I felt protective over someone was when my little brother Elijah started school. He too was a bit of a runt at school, and it wasn’t until I started seeing bruises as we were walking home that I realized what was happening. Ekky didn’t like me taking care of him, especially in the school yard, but he was special because he was my little brother and he was still alive. The only other person I would protect was Alex whenever someone tried to pick on him. He was tall which made him an unlikely target, yet his kind-hearted demeanor made him susceptible to being taken advantage of. I wanted to believe that people could be kind, caring, yet Papa had spent so much telling me about the dark nature of people that I started to believe his words. I couldn’t trust many people, even if all I wanted was to tell people about my home situation.

Many of my features and traits were dictated by Papa. “You have to be a scrapper, and with that, you have to be smart about how you look.” He could never scare away the young look of my face, but that didn’t stop him from trying. He never wanted to see me smile—a smile meant a lashing—and he never wanted my hair to grow out of the control. I was lucky to have Mama’s hair—her wavy hair was much easier to tame than Papa’s curls—but Papa made sure to keep it as close to my head as possible. With my ears sticking out, I always felt like it made me look younger but Papa insisted that I looked like someone that shouldn’t be messed with. How I dressed was limited by the clothes that we could steal or that Mama could put together, yet Papa would never stop talking about how one day, we would dress like we were a part of District 7 and not its slums. We had to look clean because if we didn’t “then we would really be beggars and that’s not what we do”. I knew Papa did this because he cared about us and wanted to make sure that we knew how to survive, and yet I still resented him for making me fear anyone who wasn’t family.


PART 2:
My family was always poor. Mama and Papa would always tell me that our lack of riches extended past several generations. No one in my family was ever on the winning side, and that was why our family was settled in the slums of District 7. Not many people talked about my family or those who lived like my family, but we were a hard bunch to ignore. We resorted to begging, stealing, whatever means it took to put food on the flimsy table that we had also stolen. There was only one item that truly belonged to us and it was about as useless as a twig in District 7. A spoon, with our family name engraved, passed down many generations until a family in the slum held ownership over it.

My family was small, but it had less to do with my parents’ control and more with Mama’s inability to provide the nutrition my baby sisters and brothers needed. Losing a baby no longer affected Mama until her womb completely dried up and she realized that there would be no fighting chance left. When she lost her first child, a boy that didn’t live long enough to be named, she showed her frustration for the first time. Mama was a gentle soul, but after many years of sadness and not being able to carry children to term, sometimes she would lash out on me or Ekky. I was the firstborn, the accident that somehow survived. Mama and Papa were young when they had me and weren’t ready for the responsibility of being parents. Yet I was able to survive when my sisters and brothers could not. Ekky was try #3, the one who was somehow able to draw his first breath and the next hundred after that. Papa and I developed the 100 breath system after that, saying any baby who made it to their 100th breath was going to live. The highest since was 57 breaths, a girl briefly named Alma.

Because we were poor and because of the low survival rate of the infants in my family, I was taught to be a survivor. Hearing about how I was bullied in school angered Papa; he was angry that I did not fight back. He would tell me that I was a fighter since I lived, and how he was disappointed that I did not show the same fighting spirit. He didn’t know that I was being teased for my living situation. He didn’t understand that the other kids picked on me because I was the smallest and skinniest in the class. He wanted me to fight with my fists, and yet he didn’t understand that I had no meat on my bones to make an impact if I did choose to punch.

He made me fight back. He spent years in the alleys teaching me how to fight and driving anger into my soul. If I ever showed any hesitation, he made sure I learned my lesson to the point that my anger felt natural, within me. I didn’t want to feel this anger; I just wanted to get through school so I could learn something and get a job to help my family. Papa had different plans for me.

My first steal was at a marketplace. It was a dingy place, one where taking inventory was a laughable matter, an easy target for low-level thieves. Papa had taken me there and he pointed at an object, telling me that Mama needed it very much. I believed him—I had the bruise on my back to prove it—and I was too young to understand the concept of payment for goods, so I did as he told. Pretty soon, all he had to do was point and I would take it without a second glance. As I grew older, I realized what Papa was trying to do with me and I started resisting. How was I supposed to take from these people their livelihoods? He told me it was necessary to support ours, but I knew that he took a pleasure in it that I would never find.

I couldn’t say that I only learned bad skills from Papa. He did teach me how to be a survivor in more ways than one. I learned how to be cautious, how to keep my guard up, until I learned how to use my fists. Pretty soon, I became the tough one on the playground, backed by my escalating height. I would never lose the skinniness, and yet I soon started to tower over my peers until they learned that I was no longer the apple on the edge of the pyramid but rather one of the apples at the base. No longer would they be able to pluck me from the group without meeting trouble of their own, and that was how I became a loner.

Friends were difficult for me. I could never take them home—not only was what we called a house dismal, but Mama’s flare ups were becoming more common and she was not safe to be around—and Papa drilled into my head the idea that no one in the district was looking out for us. And yet, that was exactly how I met Alex. We were both young, both skinny, both hungry but for very different reasons. We were at the marketplace when I was eyeing the bread stall hungrily, waiting for the moment I could sink my teeth past the hard exterior and into the doughy middle. I had everything planned out, but I was stopped by a tap on my shoulder. He was a small boy, looked hungry, but he smiled at me and gave me his loaf of bread before running off.

This happened several times before he finally stayed long enough for me to ask for his name. I maintained my tough boy exterior and yet inside, I was jumping with joy for another boy my age was finally talking to me. I still never took him back to my house, but for the first time, I realized that I had made a friend. He always gave me more than I could give him, but if he ever needed a guy who could fight in the streets, he always knew that I would be there to back him up—not that he ever got into fights. He was always the good kid, despite my bad influence.