the things we lost | colgate + hannah

Five years.

It feels like an eternity.

An eternity ago, Colgate's blade cast pools of blood onto a wasteland of bones and terror. An eternity ago, twenty-four souls were woven beneath his skin. An eternity ago, he was crowned king of death by a white serpent we call our tyrant president. An eternity ago, he came home and we melted back into his arms, the things he had done with them slipping from our minds.

I was twelve years old, confused, and tragically insecure.

I am seventeen years old, fire itself, and a drinker.

We're not who we used to be. He has hands stained with blood and I have lips tinged with the taste of alcohol. Our eyes are haunted - their ghosts dance in his and nightmares prowl in mine.

We have the same names but we're not who we used to be. We look the same but we're not who we used to be.

His eyes catch the light streaming in from the windows, washed out pale, pale blue by the afternoon sun. In our house that I still feel like I should call "new", his skin nearly matches the off-white walls, a sight that has always made me giggle. There is no crown on his head, but I can see its faded silhouette, even against the sunlight. He has forever been condemned to the title, Colgate O'Leary, Victor of the 66th Hunger Games, but he will always be my big brother - my Dishrag.

And no one can take that away from me.

He doesn't look like a stranger anymore, not like he did when he came home. He looks like my brother again, awkward in his every movement, lips stumbling over words. He's my brother, Colgate, Soap, Dishrag, Bubble Boy.

But there's something missing,

and it's clenched in my fingers behind my back. A small, blue plastic bottle, its contents once his inside joke. It must have slipped through his fingers like grains of sand in the Arena, when his body was hollowed out and rewired into a warrior, a killing machine - what they wanted him to be. Perhaps he felt strange holding his bottle of bubbles with blood under his fingernails.

"Hey, Dishrag," I greet him, an uncontrollable smile creeping up the side of my face. "I noticed that you lost something. And things change, but guess what? You're in luck, 'cause you'll always be Dishrag O'Leary, my big brother."

My hand, no longer hidden behind my back, extends to hold out the bottle of bubbles between my two fingers.

"So, I got you a present."

things we lost to the flames

things we'll never see again

❧

{ table: zoë }