Arcadia Vinanoix ~ District Seven ~ Finished
Sept 27, 2016 1:18:21 GMT -5
Post by Arrows on Sept 27, 2016 1:18:21 GMT -5
Arcadia Vinanoix
17 years old
Female
~*~ Not Every Story Gets To Be Told ~*~
17 years old
Female
~*~ Not Every Story Gets To Be Told ~*~
In an instant there is a cry, a new life crawls cradled into the beaming brilliance of a new day. It weeps for air as its connection to its Mother is severed, all while tears trickle down a new Father's face. That's how every story starts, or at least in some variation. What the new life never knows is what exactly is the world they are born into. However, each baby's first instinct is the most appropriate for their arrival. To cry. The reason a newborn cries may partially be for air, yet it could also be out of fear. Perhaps the most primal form of a person can sense the looming monstrosities of the world they have been brought forth into. A world where the moment you enter you are trapped for some unforeseeable length of time. A place where only putrid people pertain the possibility of surviving. A space in reality where darkness smothers any flickerings of light.
Every kid wishes to be apart of a fairy tale, to be a prince or a princess where they can be locked away within their castles from the troubles of existence. This desire for power is primal to humanity, an instinct all animals fight to achieve. Long ago humans won the Earth. Following that, certain humans overcame others defining the modern placement of powers now laced within the reality of Panem. Blood was spilled by power driven beings leaving behind beaten battered bodies by the hundreds to rot within festering fields. War was the tool for rising higher and closer towards the stars. War is where a kid's dream dies, where their desires drift to ash and their shackles to a stony society strengthen. History hides nothing from the viewing eye or the listening ear, there are those with power and those without it.
This is where I finally filter in from the figurative faults of past and present peoples. Far off in some gleaming glass city those with power slither with sinister sins. Here in a place immersed in evergreen and entranced in sunlit leaves the power of precise people is punitive. People of pathetic power ebb and swell like the tides of a distant district's sea. Then beneath those figures whom fluctuate force are those like me, those whom never get to taste the tantalizing treat of authority. Whose lives are spent toiled through sodden soil for sickening serpents in a power packed den some distance away. Whose stories no matter how brutal or hellish never find a place within the bindings of books. Never find a phrase within the placement of those with power into history.
Unlike people picked to be presented with power, my initial upbringing was as humble as possible. Faces faded in and out of my early childhood cabin like clockwork. Crews would come, then go. In their wakes they left lumps of lumber ash littering the darkened curtain covered rooms. My Father's face was frequently among those who ventured out of the door and back in for only several hours at a time. His faulty facial features fatigued by unimaginably unfair hours forced upon him by people presented with power. Their eyes turned blindly over his suffering soul while his eyes struggled to sustain their dangled position of sight. For four years I followed Father to the door just to see him vanish behind it. He worked to keep our family fed along with feeding the families less fortunate than us. He surged through the sickening sodden soil to ensure his family never felt a rumble ripple through our stomachs. Then just as with any protagonist it became my Father's fatal flaw.
Six years old and still not fully aware of the wretched world around me, I was the oldest of three siblings and daughter of a widowed woman. Dampened darkness caused by curtain covered rooms vanished along with the littered lumps of lumber dust. Our cabin was closed by those with peacekeeping power and our luck turned to drier dirt than that which Eleven felt during the deadly Drought. Long nights were spent beneath chilling black skies dotted with deceiving stars while we struggled to stay close and warm together. Rations and portions were provided to us for my Father's death but they did little to stop the struggle. Soon our depended on rations were depleted and desperate nature called for desperate measures. My Mother took myself and my siblings to place after place begging for refuge. Yet again and again doors were shut like stone before our suffering souls. The people were poor and had no place for the poorer, yet while we suffered those with power purged upon it. Until finally a year spent squatting beneath trees of spruce and pine was finally put to rest.
For a mere moment things got better. Our family was taken in by an elderly librarian who lived within an even older library. Although not by much, it was better than before. I slept inside a patted sleeping bag on the floor while my Mother and siblings shared the only small cot in our tiny room. This style of close quarter living carried on for five whole years until I was finally given a new small cot of my own to share with one of my rapidly growing siblings. During this period we naturally helped the lady, Ingrid, who took us in with running her library. Being the oldest I was given the hardest tasks while the others managed simpler things. I organized book shelves and moved large sets of furniture, I did whatever it took to make Ingrid's life easier. I was certain that as long as I could keep her happy she would let us continue to stay with her. Luckily my thoughts proved to be right, except although our home had been secured, several days after my fifteenth birthday things returned to the wicked way they always play out in this world.
Sickness spewed from the spit of my Mother's mouth as I watched her helplessly. I did everything I could to help her, I tried every remedy from every book but nothing ceased her distress. Soon her suffering become her silence and I dug her grave out back beneath the winding branches of a lonely willow. Sorrow seeped not just from myself but from my siblings. They latched me as their new Mother because they knew no one else to turn to. Ingrid was old and frail while I was young and a familiar figure. My mourning was ended swiftly by the needs of my siblings. I didn't get to spend months crying over the cruelty. I got maybe a week before I needed to get back to work and teaching them from what I learned from the libraries books. I stayed up countless nights reading and learning not just for my own endless curiosity but because they needed to learn. We didn't go to school because we needed to work, the library was a slow place so we often took many other side jobs from moving lumber to being errand children for local shops. We got on like this for maybe a year before our lives were overthrown once again.
Weakness waged war on Ingrid and eventually brought her fully to being eternally bed bound. I became the sole Mother figure and in Ingrid's will the eventual owner of the library. My stressed struggle only continued to surge as the world whipped me. It was during these sleep lacking nights I truly learned my place among the social pecking order. I was nothing more than a mere insect on the power pyramid. I suffered more than any of those with power above me yet when I look into future books I knew it would be their stories in them. I was just a girl with two dead parents, such a common pity among those suffering in the shadows of those who do not give a damn.
Following my Ingrid's immobility I spent one night fixated at my reflection in our tiny bathroom's mirror. What I saw was no young girl with excitement in her eyes. I saw an exhausted woman perfectly mixed between both of her parents. I saw her evergreen eyes filled with hated and distrust. Within the freckles which scattered across her skin I saw the marks of her painful past. In her unkempt and tasseled light brown hair I saw her lack of caring about what people thought of her looks. I saw in her slim body and thin features a woman who gives more of her food to her siblings even when she was still hungry. I saw a woman where a girl belonged.
Then when I peered even closer I saw the various scars which stained her skin. The ones she gained from her homeless years. I saw her abnormally formed left collar bone from where her broken bone never fully healed properly due to her past poverty. I saw her tiny teeth and tiny mouth to match her tiny nose, eyes, and ears. In every sense I saw a small suffering woman which marks of age across her. I saw her intellect, her hatred, her determination through the shackles of her suffering skin. I saw myself, a woman who never was a girl. A woman who would eventually die without a word written about her.
