Persephone Dancing [D12 - Fin]

Percy Dancing

My blood is thin, like the ice on which I tread so carefully. Sheepskin boots dance lightly across a pane of glass that is so thin that I must become lighter than the air itself to prevent the downwards pressure from cracking the surface beneath me. In the cold abyss many a man has met their untimely demise, but I flirt with death so openly that people scorn me on a regular basis.

There is a wicked wind from the south that cruelly cuts at my skin as I attempt to traverse across the ice, my white fingers pulling the scarf up and over my nose, leaving only my sharp blue eyes visible above my many layers of clothing. Instinct and experience guide me across the routes that are etched in my memory, my entire well-being relying on these mental maps to guide safe passage across a chilling minefield.

There is a slight creak beneath my right foot, and my heart leaps to my mouth. I lean backwards onto my left, holding my breath as I counterbalance myself. I feel the ice beneath me moaning, threatening to give way, but I control myself and remain composed. I move lower to the ground, my hands reach out in front of me and spread across the cold sheet. I gently place my knees down on the ice, before completely sprawling flat across the ice. The increase in surface area is a decrease in pressure, and the groaning subsides. I shimmy my way forwards on my front, dragging with me my supplies as I head for the centre of the lake.

It wasn't always this way. Winters used to be a lot warmer for me, spent by the fireplace with my Mother and my sisters. Those days are a distant memory to me, fleeting and in a way futile, but yet I cling to them, and I don't know why. My father taught me everything I know about ice fishing. He would take me on trips, sometimes days at a time, sometimes weeks. When the snows rolled in and the lakes and rivers froze, it was like time had stopped the flow of nature. We would leave the District behind and live off the land. Fish is the fruit of the sea, bountiful and plenty, spreading to the rivers and lakes, an abundant supply of food.

We ate like kings in our youth. All the fish we could ever want, and all because we were daring enough to brave the ice in the colder months and spend the time learning to master an art. And it is an art. With a spear in my hand, I dance with the fish. In the summer months, I would have to battle currents in the flowing streams of the wild, facing a completely different challenge for the same reward. My father often told me how captivating it was to watch me stand against a torrent and battle the flow of a river. Certainly that was more fun that sitting over a hole in the ice and stab anything that moved, but it was more difficult. Those warmer days were challenging, but rewarding all the same.

Now I am in a long, unforgiving winter, and the art form is dead. You could say it lives on with me, but I don't intend to pass it on to anyone else now that my father is dead. I don't want anyone else facing the same fate as him. The Capitol sees activity outside of the District boundaries as a crime punishable by death. Most Peacekeepers will turn a blind eye to it, but everyone has their limits, especially when food is short.

He was strung up in a tree, left danging like a disused puppet trapped in its wires.

I can't shake the feeling that one day a noose will be placed around my neck. That fills me with a hollow dread, knowing that I could be painted with the same brush as my father, labelled a thief and a criminal. Most people would be put off leaving the District to gather food after seeing their father hung by the neck until dead, like I did, but I continue to do it, day in, day out. Because there are mouths to feed, and I enjoy the isolation of it, I suppose.

The sun lowers down towards the horizon. It is a bleeding, swollen red, melting in the sky above me. The sheets of ice are dyed pink, the sweat misting over as the temperature drops. It will soon be getting to dangerous levels of cold, but like any environment, if you spend enough time surviving in it, you adapt to it. I have been doing this for a long, long time. By the time it is dark, I reach the fishing hut in the middle of the lake.

I spend the night cold and alone. I think about my father, I worry about my future, I cling to visions of my little sisters growing into self-sufficient young women, I do what anyone does when left in isolation for hours on end - I think up every possible bad scenario there is, and what I would do if they every happened. I imagine that noose around my neck, and try to figure out what would happen to my family if I died. I have a little sleep, eat a bit of cured meat, and warm up in a sleeping bag that was stitched together long ago by my grandmother.

I catch seventeen fish. It's a good night.