ambrosia sin | 9

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O N E

age 13

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Have you ever just, looked up to watch your older brother get fucking obliterated by some career bitch from four. She'd swung her mace into his chest like it was fucking easy, when everyone around me was watching with excitement, saying he definitely had her on the ropes.

Guess not.

I'd been calm, I was eating lunch in the district square. (Two apples and a container of peanut butter because we need to eat healthily. Salad is healthy. Cickle says that doesn't count as salad but my argument is as long as it's got something fresh it does.) I didn't feel any sense of worry, didn't feel like I had to. Everyone said that there was no way he couldn't win this, everyone was saying that we might have a victor in Nine again.

Not relatable? Oh.

I nearly died too, choking on the skin of the apple I'd been inhaling. Cickle and I'd been searching a goddamned long time for Titus. Ever since he'd disappeared when we were four years old we'd looked. When Mom and Dad kicked us out when we were nine, we finally got it in our thick skulls that he hadn't run away, he'd been kicked out too.

I remember coughing and coughing over that stupid flap of apple skin, watching as Titus wheezed for breath, fingers snatching at the air as if to try and bring it inside himself manually. I watched him die too as he took his last breath, eyes fading in the soft sunlight of that morning air and I knew it was in real time.

I'd never found Titus, not until it was too late.

I can't remember really what it felt like to watch him die. My fingers shook and no matter how hungry I'd felt only five minutes before, I couldn't bring myself to eat. I could feel my chest moving with air but nothing going in or out. Suddenly I felt that I was standing on the earth strangely. Gravity was pulling my strings up to the sky from the other side so my knees fell onto the earth and my chest followed.

My bones felt different after that day, hollow. I didn't know what to say anymore.

Where there had been hope, there was only a strange loss. I could barely remember my big brother but I did know that he'd been bright, sunny, happy and good. He'd played with Cickle and I when we were little and he'd always given me anything he didn't want to eat, which was sometimes something that he had wanted to eat. I remember sitting on the carpet with him, playing with my mother's makeup, putting it all over Cickle's little round face. He'd laughed so hard he'd lost his front tooth because it'd been wiggly all week.

I'd wanted to find him; ask him if he remembered that time too.

I remember staying there a long time. The sun tilted onwards across the sky and the games continued. Some fight between two people I'd never paid attention to.

Cickle and I hadn't watched the whole week, too engrossed in looking for our brother among the people on the streets to think to look up. I didn't think we'd see him there, on the screen. Even when I was four I was the same height as my big brother. He'd always been small, never someone that should volunteer for a games.

Cickle and I'd been looking because we wanted to be a family, just the three of us.

Had Titus even looked for us?

Did he forget.

Forget about me.

I sat in the square that day until it got too dark and the street lights came on and I could hear Cickle wandering through the streets, calling for me.

My mother used to say this thing. "C'est la vie." It means, "That is life."

But here, there was only death.

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T W O

age 14

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Cickle and I joined a gang because it was better than being on the street and no one was gonna hire some thirteen-year-old piece of shit. Nearly a year after Titus died in the games and people that we know still look at me funny, like I got shit on my face or something. They all know now, since his real name got released on his death certificate. Titus Sin. Pretty sure my parents are still trying to reap the pity from his death since there's still photos of Titus up everywhere.

'Vengeance' they read.

Agreed.

We watched the entire games from start to finish on the reruns when we found out that Titus was in them, right up to the moment that he volunteered for Tate Seraphim's piece of ass. Makes sense, seeing as he dropped our last name like it was trash. I mean, it is, doesn't mean Cick and I weren't hurt about it.

I remember sitting there, thirteen years old and hands curled up in my lap into fists, shaking with anger. Why'd some shitty seventeen year old let a kid like my brother volunteer?

Tate Seraphim must have known right then that my brother was going to fucking die.

There's no way he didn't.

He had a history of letting people volunteer for his sorry ass.

I decided last year that I hate the fuck. Cickle decided that she did too. We always decided things together, an unspoken cord between us. When we'd been born, we'd held each other's hand for a week straight without letting go. I remember Titus telling us but I don't know now if that'd been bullshit or not.

So we joined a gang and now we do what we're told, waiting patiently for the moment we can just fuckin' obliterate Tate Seraphim too. Cick wants to give him a mace to the chest, see how he likes it. I kind of just want to shoot him in the knee caps and watch him squirm.

Our hatred keeps us warm at night.

I remember when they brought Titus' casket home. There was this whole big thing. A casket and a procession of people and all that. it was open. They stitched him all up, even gave him a fake hand so he'd be presentable I guess. The nasa pin was placed on the lapel of his jacket and he wore a new flower crown. I guess the other one was too covered with blood. In his hand was the instax camera and tucked into his shirt was the photos he'd taken in the arena.

Cickle and I had stared as the procession went down the street and then we'd looked at each other.

That stuff was ours by right, all we needed was a fucking shovel.

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T H R E E

age 15

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I think I died three days ago.

Two years now after Titus died and fourteen years old, I fucking died. Like a little bitch, I just bit a bullet and chewed it up in my head until it went out the other side.

They told me while I was in my office in the warehouse. Cickle and four others had been out on a routine mission when the Seraphim gang had ambushed them. It was supposed to be a light squirmish but it wasn't. A stray knife had found Cickle's lung and punctured it and she'd drowned on the pavement while everyone ran away.

I think the last thing I'd said to her was just, "See you at home 'round six."

And I did.

They brought her body there and I've been staring at it since.

She's got the same face shape as me, always has. Widish forehead with a small mouth. I got snake bites last year so that people would tell us apart better. She never got as tall as me but I only started really shooting up this year. I liked to give her piggy backs home. i was glad I was taller, glad I could protect my twin sister well.

But I didn't.

Her body is starting to smell but I ignore it, drinking vodka until my nose stops working.

There's an instax of us and one of Titus framed beside the bed, from the carefully hoarded film still left in his camera.

It's strange, too quiet in here. Cickle talked a lot, incessantly. She didn't like quiet much unless it was the quiet that we shared. Now the quiet is too loud, we aren't sharing it becuase she isn't reacting to the dumb faces I make and the way my shoulders heave with sobs.

I thought I knew what loss was, losing my big brother for the second time in nine years.

Now I know that I didn't.

Now I know what loss is better than I know myself.

My fingers curl into fists on my lap and the skin on my thigh burns where I wrote Cickle's name with a knife last night. Right underneath Titus, that's where she lives now, with him. I hope she's with him. I'm mad that she chose him over me, angry because my throat won't stop closing with tears, my cheeks won't stop staining themselves and it smells like death in here.

I don't want to bury her, I don't want to bury her, I don't want to bury her.

My sister, my twin sister.

It hurts.

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F O U R

age 15

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Six months after Cickle dies they make me a leader, 1/4th.

They say it's because I'm crazy now and maybe that's true. Any reservations I had about pain and hurting others died with her. People are people, yeah, but none of them are her. No one seems to get that. All they see is that I'm crazy now.

Now.

I feel like I've been crazy a long time.

My fingers hold my skin together and I wander slowly through the district, looking out for someone, to make them understand that I feel like I'm in the constant process of dying. It doesn't end. A weight sits on my ribcage, crushing me slowly, getting heavier minute by minute.

It's the mace, moving a fraction of a fraction of an inch every hour, killing me. It's the blade, pushing myself into my lung slowly. Slowly, I'm drowning from it too.

I can feel Titus and Cickle on my skin, staring hard at the top of my head with every step that I take.

I flip them off regularly, both hands over my head, protecting. I live alone in the little house that Cickle and I bought together with blood money.

I like to ask people where they're from, who raised them, in case they know a Seraphim. If they say they're from the Reapers, their gang, I kill them as slow as I can, fingers kneading their guts like a cat on a pillow.

I let them suffer on the street the way Titus suffered in that clearing three years ago, the way Cickle suffered on the pavement months ago.

They call me Sin now.

Ambrosia doesn't fit.