Dario Cortés, D8 [Done]

His father had always dismissed the stories as the ramblings of a senile old man.

They’d all heard them at various points – that many years ago, before the start of the hunger games, the Cortés family had been much larger. They had sided against the capitol, and been torn apart in the fighting and defeat of the rebels. Dario remembered his grandfather speaking of his cousins being whisked away out of the district, never to be seen again. He was one of the few that remained, his mother going into hiding for months before they finally surfaced again. By the time the dust had settled it was just the two of them – the last of the remaining Cortés clan.

Except details were hazy, now that his grandfather was in his nineties. Bits and pieces of the story mixed together as though Abuelo Carlos was painting with watercolor. Dario spent nights taking care of the old man, tucked next to him watching a fire burn and listening to the same stories over and over. He would whisper about how his father had been a great soldier, and killed men from the capitol. He was always so proud of how hard they had fought, and then his eyes would change and he would get quiet, thinking about how his father had just disappeared without a trace.

Dario had a knack for searching for the truth. Or rather – he never could let things go, as his younger brother Andrés would tell him. His family had seen Dario grow from a curious young boy into a circumspect young man. Always questioning, always searching. They poked fun that he was small and wiry, and able to get between the cracks that other folks missed. He shot back that the only reason he spent so much time on the truth was that it was all that was important. Of course – they were too busy working in the factories sewing or cleaning clothes to have much time for anything else.

It’s a nice dream, His mother would tell him when he would go on about his grandfather’s story. She was a short woman, with deep brown eyes and a steady set of hands. Rather than argue with Dario, which his father was want to do, she would sit and listen, and let him burn out the fire he had inside of him. She didn’t pretend to know the answers to his questions, or the reasons why people did what they decided to do. And she felt it better that he be let free than trying to hold him down in the dirt. He was clearly full of passion, and any attempt to bottle that was just going to result in some sort of explosion.

He spent more and more time in the factory, which meant burning the candle at both ends.

Carlos started to get sick in the last year. It all happened rather quickly – confined to bed, the coughing from deep in his lungs, the soft voice when he spoke. Dario took pains to sit at his bedside and write down all of the stories that he could remember, and all the things that he would say, no matter if it was nonsense. They came in fits and spurts – sometimes in an old language that Dario couldn’t understand – parts of a story about a woman named Marisol and others that were disappeared.

Always by night, always by train. They were shuttled off to death – or rather, Dario believed that to be the case. Dario would wipe away the sweat at his brow and study his notes, his brown hair slicked back and wild, his eyes wide, as though the puzzle could be solved. Where had the rest of his family gone? Had they been disappeared and killed? After eighty years, was there someone out there that could still remember?

They mourned his passing the same way anyone is mourned that has been sick for some time. It was his time, was a popular refrain, as though there hadn’t been an important piece of history lost. Dario drank with his father that night, after the funeral had been done and the mourners went to bed. They were at the kitchen table, and his father opened a bottle of whiskey. They sat in silence sipping on it, tasting the burn in their throats to feel something.

Dario agreed to clean the old man’s shanty, and lay first claim to anything that remained. He didn’t want his cousins poking their noses, trying to find something that might have been valuable. He spent ours dusting and cleaning, and combing over old pieces of paper as though they might have been more than mundane letters or bills. It was when he moved the old bed by the wall that he discovered it.

An old radio – with signal to send out messages, with notes and locations scribbled here and there. There were notes about each of the family that had been taken away, possible locations, responses he’d received over the airwaves. Channels that he was to avoid due to capitol surveillance. He’d spent years putting together a guide, and searched for someone (anyone) that might have told him the truth about his family.

Dario knew he could not let this die – who knew how long his grandfather, dead after ninety-plus years, had spent searching. He’d never given up hope that someone might have been out there, listening and trying to speak back to him. And so it would be him, the boy who searched for truth, sending out the same messages, to find if there was anyone alive who knew the story of their family.