Tamarack Loosestrife [District Five | CBD1]

Tamarack Loosestrife -- sixteen -- District Five

Your mother likes to complain—or brag, sometimes you can't tell the difference—about how her family used to be wealthy, before they had to constantly blow all their money paying assholes to not steal their land. That some of those same assholes help keep your family in business—your average District Five family has better things to save up for than custom-bred pets—only, as your stepmother accidentally discovered over one dinner with the neighbors, makes her angrier. That makes sense, you guess, but you have no idea what she expects you to do about it (sic an army of turtles on the oil industry?), so you've taken to exchanging knowing looks with anyone nearby and letting her get it out of her system.

Occasionally, when your legs ache with fatigue, you think—and only think; you know better than to invite a separate rant—that it would be convenient to lose the land. If you had to move, you could live closer to school and never stumble when your cane sinks into a mushy patch of earth. You don't really want that, though. It would break your mother's heart, and anyway, you'd miss the animals: the snakes, your favorites to feed, and the turtles each fancier than the next, and the frogs that aren't yours but that sing outside your window every summer, and the salamanders with their funky little fingers. You'd even miss the alligators, and in their way the things that lurk under water and in shadows. Your family has agreements, after all, forged long before you were born; better the monsters you know—the ones you know how to keep at bay with old words when blood spills, and how to scream at when they come too close anyway—than whatever enigmas might prowl in town.



300/300 for the first 2018 CBD bio.

Elverson pronouns (ey/em/eir)? I'll edit this if I change my mind about that.

tamarack and swamp loosestrife don't even almost grow in the same places but I got stuck on the rhythm of this name so geography and botany can both fight me, it's fine.