Cat Stirling [d11] [done]

Cat Stirling
23 years old
District 11
Not Your Bitch


If you ever repeat this to anyone I will find you and rip your tongue out of your throat. Are we clear? My name is… Agnes Alma Stirling. With a hyphenated Izar at the end if you’re technical, but fuck hyphens and fuck technicalities. I’m Cat. Don’t call me anything but Cat.

I was the quiet one for most of my life, the patient kid who sat back and allowed my neverending crop of siblings to crawl and grow all over my body. Six years separated me from the next which provided me with ample time to become the perfect referee for the wrestling and the horseplay and the pranks and the unorganized chaos. Time lent itself to my silence and the patience and serenity that once defined me took a sudden drop from the highest tree around.

We had a pet rabbit for a long while. His name was Cat, before mine ever was, and he was my best friend during those early years. Mama was much more of a presence then, but as time morphed me to its whims and will it too changed something in my mama, sinking her eyes and drying her lips thinner and thinner until her mouth was so rarely used they almost seemed sewn shut like a walking Jack Eckhart. As Mama drifted away, Cat curled into my heart more and more. He slept in my bed, took my side in sibling rivalries, and always ate the bad apples that we would’ve tossed anyway. I was being pulled in all directions, the warmth of Cat, the ice of Mama, the upheaval of time spent in my mind.

One morning I woke up and screamed.

Cat was breathless, and had been for quite some time. In the night I’d rolled atop him and never budged. My limbs flew out from my body fast and flimsily, slung without a thought and without restraint. The rabbit hit the ground with a thud and my sheets bunched up around my face as I screamed again. Muffled heavy breathing warmed me up in a sickening reminder of Cat’s life, and by that time I knew Mama would come to check on why her oldest girl was yelling at six in the morning.

But she didn’t come, and neither did my siblings, and I allowed the silence to exit my body for good.

I walked up to my siblings’ room later that morning and told them Cat died in his sleep, but I was Cat now. I was Cat and if they had anything else to say about it they’d wind up with their face glued to a dirty toilet seat. My siblings had never heard me talk like that before, always considerate and kind with them, watchful and calm. They nodded in bewilderment, a couple jaws slacked. I was no longer their sister. I was new.

Mama never much came out her room after that. All her life she led us to believe she was a nurse, working weird hours and late nights and taking in stray cousins with hair as wild as mine. Turns out she was just some whore, and that’s what did her in. Got some kinda infection that drained her of energy, sapped her strength and left her bones brittle and grainy like sand. She was weak, but she told us she quit nursing to knit. And so she holed up in her room and knit and sang the songs Carmen used to sing and coughed up blood until she passed out for the night. The rightful thing then was to take on her role, even more than I had for the majority of my years on earth. But rightful wasn’t my rightful anymore. My views of right and wrong had warped with my senses, melted into puddles of multicolor messes, and I tried on a different pair of pants.

Unorganized chaos was easy to reign in with a stern voice and the back of my hand. They listened to me without hesitation after only a few months of my regime, and I know it’s because they were tired of feeling my knuckles clap across their cheeks. I wasn’t mean, I was harsh; and I had nobody asking me any questions at all. Freedom to whip kids into shape and squeeze their little clay bodies into my preferred form came all too simply. I thought about how many other families out their had a sixteen year old matriarch and a forty-something wasting away in her bedroom as her four other children marched in line to a child’s wishes. I couldn’t be the only powerful teenager in Panem.

Organizing the chaos was even easier. My sister found Mama’s client book, which was as upsetting as it was a piece of burnt toast. I sent my siblings out to their houses to leave a note on their doors, a risky venture as most of these men had wives and families to worry about on top of infecting my mama with sickness, or catching it and spreading it further. But none of the notes were intercepted, and all the men followed the instructions and showed up right on time. They filed in the room in small huddles, concerned and confused at the other faces present, but they came regardless. I snapped my fingers, and my siblings went to work. One laid out the paperwork, one procured the pens. The boys went out back and carried in the chest we’d prepared.

With the blackmail of Mama’s list, which she so detailedly noted the times and dates and specific orifices and extremities in use, we secured ourselves several investors that day, and they all took home a signature bottle of Stirling Stirs.

Stirs was hooch. It was nothing but hooch bottled in fancy glass containers I sent my siblings out to steal from the dumpsters behind the Peacekeepers’ buildings and homes; nice things like that weren’t taken from regular homes. And we poured our trash can concoction in and capped ‘em. In fact, some of Mama’s clients were the very Peacekeepers we stole the bottles from, which made it all the more sweet when they signed their names on our sponsorship list.

We were near invincible then, or at least on a breathtaking high of adrenaline that didn’t peak for weeks. We trashed yards, we threw parties, we stole entire farm animals and set them loose in Town Square. There was nothing we couldn’t do, with the Peacekeepers and other nasty pig men signed away to us. Crazy that a bunch of kids and their older sister had one up on who were supposed to be the most powerful people around. But their power didn’t extend to the Stirlings, and we continued our hooch business, and we continued wreaking havoc all over every day.

Business is booming still. It’s been seven, eight years of this life, of men buying our junk wine we fermented in trash cans every month if they want to maintain their picturesque little families. Mama had no backbone, but Mama didn’t raise me. I brought myself up in time. I brought myself to where I am now. I may be twenty three and living at home, but somewhere in me I did take the responsibility of mother seriously. I would never admit it to anyone, especially not you, so don’t bother asking shit. But I can’t leave them, my little rascals. They’re loyal, and they’re kind, and they’re all the things I used to be but don’t have room for anymore. But, most importantly, they are just the chaotic free-thinking rebels the world needs, and I am their role model.

“You don’t get more chaotic than Agnes Alma Stirling-Izar.”

Fuck you. Where are my scissors?