Lotsee Oxendine, District 10

lotsee oxendine
district 10

Your hands, they say, are magic. The way they coax creatures and people alike back from the brink of death is nothing short of miraculous. But you know the truth; magic isn’t real. You are a healer, and a natural one at that. And to attribute that to magic when the real progenitor of your skill was hard work and study is more than a bit insulting.

Your name is Lotsee Oxendine, and you are sixteen years old. You live in District 10, where you work with your mother as a healer. You don’t realize just how important your work is; you’re the closest thing to a veterinarian that most of the District can afford, and to lose a member of the herd or good breeding stock would be enough to ruin many of the people with whom you dwell on the dusty plains of District 10. A laugh escapes your lips, a wry smile stretching across your face as you scoff indignantly. Your father, ever the manly man, felt that healing is not befitting work for a grown man such as himself. Instead, he works as an equestrian behind the small pueblo house in which you live, taming particularly difficult young horses and turning them into fine riding steeds. But you, your hands were created for apothecary work. And since you have no siblings to lighten the workload on your old mother, you really have no choice but to oblige.

Your parents are part of the large Anasazi population that inhabits the northwestern portion of District 10, and you’ve got the looks to show it. Your back-length hair is dark brown and thin, and smooth as the fur of a newborn foal. You’ve taken in recent years to cutting your bangs horizontally; you tell your mother this is to keep it out of your eyes while you work. Your skin, a deep reddish tan, is relatively free of hair and covered in calluses from long years of working a mortar and pestle (or helping your father with the horses on occasion). But most striking about you, perhaps, is your face. The white men of District 10 would call you beautiful (although they’d always mitigate it by drawing attention to your Anasazi heritage, as if to insult you). Your features are soft and round, with prominent cheekbones and puffy cheeks. Your nose is proud and angled downward, your eyebrows lush and dark. Your lips, full and defined, conceal a smile that you are hesitant to show because it is crooked and stained.

You frown at the fact that you are taller than most girls your age, standing at five feet and seven inches tall and weighing just over one hundred pounds. You have a BMI of 15.9 (although you don’t know what a BMI is). Your years of not-so-taxing apothecary work and never quite having enough to eat have left you able to see your ribs in the mirror, devoid of curves or any meaningful muscle mass. At school, you always find yourself envious of the pretty girls who live in the nice towns and always have more to eat than you; you find yourself equally envious of the ranch hand girls with their broad shoulders and defined muscles. But such luxuries are rarely afforded to the Anasazi. After all, it is to the Capitol’s advantage to keep you divided, to keep you animous of one another. And sometimes, it’s hard not to fall for it.

You’ve always done well in school, much to your mother’s pride and your father’s silent indifference. Your favorite subject is biology, even if most of it pertains to livestock. You absolutely love to learn about the natural world, the plants and animals and every little thing that makes an ecosystem tick. Being a healer’s daughter, you’ve got quite a knowledge of plants and herbs and a good understanding of anatomy, both human and beastly. You’re a polite and funny young woman, outgoing when you need to be and smart as a whip. Sure you daydream and dissociate more often than not, and you’re probably the most stubborn person in District 10. It just means you’ve got goals and aspirations. You know what you want, and that can’t possibly be a bad thing, right?

As a child, your mother could hardly keep you indoors. The plains of District 10 were your kingdom, and you their empress. You would run around at all hours of the day, collecting dirt and finding the most remote aloe plants to bring back to your mother. You would observe all manner of lizards and birds, insects and cacti, and keep little notes about them in your old raggedy journal your father bought for you from a stationery shop in town as a special treat for your birthday. Being outside helped you to escape the fact that your father and mother didn’t seem to love one another anymore. It helped you hide away from the fact that even at a young age, you realized that you and your family were financially destitute. It helped you to forget the emptiness in your belly and the chilling animosity that hung like a thick blanket over your two-room pueblo home even in spite of the Southern heat. For a while, you convinced yourself that everything was okay, because the scorpions were your friends and mommy really did love daddy, she just had a hard time showing it. You pretended not to notice when your father would sneak in young girls from the shoddy old pub in town; you’d plug your ears when mother screamed and cried at him and asked why she wasn’t good enough. Because when you hid like this, you could almost believe that the demons that haunted you every day didn’t exist.

To cope with the growing enmity that threatened to suffocate your household, and partially because you couldn’t stand your father, you threw yourself wholeheartedly into helping your mother with her apothecary work. At first you started off manning the counter in the front room of your house (your gregarious nature was well-suited to it). You had a knack for herbs and plants, recommending and even prescribing them for your patients without having to ask your mother. You learned how to set fractures and dislocations that were so common amongst the ranchers; you learned how to diagnose and cure ringworm and lice and scabies. You could soothe even the worst scorpion sting, banish even the most stubborn ticks. You became well-known amongst the people of the pueblo village, and eventually your mother took you under her wing full-time.

You tell your mother everything, almost. But the one thing you can’t tell her is that you just aren’t happy. You no longer feel that you can handle your sad little life in District 10. No matter how much of a mask you put up, no matter how much you pretend, it’s fruitless and you know it. You can’t pretend that it works anymore, not like it used to when you were a kid. The fact is, the constant struggle of trying to maintain peace in your household leaves you weary. You remain cordial with your father; you talk longingly with your mother of the day when you will finally save enough money to run off, just the two of you, and make a better life for yourselves with someone more deserving. But you have never been able to shake your worries forever. No matter how much you try to escape, something always rips you away from your fantasy and plants the weight of your world firmly back upon your shoulders. It’s changed you, Lotsee, and you can’t tell if it’s for the better. Because the little girl who used to turn away from the television during the Hunger Games, who would cry and plead for a tarantula’s life when it strayed too close to your mother’s gnarled feet, who would pretend to be an itinerant academic studying interesting new plants and creatures, that little girl is gone. Sure, you still talk to your friends, and you love them deeply. Sure, you can go home and hug your mother and smile at your father even though you hate him. But at the end of the day, you don’t know who you are anymore. And, you’d be lying if you said it didn’t terrify you.

PAT word count: 1392