kenny frazier | d7

kenny

His eyes devour the words in front of him, the book revealing its secrets to him. The kid, just at the age of ten, uses a gentle hand to flip to the next page before pausing, placing a shoelace along the interior spine and shutting it. He had reached the end of the chapter, signaling it was time for him to take a break.

The father had been patiently waiting for his son to finish the chapter, tapping his toe against the ground teasingly. "Come on, we don't have all day." He says, reaching out one hand to pull his son up from the position on the floor he had taken. His son smiles, letting himself be dragged to his feet before walking over to the stack of paper fresh from the mills.

His father picks up a stack, and then the son does the same. After trying twice to pick up a stack a bit larger than he can carry, he disappointedly drops some back onto the pile. Following behind his father, he places the paper down on the printer. His father presses a few buttons on the machine before it starts whirring to life, and together they watch as the words are stamped rhythmically onto the pages. Thump, thump, thump. They stand as each stack of divided pages is deposited at the familiar end of the machine, and Kenny's father gently ruffles his hair.

The boy would often grab finished copies of whatever they creating to hungrily read new material. Sometimes it was a textbook headed to District 6, sometimes it was a book on poisonous berries being mass printed and marked with delivery notes for a 'Career Center,' and rarely it was a fiction from long ago for a library in district six.

Just as he's about to grab the copy of what they were printing, the father speaks. "Let's get some lunch into you." And they depart to let the machine take its course before they must come back and bind the books.

---

It was late at night and Kenny had been banned from the kitchen. He always was when his father had friends over. Kenny knew they drank and played poker, but not much more than that. His father had always told him "You'll learn more when you're older." It was a constant refrain that was always met with scowls and pouting. He was older, but at thirteen he was still forced to hang out with his younger siblings upstairs each Friday night.

Often, his father would get heated with his friends. Raised voices would drift upstairs and Kenny would hear the dull roar of anger. On this night, he was feeling particularly curious. Their tones had taken on less of people filled with anger, and more of one filled with determination. Rather than waiting to fall asleep in bed as he normally did, he crept quietly down the stairs, stepping gently over the one that would creak loudly at the slightest press.

Tilting his head around the bannister slowly, he knew that he wouldn't get caught. The adults were too riled up in their own world. From down the hall, he caught snippets of conversation.

"There are more peacekeepers than ever!"

"People are afraid to leave their homes!"

"They can't do this to us!"

Then at the sound of his father's voice, the room quiets.

"We know what to do. We have the words. We have the design. We just have to print. The people will follow the manifesto."

---

Two days later, the men in white suits with guns and batons arrived and dragged his father away from the printing press while Kenny watched, eyes wide.

"What are you doing?" Kenny yelled as his father struggled, trying to push his way past the heavily suited soldiers. As he ran to loyally join his father, one of the peacekeepers grabbed him and held him still. While the man was pulled from the house, the peacekeeper knelt down, preventing the struggle thirteen year old from joining his father.

"Stop struggling," The peacekeeper said gruffly.

Kenny, feeling the strength leaving his body as he realized the hopelessness stared into the soulless mask in front of him. All he could see was his reflection, staring back at him. All he saw was a wild-eyed child with tears leaking down his face, too weak to stop them from taking his father.

"Don't worry." The voice comes through the visor deadpan, as if it was reading a script poorly. "We received notice your father was doing bad things and abusing his power as a publisher. You will be taken care of."

Then more peacekeepers arrived, taking stacks of whatever was being printed and loading them into cars to be taken away.

He and his siblings were whisked from their house, taking nothing with them. They were deposited unceremoniously at the Capitol-run orphanage. Staring upwards, still dazed, they saw the decaying building in a side alley off the town square and broke.

---

A year later, they were finally allowed back into their home. Kenny, now fourteen, had spent the last year defending his younger siblings. The Capitol-assigned employees were less than caring, choosing to spend their days drinking rather than watching the children they were assigned to protect.

He had spent that year going out and working, making sure that he and his siblings had enough to eat when they never had enough on their plates; he illegally skipped school to make ends meet; and, whenever he had the chance, he snuck back into the old house to find a new book to bring back to read out loud to his siblings. At night, they would sit at the edge of his cot and listen to him regal tales of monsters and heroes, and they would wonder when they would see their father again.

Kenny slowly learned about where his father was. He had been whisked away to somewhere called the detention center where peacekeepers locked up criminals. But that didn't make any sense to him. His father had done nothing wrong.

When they made it home and saw him standing there, Kenny was the first to run up and hug him, only to be met with limp arms and a quiet father. The detention center had not been kind to him.

His father was now a shell of who he used to be. When Kenny helped him load up the printing press, his father's eyes would no longer glint with the intrigue of bringing words to the world. When they spoke, their conversations were no longer lively. His father's hair, once a set brown like Kenny's, was quickly becoming a silver gradient.

It was as if the father's soul had been chipped away until the only thing that was left was a body on autopilot. Each morning, Kenny would watch his dad tumble into the kitchen, drink some water, and then get to the press. As night fell, his father would mumble a few words of acknowledgement before falling asleep next to a bottle.

He had never been like this before. Even when they lost their mother, he had carried on.

There were no more late night arguments with friends for Kenny to eavesdrop on, no more affectionate hair ruffling, and no more talk about a manifesto.

And it hurt Kenny to watch his father break. Every day for the past year, Kenny had told himself to just keep pushing, to just keep his siblings safe until his father would come back. And now, late at night when everyone was asleep, Kenny was awake, suspecting that he would never go back to the comfort of being the one looked after.

He would curse the Capitol for tearing his father apart, but he blames them even more for dooming Kenny to forever follow a shadow.

It landed on Kenny to make sure the money they were making went towards food. It fell to him to continue reading to his siblings each night to keep their thoughts preoccupied from the ghost of their father. It became his job to ensure their family did not fracture as they all grew increasingly distressed at their father's lack of actions.

---

At eighteen, Kenny now loads up the trays of paper into the printer alone. Watching it in silence as he completes an order request. Without the filter of childhood, the thump, thump, thump of the press seems less lively, less mystifying. Looking upwards, he knows a few rooms away his father is lying in silence. He hasn't touched the paper in over a year. All of Kenny's siblings were at school, so there was no one to talk to while he loaded up the paper cartridge over and over again.

The customer had come to check on the order earlier that day, and Kenny had just nodded along to the instructions. He didn't like talking that much anymore to anyone besides his siblings either, it was a waste of time. He only cared about making sure the job was done so that he could keep the family's modest income trickling in.

Each night, he shuts down the printer, stacking each set of papers into divisions based on what they were for. The textbooks headed out to six and stitching manuals to eight had long ago grown dull.

Then, he would head up to the room he shares with his siblings, switch on a small light hanging next to his bed, and get lost in a book. While he reads about adventures and tragedies, he ponders his life, wondering if there will ever be an escape from the horrendous monotony the peacekeepers forced onto him the day they brought his father back.