elliot gallagher. d12.
May 22, 2022 14:39:26 GMT -5
Post by doodle :) on May 22, 2022 14:39:26 GMT -5
Elliot Gallagher.
7 years old. (6 at the time of the 90th.)
District 12.
“Mommy?”
It’s common for the little ones to want to call their teachers “mommy.” Most of the time, they don’t mean to. It simply comes out. It’s instinctual for children to love like that.
Little Elliot’s “mommy” is actually a thin blonde woman named Miss Porter. She is his first grade teacher, and she doesn’t love him the way he loves her. Little Elliot is the kind of child that doesn’t listen the first time, that prefers to play with his hands while she tries to teach him how to read, to draw on tests rather than fill in the answers. He writes several letters of the alphabet backwards, and confuses “M” for “W” in his writing and reading. And recently, he’s become a bully. He punches the other children in the neck – always the neck, she can’t understand why. Then he says that they were going to do something bad – that they were going to hit him, or hurt a little bug crawling through the grass. But they were never going to do that. Elliot just assumed.
His first day of first grade, he jumped atop his desk for no reason. He leapt out of line and sprinted down the halls, giggling with wild abandon. He shrieked in the bathroom to hear the loudness of his own voice. And she had to chase him down every-time.
He’s better now – his occasional tendencies towards violence aside. Sometimes students get better, sometimes they don’t.
Elliot and Miss Porter sit together at the picnic table by the field. The other children play, or try to. Many prefer to sit in the grass and rest their dying skeletal bodies, visible ribs heaving as they gasp in the fresh air.
“Miss Porter?” Elliot pipes again. He won’t stop until he has an adult’s attention. “Miss Porter?”
“Yes, Elliot?” she smiles at him tolerantly. The boy is built like a lizard. A gangly body with rail-thin arms and a sharp chin. His smile bunches up the apples of his cheeks and curves his eyes into gleefully mischievous slits.
“I made you something.” He practically shoves a piece of paper into her face. She reprimands him for it, makes him try again, and this time he politely holds it out for her to take.
She frowns at what she sees. “Ahh – Elliot…”
“That’s my bruh-ther!” he lisps, in that nearly robotic way younger children stammer-punctuate syllables of certain words. (“WA-ter BO-ttle.”) His long crooked fingernail taps the blurry crayon stick figures, all smudged across the page, filling up whatever gaps it had, creating a scene of rudimentary chaos resembling a Hieronymus Boch painting. “Him’s in the Hungry Games! Him’s – him’s stabbing me!”
Miss Porter stares at a large, taller stick figure clutching a red-smeared knife in its nub hand as a smaller stick figure lies with its back to the linear ground. Judging from a smudged attempt to recreate a darker complexion on the smaller figure’s face, the victim had not originally been intended to be Elliot, but at some point had become Elliot anyway. Both figures were frowning. The larger one was crying. The smaller one seemed to be crying blood.
“He, Elliot,” she whispers, not sure what else to say. It’s second nature by now to correct his grammatical habits. “Not ‘him’.”
“He’s stabbing me!” Elliot chirps, and slides his fingernail up to a stick figure in a skirt, surrounded by a circle. “That’s my mommy! Her – she’s – she’s watching him stab me, but we don’t see her, because she hides from us!”
“Right,” Miss Porter whispers.
“She – she hides from us, so my sister Pe-...Petra has – has to take care of us! My, um…– My bruh-ther, he, he used to take care of me too, but then he went to the Hungry Games, to be hungry, and he died from being too hungry.”
Miss Porter’s mouth is a thin, tight line.
“Pet…Petra says we’ll die from being too hungry, too, maybe. And, um…” He notices movement to the left of him and stops to glance at it for a moment. Then continues: “He…When he got hungry, all these people came to see us, um…And they, um, took pictures of us, and asked us questions, but they didn’t ask me any questions because they had these boxes that flashed at us, and those are called cameras, and cameras are things you – you, um, take pictures with…”
He remembers they were talking about his drawing, and points at some figures off to the side. All with frowny faces. “That’s, um, Pet-ra, crying. And that’s, um, Finn, but he doesn’t cry, he just gets mad. He’s mad. Because, um, Ellis…Ellis got – hungry.” He stops to run his hand through his hair, performs a shuffling side-step to get some wiggles out, which goes on as he picks up where he left off: “And, um, that’s Pat-rick…He, um, has a bottle, because he likes those. And, and he gives them to me, and I play with them, with Finn, sometimes…Um…That’s Finn by the way, he’s mad…he’s…um…And that’s, um, he, he kills ants and Pat-rick gives me a bottle…um…and Pet-ra…um…”
He stops suddenly and scratches his head, wiggling his mouth around as he tries to remember where he was going with this. He's suddenly very quiet, wide glazed eyes staring into nothing in particular. He turns to sit beside her, toes dangling inches over the ground, toes wiggling through the holes of his thread-bare shoes. Miss Porter stares at the picture he’s given her, a slight tremor in her hands. She lowers the picture to her lap and folds her arms around the little boy, holding him close. He swings his feet as she hugs him, head leaned into her tender shoulder.
