sigrid vivuus, district twelve | finished

Maybe I've spent too long in this life to be fond of it.

Eighteen years in Panem is an impossibly short amount of time, but within the Vivuus Estate those years unfold like a century passing. I have known these halls longer than my siblings, I have stared out at the cemetery for hours on end, and I have grown to hate this place before any of them. When I was younger, I thought it was some fault on my part. Maybe I was simply entitled, an ungrateful daughter. I couldn't understand the vital role that we played in the community. Ugly, but vital.

Death and life are a circle. One always returns to the other.

Now, I know the truth. The Vivuus family is a plague that has been cast on Twelve, an ill omen that masquerades as something merciful. We are vultures that only know how to pick apart sacred things, to take and take until only the bones remain. Wealth in our district is rarely a fairly gained thing. Our manor looms high above the cemetery, three stories of a home filled with many trinkets, antiques, and classic paintings. Stolen artifacts, treasure piling to the ceiling in the dragon's den.

I used to think there was beauty in it, in the grim and the macabre. The portrait of our grandfather hanging over the grand fireplace, Roslyn's cherry wood rocking horse that all these years later still sways back and forth from time to time, the carved figurines of rebel soldiers that Terrence and Umber would play pretend with, now collecting dust on a shelf. The golden chain of my father's pocket watch dangling from his vest, the pearl necklace spilling out the side of my mother's ornate jewelry box. The only thing my father made for his children was the swing tied to the gnarled tree in the front yard. It now only moves when the wind urges it to. Once, I loved all of these terrible wonders.

All I can see now is the fraud.

What is ours was not always ours, and what is dead cannot claim rightful ownership. I know too much for my own good, and I don't need the scolding of my parents to make me realize this. How can you move on from knowing what happens in the basement of the home you grew up in? Knowing that all the corpses rotting in the yard just outside your bedroom window have been picked clean of valuables? I have heard the wailing of men mourning their young brides, taken from them so soon, and I have seen the diamond rings my family is so quick to pawn.

We come into this world bare, furious and wailing and vulnerable to all things, and we leave it the same. This is true here more than anywhere else in Panem. I have watched my mother cleanly cut the dress off a dead woman's body, and I have witnessed my father take pliers to the golden tooth in a dead man's mouth. This is no final resting place — it is a final crime. One that I have benefited from, one that has afforded me a proper education and fine clothes and all the toys a girl from Twelve could ever hope for. But I am unable to shut my eyes to what I know to be true.

This wicked life should be my inheritance, but I try to convince myself that once I become an adult I can step away from it. These days, I count each tick of the clock hands that leads me closer and closer to a life where this doesn't have to be my norm. My brothers and sister need me, or at least I convince myself of that, and it's because of them that I try to uphold the duties of being an eldest child as best I can. I love each of them, but I don't know how to save them. It feels cruel to ask them to run away with me, to hide from what we all know to be true, to leave our parents to their awful schemes and wash our hands clean of the sin. For all my intelligence, I am also a coward. It frightens me, the way I am almost willing to quietly erase myself if it means I can pretend I was never a Vivuus at all.

I push my long blonde hair back with a headband, my school uniform is crisp and freshly washed. When strangers talk to me, I smile and speak warmly as if I have never seen a cruel thing in all my years of living. It does not bother me to play the illusion of a privileged girl, some rich man's daughter who doesn't like to talk about her home life. One day, after I pursue a higher education and graduate, I intend to marry a rich man and change my last name. I will move to another manor with a far more boring history, and I will be grateful that my life is simple and quiet. No crime, no ghosts, no red clay staining the winter snow crimson red.

My only hope is that my siblings will follow me out of this haunting, but I cannot wait for them forever. Death and life are a circle.