neamhan furey / d8 / fin!

Luxury came to District Eight, but none of it was for the Furey family, who stayed living in the attic, above the family business. The family business was a rotten one; a festering pit of debauchery sandwiched between two factories, masquerading as a somewhat respectable bar, with a couple of near acceptable rooms for rent on the second floor. Luxury came to District Eight and with it came a wash of disposable income for their patrons; the proprietors at the time, relatives Neamhan doesn't know the name of, spent the new profit on imbibements and injectable uppers. Each subsequent generation saw rises and falls, but that rickety brick building always stayed the same, trapping the same cyclical pain within its walls for each new inhabitant. 

Neamhan sees herself, stuck in the riptide, drowning in it despite a childhood spent clawing at the lapping water at the surface. The entire violent process, invisible to those above, repeated itself around her -- cousins, siblings, aunts, uncles -- and one by one, each of them went still, sank, bodies bloating up to cushion the impact of the bones below them, waiting. Neamhan slips away one day when she's thirteen, when she ditches the funny smelling cigarettes she's been partial to for the last couple of years for what her older sister says is morphling, but better, not as easy to get hooked on, and that some regular passerby pays with instead of money. Her sister, Badhbh, is only sixteen too, so she believes him, but still doesn't want to do it alone. Neamhan is scared to be stuck like a sick animal, like Mom and Dad, but Badhbh is different. If Badhbh, her big sister, with the shrill, far reaching voice and her sixth sense for trouble, says it's okay, then it's okay. 

Okay doesn't even begin to cover it.

Life from then on is spent chasing highs. School is somewhere Neamhan goes to needle the other students for leads, for cigarettes from their shirt pockets, for invites to dodgy meet ups beneath the old underpass, the one that comes from and goes to nowhere. Just like Neamhan. Gasoline veins, stuck with matches, burning up from the inside -- that's Neamhan. She's propelled day to day from one morning to the next by the fire under her skin, forcing her to get up, to go. 

Everybody says they want better for Neamhan, with her long stickbug legs and the straggly brown hair that twists and tangles down her back. She's a rose, they say, red lipped and red cheeked, a bulb in the dark of their hovel, keeping it alight no matter who comes or who goes. Badhbh is thinner than Neamhan, which is saying something, and her fingers hurt as they curl around her face. Badhbh tilts Neamhan's chin back, examines her carefully. Neamhan sees herself as her sister sees her, just for a moment. They're one in the same, and that's what's scary. 

Hasn't that always been the case for Furey girls though? Haven't they always been the same, each one of them, as far back as they can trace? Setta Furey was in the Tenth Hunger Games, and she died like a bottom dwelling pest, hair stuck between the teeth of Capitol muuts. That girl had a fleshy rat tail according to legends. And so did all Furey girls after her, since they were all descended from Setta's mother, who had a son later that same year that went on and sired them all. And every one of them since then was born with a horrible, pink thing that set them apart, that made them freaks, that boys and men paid to see. 

But not Neamhan, so says Badhbh. Neamhan isn't sure she agrees. There's no tails, but Neamhan swears sometimes she feels one curling around her leg. She swears sometimes it must be behind her, propping her up like a doll on a stand -- how else could she still be standing? The fire in her veins is burning out, burning through, eating away at her strength. She fans the flame regardless, spends the small hours of the morning dumping fuel inside of herself. No matter though. Still not Neamhan, says Badhbh. She'll go to school even if it's just to fall asleep, and she'll get a job at one of the factories, even if it's just sweeping the floors. So says Badhbh, when Neamhan is fourteen, a year after Badhbh drags her over the edge of the metaphorical cliff, six months after she starts feeling guilty for it, and three weeks after Badhbh starts coughing up blood. 

The day they bury Badhbh it rains.