Rabbit Heart [Open]

Rabbit Heart [Open] Jan 9, 2012 0:02:51 GMT -5

Post by Katharyn on Jan 9, 2012 0:02:51 GMT -5

Brynn Larks|District Ten

As a child, Brynn had often played with her mother's snow globe. She had been completely mystified by the magic of it all. Tip the globe, and you had a light shower of snow. Shake it, you had a storm. As a young adult, she was equally as mystified with snow itself. There was something wonderful about the way the cold flecks hit her skin, peppered her long, faded, red wool coat with a frigid dampness.

Though, as she sat at the fence and looked upon the white field and the grazing animals, she couldn't find it within herself to want to banish the snow. In fact, winter was her favourite time of year. The white that covered the land filled her with an inexplicable joy. Perhaps it was because it when the world was covered with snow, it was clean and new. It filled her with a warmth she did not feel any other time of year. A feeling of hope. That perhaps someday, the snow would melt and reveal a new world.

A place where nothing was so cruel as the Capital. But she would never admit that aloud. Or even to herself, completely. She had never been in a position to question their authority. Brynn had only ever been the outsider looking in. The girl with the chip on her shoulder. But she couldn't help but wonder how much all of their lives would improve under the rule of someone else.

Brynn dangled her feet and looked at the boots upon her feet. They were a size to big, as were most of the things that she wore. Her coat hung past her fingers and past her knees, the knitted jumper beneath had a tendency to slide off one shoulder and it draped off of her like a poncho. The only thing that fit her at all were her trousers. And that was only because the winter before she had sewn them herself. The material had been a gift from her mother. She had the tools to fare the winter better than many of the other people of Ten. Layers of clothing, warm bread, and on the harshest of winter nights, she and her sister had taken to sleeping in the back of the bakery, where the ovens always seemed to put off heat.

After volunteering in the fields or seeing the children from the poorer part of the district, she almost felt guilty about it. Perhaps that was the reason why she spent most of the winter padding around outside. As if somehow she could understand the pain of others. Not that she ever really would, but at least she could say the thought was there, right?

She looked up just as the sun began to rise. This was exactly what she was waiting for. The reds and purples and pinks that touch the sky against the white of the snow. This was her morning routine. Awake before dawn, sit on this same old fence, and watch the sun rise up.

To find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

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Rabbit Heart [Open] Jan 12, 2012 15:15:16 GMT -5

Post by Ena Mena Mina Mo on Jan 12, 2012 15:15:16 GMT -5

Hadena rolled over and promptly knocked over a short table her father had made for her, growling into her pillow as she heard the corner of the table splinter, but rising without regret. She wasn't one to stay up any later than she had to, so rising in the early dregs of the day's sunlight, only barely starting to filter through the clouds, had never bothered her. She threw back her covers and crouched to right the end-table, examining in the dim light the chip that had come out of the corner. She'd find the chip later and glue it back on with pine sap easily enough, but now she didn't have the time or the ambition to bother.

Hadena had a handful of dried apple slices and a cup of frigid water, frost having already formed over the top of the jug when she went to pour it, and yanked her knee-high, wool-lined boots that had cost three months' wages on tightly, knotting the laces over her calf, and stomped out into the few inches of snow. At least it hadn't snowed again overnight, though the heavy clouds promised to do so again this afternoon, at the latest. The goats--all seventy-odd of them--were already awake when she went out to the small, fenced-in area that held them when she wasn't chasing them up and down the mountains' foothills. She refilled the four, low grain troughs and then began herding them one-by-one into a narrower, closed-off section of fencing where she could milk them individually without getting kicked or head-butted too frequently.

It took her more than an hour--closer to two, really--to milk the lot of them, and by then the sun was resigning itself to another long day suspended in the cloudy sky. Hadena opened the gate, whistled for her two herding dogs--Frost and Alder--and trudged up the hill after the rambunctious herd as they hastened to find snow they hadn't yet trampled. There was a herd of sheep about half a mile north of where Hadena ended up settling the flock for at least an hour before they started getting restless again, as she knew they would, and a fence not far off to her left kept the animals out of someone's yard. There was a girl seated on the top rung of the fence, but Hadena didn't recognize her, and wasn't in the habit of initiating conversations herself, preferring to let others go to the bother if they wanted to talk. Instead she gave the whistle command for the two shepherding dogs to keep the goats in relative order for a while, pounding the butt of her staff into the frozen clumps of grass to test for the added spring--barely detectable this time of year--that might give away a gopher burrow she could either raid or flush. Gophers may be small, but their homes were treacherous for horses, and their fur warm for mittens.