Mouse Loveland, Wanderer {FINEESHED}

"The cannon marks the final beat of her heart, the last rattling breath to pass through her lungs and the rest is only silence. The world around her dissolves until she can barely feel the pavement beneath her feet, barely smell the perspiration of bodies beside her that wafts into the air of District One and the only sound is the swelling of white noise, loud and aggressive in its loneliness and its oblivion.

She thought that love at least would last forever, thought that there was no limit, no depth that her love couldn’t reach, running through each threading vein of your body, of her body, the child’s body and right down to the marrow of your bones. The others must see blood now, but she can only see her love pouring out in thick deep spurts. Catch it, she wants to scream, before there is nothing left and all the love in the world runs dry. But no one can hear her over the nothing.

So she lets the nothing overtake her, gives herself over to it entirely.

She loved too much and that is why she is dead- there is no comfort in knowing that there is no one left to mourn for her..."

I saw you on the big screens, smiling the way they told you to- like they’d inserted fish hooks into the corners of your mouth, pierced under your skin. The cameras didn’t pick up the blood then, but I knew your smile- the private one you saved just for me- and the one that the rest of the country saw never seemed to reach your eyes. There are tapes, you know, of you smiling like that, preserved in time and history- the strange way they did your hair, the clothes they put you in a brighter shade of blue than we'd ever even seen before. The rest, the real things are fleeting, preserved only in my memory.

I want to write them down one day, pass them on when he comes back to me.
Have you seen him?
Have you seen my baby?
Will you tell me what he looks like? Everything from those times has gone fuzzy, like shadow puppets- I remember the dark a lot and the moving shapes. What colour were his eyes?

The audience cheers and the man in the chair asks you if you have a girl back home. The people are confetti, colourful and bright but ripped to shreds, they don’t see you blush but I do. Mouse, your lips wrap around my name, I see it, reach a trembling hand out to the screen. Is she pretty? The most beautiful girl in the entire world, you said. Perhaps in that moment your eyes might have flickered closed to one of the longest days in midsummer as you reach with your fingers to tilt my chin up. In the yellowing light of the sun our eyes glow like fireflies, my lips grow moist as I lick them and you want to kiss me. So of course you do and in that moment the world holds its breath. But when you finally do exhale, you are brought back to the cold synthetic bright lights. And you know as well as I do that, for us, the summer days are long gone.

My protectors were watching too. My monsters. After you’d gone, they were all hands and teeth cooing isn’t she pretty, isn’t she pretty, touching my hair, my eyelids, finding all the softest places and pinching where it hurt.

These days no one touches me like that but there are children who throw rocks if they ever see the crazy woman in the woods. The forest is awash with sound; each gust of wind it’s own musical note through the gaps in the trees, each snuffling animal a melody of its own- close your eyes and you can hear the colours as clear as a song, the forest filled with the fresh greens, turning cinnamon in the autumn, pollen and spores texturing even the air, speckled with fresh pine scents and wild new blossoms . At night, though, the branches twist into their teeth and their snarls. I still fear the dark above everything else.

Would you still think that I was the most beautiful girl in the world, if you saw me now? Colours fade and turn to grey or sepia, the blood comes off in time. Parts of me have been taken and no one will tell me where; I am not a whole person any more. Catching myself in the windows, in peices of broken glass is enough to pull me back into the present, sometimes. My nails peel away like the rind of an orange, my skin bleeds far too easily, filled with splinters from grabbing fistfuls of dry twigs. It’s too cold and I am a transparent smudge of white, pale as a ghost from the lack of sunlight- it hardly ever reaches through the trees. I used to love the way our hands looked threaded together, contrasting colours but now I can only see an endless white nothing. Both of us have slipped away into nothing more than memories, sheer silk, crinoline. But I am cracking like bone china under the strain around the eyes and the mouth. The frown lines I understand, but the crows feet- the laughter lines- I don’t know where they came from. I haven’t laughed one day since you left me.

After you’d gone, they told me what to wear and who to talk to- moved my arms like one of my china dolls into the dresses, out of the dresses, so I could shut my eyes and pretend that I was somewhere else. You were always there too and you brought my baby with you, I couldn’t get a tight enough grip on his face so I pictured him different each time, like colouring in a black and white picture with water colors or pastels.I still do.

See those eyes there, those are mine today; tortoiseshell like the old cats that kept the mice out of the bakery, almondine looking someplace else when he feels he doesn’t quite belong. That mouth is mine too, he doesn’t like it much- too feminine and too full for the rest of his face, though no one ever skates their thumb across it, something stale and strange smelling on their fingers. No one ever would, because he is always, always safe. His hair is yours, dark and tightly curled- does he muss it up the way you used to when you were afraid? Look, his hands are yours... will be yours ...are becoming like yours. How much time has passed since they took him from me?

It’s all mixed and muddled; time is more fluid now than it was before. Past tense will become present, the present is past, the past was the future.

Some days I see a fuzzy baby, other days he becomes the silhouette of a full grown man- a full head taller than me as I hunch over into myself, wishing to disappear. Some days I am here- tired and worn down, in dressing gowns, clutching at a wisp of greasy hair, finding grey within the brown like snowfall on the earth, some days I am with the monsters and my lips are heavy with gloss, with them and the dresses are too tight and the perfume is intoxicating, and others I am just with you. I just belong to you. My hair is knotted to one side, thicker than it is now with a glimmer that shines with life and with hope, yours is ruffled and wild, autumnal brown colours envelope us though we are glowing like it can’t possibly be anything but the summer. You lift my sweater delicately and gasp as you touch the swell of my stomach underneath. We are so, so very young. I used to have marks on my stomach from carrying him, but they made them go away and sucked out the places where the fat still lingered from keeping him safe, plush and protected. To be prettier for my monsters.

I should never have let them take him. You should have made me promise.You should never have left.

After you’d gone, it was all illusions to them and in those places they broke me down and pieced me together with borrowed parts. Other people’s hair pinned to my head, sleek and curled, synthetic nails and eyelashes stuck fast, wall papering over the cracks and the mould in me that had started to form. There were wires and needles in their brilliant white smiles that looped through my broken joints to bend where they wanted me to go. Their fakeness made it easier to pretend that it wasn’t real. I was always thankful that you never had to see me in that place- a small comfort, but the only one I had.

They gave me things in return. For the pain, sometimes to make it better, sometimes to make it worse, but always to remind me somehow.They were the most fleeting of cures, bridging the vast distance from me to you for seconds at a time. Sometimes I miss them and then sometimes alcohol is enough. Their gaudy colors, plastered onto me have long since peeled away and I am an abandoned doll; dirty, disheveled and broken. I fold oversized clothes over myself, protective covers that match the trees and the earth- a long way off from the bird of paradise they tried to turn me into. I am a sparrow, a weasel, a mouse. Drab fur and feathers, hiding.

There are no good days and there are no bad days; in fact I barely notice there are days at all. There are cigarettes that turn the bright white teeth that they put into my head into yellow ones, there are bottles that stop my hands from shaking when I get them, there are meals that I go without until the bones in my skin poke through and I can count each slice of my rib cage, there are meals that I eat and watch the bones disappear back inside of me with fascination.

There is this, but there are no days. There is no you.

If you see my baby, tell him I’m waiting for him in the woods.

Sometimes I only have to close my eyes and I am back at the academy. The gymnasium equipment is new and shining like cut glass or polished jewels, the floors gleam and smell of new varnish. Everything is clean and fresh- I’m clean and fresh too, unblemished, unmarked; quick to smile and quick to laugh. Do you remember the way I’d catch you looking at me through your deep, dark eyes over the observation gallery long before we started going together properly? I would always toss my hair and smirk to my friends a little, you had to know that I was showing off in front of you the way I’d practise on the cross beams, always surreptitiously stealing glances in your direction to see if I had made you blush, hoping to impress you, knowing that I would. I was Mouse even then, but in those days I was a living breathing misnomer. They called me Mouse but ,oh, the way I used to roar.

I’m envious of that girl; the self assured and sometimes vain creature who held her hand tightly in yours, never really stopping to appreciate all that she had. You can be sure that she isn’t me anymore, long gone, long left to rot. Sometimes I can hear them talking and laughing as they pass notes back and forth in class to each other, or while they’re sharing clandestine milkshakes in quiet coffee shops, sharing secrets and promising to share that big wide future that the two of them were bound to have in front of them. A house, a lawn, a weight room (at your insistance, not mine) and a family. Those dreams are long gone now but I swear I can hear your laugh, carried on a soft wind, echoing from somewhere or filtering through the soft music of the mockingjays- those are the moments that I get as close to happiness as it is possible to grow in this place. I wonder if my baby is happy; a babbling infant in his cradle, drooling and smiling around one fat, little fist- the same golden brown colour as demerara sugar. The little flutters in his chest come from my heart held tightly against his while my ribcage is scraped hollow and bone dry. I’m sure that she would hate me, that pretty girl flickering her hair in the gymnasium who could make you laugh until you cried, I’m sure that she would hate how easily I have given up and given myself over to despair.

After all, what we had wasn’t ripped from our clutching fingertips while we screamed in despair, nor was it stolen from us secretly while we slumbered. Our burdens were not thrust upon us, we did not cry out and run in horror from these years of emptiness. It never was. No, we volunteered.

We were all supposed to be the brave ones, weren’t we? Bathed in glory, so talented and courageous if you listened to what everyone said. You were going to be my soldier and whatever we did we would have done with our heads held high. I saw you on the big screens, most days I didn’t dare tear my eyes from them as though if I did that you would be able to feel it from all those miles away, so I watched and I was with you until the very last. You tried so hard to be everything they wanted you to be, but in the end you weren’t very brave at all, were you? But then, neither was I when it came down to it. I keep my head held so low nowadays it’s a wonder my nose doesn’t touch the ground. I think that if I see my baby the first thing I’ll tell him is that sometimes it is fine to be afraid. The way I would have told you if I’d ever gotten the chance again. I hope you never thought that I was disappointed in you, not once out there- I don’t think I could bear to see your face filled with heartbreak like that again.

I see it clear as day if I really try to, so close the wind could be your breath against my eyelashes and I can almost smell you; fresh soap, chalk dust and strawberry milkshakes- but then there are moments when the days back home, with you and me are like wonderful dreams I can hardly remember, ephemeral as smoke, and I cannot be sure if I didn’t just make it all up. I hate the feeling of you slipping through my fingers like that, as frail as my memory now when you were always so vivid and strong before.

I know that the monsters are real though and no matter how hard I try they won’t ever let me forget. How long I was there for I honestly couldn’t say, a seemingly endless stretch of time punctuated by the comings and goings of strange shapes more like nightmares than actual people- I remember the girl you loved clearly, tossing her hair and making you laugh but I am not sure who the girl kept locked away with the monsters was. I don’t think that was ever important- she was barely human herself, a china doll only warmer and softer to the touch, barely conscious for the most part. I am glad that she is gone but I should have known that they would never let me leave, even though my body is here, at night my mind will always go to the darkest of places.

For as long as I can remember my dreams have been in crimson, of that place, the rich deep carpeting swathed in somebody’s blood and wall paper that always reeked of smoke and sadness stained scarlet. Always those four walls, that one room- the windows barred, the doors locked and bolted from the other side. From some far corner just on the outer reaches of my hearing comes the pitiful cries of a child, faint and sad, desperately calling to me though I cannot get to him, and though I always hear him wailing for me I can never get close, I can never see him. I don’t even know what colour his eyes are.

Sometimes you are there with me too, chained with me to the bed, drenched in blood that has dried almost black, your eyes rolling at me, sclera as yellow as urine, an unbearable stench of decay that makes me gag as maggots fester in your gaping wounds, shrivelled brown with time.

I always try to clench my eyes shut- never wanting to see you like that- but the monster’s fingers are there to pry open my eyelids poking with clawed disembodied hands, pawing hungrily at my body as great luminous eyeballs leer from shadowy bodies. There are hundreds of them but they are all the same, made of nothing but hands and eyeballs that are slippery to the touch though they can hold me fast and hold me down, pressing my head into the bed, right into the smell of decay, right against your corpse.

When I scream they force their fingers down my throat until I am choking and suffocating on them, there are needles behind their nails and pills on the tips of their tongues as they snake them, frantic and searching into my mouth, forcing me to swallow. Like always I wish for death, harder than anything. But it never finds me and each rattling breath in my chest is like a curse.

I simply wake up to another day without you, without my child.

What would he think of me now, I wonder, as a way to pass the endless hours in this ocean of time I find myself adrift on. It’s difficult to say; the monsters left scars that weren’t physical but they were cut into me deep and ugly all the same. I skip through memories as easily as breathing, passing through time backwards and forwards like weaving through the forests. The lucid periods, the weight of the present are rarer than they once were and in many ways I am grateful for that. Life here is heavy and cold while I can be warm and safe when I am in your arms, vanishing under the comforting eiderdown of our shared past. I suppose I cannot blame the children for throwing rocks, for people startled by screams in the dead of night coming from the woods- we would have done the same, wouldn’t we?

I am certain though, that I will know him when we find each other and the parts of you that I adored will sing out to me from inside of him, your laugh, your strange habits and superstitions, the smell of fresh soap, chalk dust and strawberry milkshakes and finally fill out the hollow space where my heart used to be.

It is a thought more precious to me than oxygen; more vital than every organ in my body and it is that thought alone, I think, that keeps me alive.

If you see my baby, tell him I’m waiting for him in the woods.

The story starts as a simple one, everyone knows it quite well; there is a boy, there is a girl. They meet. They don’t meet in the way that you might meet your friend for lunch to stop and gossip or the way you meet with your teacher and parents to check up on your progress at school- this is the kind of meeting between the boy and girl that goes deeper, as twin sets of hearts begin to synchronise and two people somehow form the separate halves of a whole being. You can know someone your whole life and take years to really meet them the way that all the stories talk about. But when it happens, the moment is instantaneous and huge like a supernova and both the boy and girl know somewhere, deep down, that there can be no going back. I’d seen you around school, like quite a few girls I admired the kink of your hair and the way you hunched over to lift the heaviest weights you could manage, we’d talked once or twice - but I hadn’t met you yet. But just as in the hours before a supernova, the universe seemed to be holding its breath.

My father owned, owns… I don’t know, a jewellers workshop and store. He had a head for business and was good with the figures but it was my mother who was always the real artist. She could do it all and taught the other employees the trade; setting delicate diamonds into broaches like holding a single grain of sand gently between her fingers, polishing platinum, engraving and plating necklaces with gold as though she were an alchemist spinning it from nothing but plain threads. She had a way of creating something beautiful from raw parts that always left me captured and filled with awe. But her best works were always the cameos; engraved silhouettes set deep into gemstones carved by hand, shipped directly to the capitol. She’d use my profile sometimes, have me sit and tilt my head to the side, sitting calmly and stilly for as long as I could- and it tickled me to know that some capitolite might wear my face proudly as an adornment. Perhaps someone wore me in the audience as you gave your interview, and though you didn’t know it, I was looking out at you, watching over you, pinned to someone’s chest the way I had you pinned onto my heart.

I was working in the store the day I met you, helping my parents out when I wasn’t in training or at school, trying to learn the tricks of the family trade from my mother though I didn’t have a lot of her skill. But I could engrave jewellery though, and enjoyed feeling as though I was being useful. The weather was grim; swollen rainclouds and the distant thrum of thunder like a drum roll to build the anticipation and when you stepped in the store you shook off your umbrella outside of the door to avoid dripping tracks onto the carpeting. It was a gentle, courteous act that took me by surprise from someone so large, so strong and so supposedly fearsome in training-but I would grow to learn that was just like you.

After the usual pleasantries were out of the way, you fished into your pockets for an indiscriminate amount of money, picking out the lint that clung to the coins and retrieving a stray stick of gum that was mixed up with it. Placing the coins on the glass counter, filled with rings and gold watches, your smile was more brilliant than any measure of precious metals, the sheer pride in your eyes almost as dazzling as that smile.

“What can I get for this?”

Wrinkling my nose, I counted your money sceptically- it wouldn’t go very far. “Not much. Is it a gift?”

You nodded your head, “something like that. For a woman.”

I took that to mean your mom. I didn’t know her personally back then, but I knew of her sure enough. For one thing, if you saw her on the street she was impossible to miss; as tall, dark and broad as you were, ample with enormous breasts and thighs, but as firm and solid as a brick out house, her face was supple and ebony on the right hand side, wrinkled quite naturally with time while the left was strange and plastic looking with a polished shine to it, the expression reaching her abnormally clear looking left eye never seeming organic. Even without her immense form, her reputation preceded her the way of all our celebrated district one victors. Nobody had expected her Hunger Games to end as quickly as they did, so the story went, and when she stood alone and victorious having walked head on into a storm, missing huge chunks of her face and her left eye damaged beyond all repair she would only say briskly that she had important things to do back at home. I suppose you must have been tired of that story.

Imagining that someone like your mom would want something more functional than decorative, I waved my hands over to the cheaper watches, the straps weren’t real leather but that was all you could afford. Instead, your eyes were drawn to the nickel and copper rings, in your price range but still ornately decorated with coloured glass and plastic flowers that could almost be real mother of pearl, provided you squint a little.

“That one,” you said, and tapped on the glass. It was a copper ring, delicately shaped like a creeping vine to twirl around a finger, detailed and engraved with the veins of leaves and a single flower with the smallest crystal inside of it. It was pretty, really, and your taste surprised me- but I couldn’t see your mother wearing it, could barely envisage her sliding it over her large, girthy fingers.

So I asked if you wanted it signed and you said no but you would like it engraved.

“Uh huh, what do you want it to say?” I said, fishing for a pad and paper. Here you scrunched up your face, looked up to the heavens.

“How about…The second I stop thinking about you will be the second after I stop living, Mouse.”

I barely listened as you said it, scribbling down on the notepaper until I got to my name. On the pad I traced the outline of the M before I could bring myself to look up at you. And in that instance my gaze met yours, and that was the moment the two of us met.

“You know, that probably won’t fit on the ring.”

That ring is long gone now and for that I’m sorry- I wanted to keep it with me forever; I think the monsters took it away not long after I went with them. I used to wear it all the time and the metal would stain my finger a permanent green colour around the rim, I didn’t mind that though, it made everything feel so real and so eternal. The stain has long faded now, though if I look hard enough I might still be able to see the last lingering trace of it.

It was always sort of disappointing how much my parents liked you; in those early days we never got to be the star crossed lovers from story books. My father would always ask questions about your mother, if she talked about the games when you were at home, if she still practised with knives- he was as obsessed with the glory of the games as the more zealous teachers at the academy and probably always privately disappointed until the last that I was never chosen at the reapings. I wouldn’t say that our world was poison coursing through our systems, afterall, we were happy and there are so many things that I would give to go back to that place, back to that time but there was something in the air that planted seeds in us, alright. And the seeds took root, began to grow and spread strange thoughts into our minds.

I was already pregnant, but far from showing, when you volunteered and it never occurred to me to use the child to keep you with me, though someone would certainly have taken your place and be happy to do so. Some fool, some boy who wasn’t you for another girl who wasn’t me to mourn over, none of our concern. I pictured you triumphant, like your mother, alone at the end of the games among the wreckage and all you would say was that you had important things to do back at home. When I pressed your hand against my stomach and heard you gasp, I told you to win and be brave, for me, for the child.

It was the worst, the stupidest thing I ever said.

Here, the world gets too shadowy to really recall so I will be brief though there are instances, seconds in time that are as clear to me as broad daylight.I try not to think about them, how close you came, the glint of a knife, heavy breaths and a struggle until it’s edge finds your throat. The cannon marked the final beat of my heart, the last rattling breath to pass through my lungs and the rest was only silence.

I thought that love at least would last forever, thought that there was no limit, no depth that my love couldn’t reach. I was stupid and I was a child- if I was born in the moment I met you, then I died in the moment that you did. What was left was only the spectre of an echo.

So I think only of the ring, and the engraving. Was it true? Did you think of me the second you stopped living? I know that I did as I died and passed into the hands of shadows.

I don't want to remember....

I’m still not sure how I came to be with the monsters until I found myself in that room. The one with the four walls and the plush carpeting and the wall paper that always smelled of smoke and sadness. I don’t think that I cared where I went then- though they might have lied to my mother and father, might have told them that they were helping me, helping my mind. If their hands and their mouths were helping then they tried very hard to fix me. It was like stepping into a dream, into a blank white void punctuated only by screaming. For a brief time, it stopped- while I got bigger I think; our child saved me for as long as he could. I think that’s why I barely remember the birth hurting at all, I was so thankful to him for coming when he did.

They brought in a woman with a stern face who pronounced the baby a boy, wrapped him in swaddling cloth and took him from me before I even got a chance to look at his eyes. I screamed and I screamed, I know that well enough until they came with pills and needles and then I didn’t scream anymore. Let the silence wash over me.

I don't want to remember...I only want to close my eyes and think of you.

The hibernation came, like an animal in the depth of winter waiting out for the spring and I don’t know how long passed. Hours, days, years I think. They moved me where they wanted, dressed me how I needed to be, took whatever they pleased from me, all the while cooing isn’t she pretty, isn’t she pretty. I don’t think of those days, ever, I won’t let myself. That, is until they come for me in the night. All I know is that it was winter for a very long time.

But he saved me again, my baby, both of you did. One moment I was sleeping, and the next I was awake and he was crying for me- just at the outer edges of my hearing, just beyond a locked door. So I waited for them, for the monsters, knowing that to get in they would have to unlock the cage they kept me in.

They weren’t expecting me, maybe they forgot that in spite of everything the academy had done its best to make us strong. I smelt blood for the first time in years, saw it on my fists hot and slippery and deep- but it wasn’t mine, for one wild moment I thought it might have been yours. It belonged to a monster, though, didn’t it? Slumped on the floor and hard to tell if he was moving or not…I don’t like to think of it….everything is fuzzy.

“the moment is instantaneous and huge like a supernova and both the boy and girl know somewhere, deep down, that there can be no going back”

Run, I heard you yell, in a voice carried on the wind. I need you, wont you find me, my baby cried. So I ran, right for the woods the way you told me to, trying to find my baby the way that he had asked of me.

These days I try to stay as close as I can to district one, though that isn’t always possible when the trees thin in winter and the cover is lost. I’ve wandered far away from you over the years, sometimes I lose track of the miles and the terrain and find myself in unfamiliar places- it happens more and more when I remember and get lost inside of my memories only to end up somewhere lonely, somewhere alien.

But something always seems to lead me back to you and I follow the cries of my baby back to where I need to be, I am sure of it.

One day you’ll help me find him, I know you will- it isn’t like you to let me down.

If you see my baby, tell him I’m waiting for him in the woods.

Always waiting.

...and the rest is only silence...