Cricket Antoinette, District 2

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( N A M E ) Cricket Glósóli Antoinette
( N I C K N A M E S ) Moonface
( A G E ) Sixteen
( G E N D E R ) Female
( D I S T R I C T / A R E A ) District Two

There's only two types of people in the world
The ones that entertain
And the ones that observe
Well baby I'm a put-on-a-show kind of girl
Don't like the backseat, gotta be first

( A P P E A R A N C E )

I am the moon. Dandelion-round faced, edgeless with the full cheeks of a childhood I've never outgrown. Bone-pale and stardust bright, my father tells me I have skin like mountaintops. I am snowcap white as new death, scars etched across my figure like inverted ravines — maybe this is why my body always wants to move: to prove it's alive. I am. Oh, and how. There's a hummingbird heartbeat fluttering inside the cavern of my chest, as if I were caged within a fever dream. Maybe that's true. I never want to wake up, if only I can please keep feeling this beautiful panic of living. Every twistbendarc of my body pulls me closer to something — I don't know quite what, but it's agonizingly wonderful. Other people tell me I shouldn't contort my limbs this way, I think it's only because they can't. I want to fold my spine in half, touch my eyelashes to my toes, press my palms against the space that's perpetually behind me and never seems to get any closer. There is freedom in this. I'll show you if you quit telling me to stop.

Stillness looks like rocking chair brown hair and yawning curls quiet as sun-softened double-helixes unwinding to brush against my shoulders. Like a brokedown doll, I become uneventful. My joints never settle quite right, all skewed angles and impatience — I've forgotten the laws of my own anatomy. Forgetting is what happens after devoting yourself to disregarding. I hate standing straight, but when I do I am five-foot-five and feel skycloud tall like a child reaching tippytoe to fingertip upupup. The vulnerability of it is suffocating. The only time I belong in the air is wrapped in aerial silks or barefoot-pacing tightropes, my palms and soles baptized in rosin that puffs into the air like the birth of dove shadows each time I move. This white dust of circus-flight suspends me above the earth, a pale frictiongrip powder embedded into my lifelines like runes to ward away the fear of falling.

Rarely do I tumble to the ground in a freefall plummet, the world tipping toward me until we collide into one being. I am strong. Strong like the summer-scorch sun. Strong like harpoon-tongued mouths that don't understand no. Strong like knucklecracksmack. Strong like a lifetime of never knowing hunger. My body may seem as soft and edgeless as my moonface, but it knows how to hold onto things. It understands the importance of balance and the value of pride. Swallowing swords may scrape my throat raw, but this rasp in my voice is not a wound, rather, it is a victory cry. Proof, like the bloom of a new bruise or the burns that ripple across my flesh after a flaming sword unexpectedly twists against my grasp until fire affectionately licks a shin or shoulder. The scalding brands from such radiant heat color my pale skin pink and tell everyone who sees me what I already know: how alive I am.

I'm like the ring leader
I call the shots
I'm like a firecracker, I make it hot
When I put on a show
I feel the adrenaline moving through my veins

( P E R S O N A L I T Y )

Sometimes the trees teach me how to fight, their branchwhip dance against the winds of almost-destruction showing me ways to move that humans don't know about. They call to my elastic bones, whispering instructions in coniferous codes until I translate swishshuddershake into the climbwrapdrop of a silk-strung acrobat unraveling from a moment's cocoon. Their language lives in my ears; I know this because no one else can hear it the same as I can. I listen like an affirmation as others box their ears with denial. My mind is wide-open and the breeze of an afternoon's sunburnt sigh fills me up with the earth's secrets, telling me how to hold its hushed knowledge within me until I'm willful as a fortress, keeping them there as if they had been mine to begin with. That's when we become each other, the earth and I — earth mother and moonfaced daughter — wisdom passing from generation to generation.

Passerbys observing my limitless hunt for new motion ignorantly name me a career, those clumsy bundles of muscle who walk with swords as if they are armored stilts to lift them higher, but I'd rather think myself an acolyte of movement. I follow the momentum that tugs persistently from within my body, challenging me with dares big enough to throw those violent sword-stilt boys off of buildings, imploring me to explore for new territory at the edges of my own boundaries. While they wake up with bruises and can't remember what they broke themselves for, my accordion-limbs fold and stretch with purpose. I want to show the world what a body can do and how the quivering release of a bow string can be a silent symphony heralding the opening dance of a swordfight ballet. Tradition brings us together each year with steel blades and twenty-four stutter-song heartbeats, but it's up to us to choreograph them into a performance. I don't train for death; after all, what does that word mean to a sixteen-year old? It's foolish to aim for the end when the opportunity for the way there is still unfurling out before you. I want that moment in the middle when the world spins because the sprint-kick of my racing footsteps told it to, every onlooker gasping with enlightenment as I redefine possible into something that will feel like every yes I have ever held within me.

This may be the misguided arrogance of courage, and sometimes I do forget that I have a mouth full of teeth and not sequoia-hewn bullets, but when your tumble-tossed spirit is free and your pockets are the opposite of empty you're generous with everything, even emotions. They are directionless floodwater, welling up wherever there is space to fill or they encounter something light enough to cradle on their rolling lullaby-waves. It's another irresistible kind of movement and so I follow the flow, drifting across the babbling waterways of my own mind, between the whale-back islands and shallow whirlpools of the subconscious. I imagine that fighting the tide might feel like drowning and so I don't, because I doubt that any double-jointed triumph of contortionism would be enough to save me from that.

Spotlight on me and I'm ready to break
I'm like a performer
The dance floor is my stage
Better be ready
Hope that you feel the same

( H I S T O R Y )

Dear stranger, if ever you overhear my voice and think any of my words could be about you, please don't stop listening. I think I loved something outside of myself once and maybe it was you. Memories are difficult when there's so much now to think about, each shiverwrist-twist eclipsing the last, until the only thing left is the future. Catch up to me. The days of playground promises have passed and I couldn't go back to them even if I wanted to. I spent an entire childhood listening for hidden meanings in sounds you tried to tell me didn't exist. I've always heard and felt so much and I'm sorry, but it's difficult to take kindly to being called a liar, even when you're too young to understand what that means. We could have been much better friends if you'd have played along with me instead of looking for different Games. I always thought you were pretty and wanted to know you, but it's hard when I'm still trying to know myself.

When my parents began encouraging me to train, telling me how starting school meant I was old enough to learn to play those different Games I'd heard so much about, I'm sure they thought I'd follow the same playbook as everyone else. At first maybe I thought so too, but as I started walking tightropes, I began to believe they would lead me somewhere and I wasn't wrong. On their other end were flames that I repeatedly devoured, held within my lungs, and breathed back out until the aftermath of practiced blackened scorch marks became a map for what came next. I lit swords and arrows as torches to light the way, dancing in their flickering blaze until I learned how to use a bow to send them soaring out like wildfire-tongued messengers. I am coming. I am coming. I am coming — with the footsteps of an acrobat tiptoe-tumbling across the air, so as not to leave any tracks. Not many of the other careers aimed for stealth, but over the last seven years I went so far as to conceal my sword, swallowing it down my throat and into my stomach where no one else would think to look, until I was ready to attack with a flash of sharpened silver and a show-stopping back-flip.

In my growing curiosity, my feet became a second set of hands and my hands another pair of feet. Palms were soles and souls became palms and this new way of moving was different than the ways I had once learned by watching light flicker in through my mother's window, dust drifting on the sunbeams. Toes wrapped around bows and arrows, holding tight and steady as my body curled up onto my elbows and forearms, flipping over itself until hips were suspended in the air with more stubbornness than I'd ever held in the set of my shoulders. Spectacle became home and while the improvement of my shooting accuracy in correlation to the oddity of my stunts astounded others, it felt only natural to me. Upside-down and backwards while tumbling through the air as if flight were footwork is only my beginning. This is practice.

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! The real show is about to begin...

All eyes on me
In the center of the ring
Just like a circus
When I crack that whip everybody gonna trip
Just like a circus

( C O D E W O R D ) Odair
( F A C E C L A I M ) Andreane Leclerc

( C O M M E N T S / O T H E R )

Circus by Britney Spears.

Ringleader in the Misfit Mafia Circus plot.

( S P E A K I N G ) A64D4D
( O T H E R ) D3B2AC
( O T H E R S P E A K I N G ) CCDDCC
( T E X T ) 9AA8A8
( T H I N K I N G ) 72727F

Don't stand there watching me
Follow me, show me what you can do
Everybody let go
We can make the dance floor
Just like a circus