Nettle Harlequin, District Eleven

Nettle Ray Harlequin

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I'm not saying its your fault
Although you could have done more
Oh you're so naive yet so
How could this been done
By such a smiling sweetheart.
Oh and your sweet and pretty face
In such an ugly world
Something so beautiful.
Oh that every time I look inside.

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Some people are like flowers. Delicate, beautiful and without a doubt one of the most prized and over-rated things in the world. Other people are like weeds - strong and resilient - they come up through the cracks on the sidewalk where they are no more wanted than helpful. Some people are like trees - sturdy and strong with roots that go so deep it seems as they are holding the world together, all alone. Others are like thistles with all of their beauty - yet they are painful to the touch.
My name is Nettle; my mother gave it to me after much deliberation. I'm not sure why exactly she chose it, but I figure she hoped it would fit me. Nettles are flowering plants with stinging hairs on their leaves and stems; they protect themselves from predators and sting anyone who gets too close to them. Maybe she figured that by giving me such a name she would somehow protect me from the harsh District Eleven, the Peacekeepers, the famine, the poverty and the harsh, strenuous workload with little reward. Well, whatever her intent - it didn't work. I'm more of a daisy, I guess. Pretty, yet fragile and fearful. Not beautiful and shining as a sunflower, set to rise above the rest. Not resourceful and genius like the vines that grow up the walls of the tattered Justice Building. Simply there, swaying to and fro in the breeze with no particular desire to make a decision. Not beautiful. I have no thorns like a rose; I am easy to sway and to move and pluck from my place. I am too afraid of the wind and the rain and the sunshine and everything in between to resist. Naive. Too trusting. Always seeing the best in people despite the wrongs they have done.

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It's a curse, really. Being the daisy in the field among the others. The one with no medicinal properties. The one that is only edible if you are truly starving. The plain flower which is only really pretty at best. Not even that, unless you catch it in the sunlight in it's prime. I am not in my prime. Actually, I'm not sure I ever had my prime. My history is a terrible one, filled with unfortunate events, poverty and starvation. Something I'd really rather not recount. It scares me to even think of - but then again everything scares me. Many people call me pathetic and weak and stupid. They're right, you know. Only my friends are there to defend me but I certainly don't deserve them. Long ago, I had many friends. I don't like to talk about how I lost them. I'm afraid of them all now though - they tease me and intimidate me and in a way many of them are scared of me, too. I guess a girl with such a fierce name and terrible background who doesn't utter a single word is something to be afraid of. I'm afraid of myself, sometimes. I know it sounds pathetic but it's the way I am. The way I've been ever since I can remember. Which is not particularly long.
I do have two friends though. We make a strange little group. Three loners who somehow come together. When I was small I would only speak in front of my family; now I speak only in the company of my friends. Admittedly even then I don't say much. It's funny; when my mother named me Nettle she wished for me to be all sorts of things that I'm not. She hoped one day I would be strong for myself and my family - but I never could. I never will be strong. Not like my brother once was. Avon was one of those people who was brave enough to take over a family just after the age of eighteen. To care for his young sister with all of his heart. To take on the finance and responsibility of himself and I while he was still of reaping-age. That was what turned out to be the problem. I was ten when he was reaped, at age eighteen. And he did not come home. So I stopped speaking to anybody at all.

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I guess that I'm petrified of responsibility. Thinking about it now, my brother was only a year older than I am now when he was left with everything to worry about. I realize it could never happen, as I have no younger siblings to care for, but the simple thought of being left as the one to look after a child when you yourself are still not grown up, is enough to send a shiver down my spine. I guess I'm simply more a follower than a leader. Someone always seems to have to guide me as I am too afraid of the outcome to make decisions for myself. I don't really feel good at anything. Anything but drawing. I can draw, it is true. I don't wish to sound full of myself, but as I'm no good at anything else I think I can say that I'm alright at drawing. I've drawn ever since I could hold a pencil. I read, too. My drawing books and my tattered and torn encyclopaedia on plants are the only things I have left of my parents and I don't mean to let them slip from my grasp. Every night I use the charcoal from the meagre fire I build to sketch something new. Usually plants. I like plants. They're solid and harmless when you know enough about them and I do. I'm not clever - not even clever enough to make my own way in life - but I do know about plants. Maybe it's something about living in District Eleven. I'm surrounded by trees and herbs and grains, yet I'm still forced to buy tesserae just to get by. Knowing what I can forage from around the ground in the orchards and from the meadows which are out of season is something that has kept me alive through the winters. I wish I could make a fire, too. But I can't. I'm too afraid to rub the sticks together myself, and I resorted to lighting matches in a fire-pit with a bucket of water near-by. Even if the shack in which I live was to catch alight, it wouldn't matter. As long as I got my drawing-book out, I'd be alright. Scared out of my mind and scarred for all of eternity, perhaps. But fine. There is nothing in there for me to loose. It's a simple place. I didn't always live there. Maybe I should start this story at the beginning.

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I was born seventeen years ago in the dead of winter. My family consisted of my elder brother, Avon, my mother and my father. From the moment I was born we struggled to get by. My brother was eight at the time, yet already he worked all day in the fields all alone, while my father slaved away in the orchards and my mother collected plants for the Capitol in the vegetable gardens three miles from our house. At that time, I was only an infant. You may wonder where I was at this time - you can hardly leave an infant alone in the house all day, no matter how starving your family is. No, I came with my mother, slung in a harness around her shoulders, her little golden-haired cherub baby. She walked two miles there and two miles back, barefoot, every morning and evening. At night she wrapped myself and my brother in her warmest clothes and sent us to bed with the most she could manage to feed us. My mother and father where amazing people. They put themselves last all of the time. This is what I wish to do, now. People say I wouldn't hurt a fly, and I wouldn't. People say I'm kind and caring and generous, and I guess I am. But I need to be, to make up for the terrible thing I did. I was a sweet child. I looked a lot like I do now, I guess. It's just that big green eyes and blonde curls, matched with baby-faced cheeks and a sugary smile look better on a toddler than an almost-grown woman. I have a peculiar appearance, in fact. Wide-set yet large eyes and a long forehead mixed with slanting and sharp cheeks is hardly your average District Eleven look. I guess I do have the typical starving-girl body, with bony arms and obvious rib-cage. It is not an attractive thing to be that skinny, you know. Five feet and seven inches and still growing, if in a stunted way, leaves me weighing around one hundred pounds. My legs are long and slender, however the muscles I used to have from clambering around trees with ease have wasted away.

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Once I was old enough to work myself, I moved out into the orchards with my father, where I have been slaving away ever since. If I have lived up to the name my mother had called me I would have stood up against the Peacekeepers and gotten food for myself. I could have fought back when my brother was reaped, or stolen good or torched the place. If I wasn't so afraid of Panem and everything in it I could have lived up to the name my mother gave me and be strong and untouchable. I could be fierce and poisonous and firmly demand what I deserve. I think these things often. I do a lot of thinking. And when I do think of the ways I could be, the things I could deserve, I remember why I don't. Because I killed my parents and there is no way I can take that back. I don't deserve anything - only to be an avox in the Capitol. Even that is too good for me. My parents where amazing people. It was because of me they didn't live to tell the story I am telling you now. So I shall go on. I worked in the fields and let my mother go on walking to and fro her gardens. At that point in time we didn't live in a shack at all. We lived in a house. It was small to say the least - with only one bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom between us - but we where happy. It was mid-winter when it happened. The time of the reaping - the time when I was ten and my brother eighteen. The snow was falling thick and fast, I still remember it to this day. I had wandered from the path, strain too far on the families way home one evening. The darkness was closing in and with it came the bitter cold. I slipped away, chasing after a cat or something of the sort - and that was when it happened. I slipped, tripping and falling into a crevasse of uneven land. There I was trapped, my ankle broken. My parents both stayed with me all that night, removing their coats and keeping me warm. I drifted to sleep still in the hole as my brother ran for a Peacekeeper or something. I didn't tell my parents to go home as I should have done. I didn't try hard enough to keep them warm. So they froze, and when I awoke they looked as still and fresh as two angles coated in a dusting of snow. A tear runs down my cheek as I think of it and the guilt washes over me for the millionth time since. Since then I have been cautious - as my actions can easily kill another person. You will think, from all I have written, that I am ungrateful for my life. This is not the case. I smile more than I frown. Not beaming and grinning as they do in the Capitol but sweetly smiling. It's more than most people do in this place. I don't hate my home. It's a shack, of course, but I have blankets and my books and my little fire. I'm warm and I'm not dead yet. I have my friends, whom I love, and the world is, all in all, a nice place. Just because I have suffered misfortunes it is no reason to become bitter. I brought it all upon myself, after all.

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The ways of the Capitol mystify me. When I come to the town square every Games-time to watch those who follow in Avon's footsteps, I see all of the privileges and fancies of the Capitol people and wonder at how pleased they must be. Yet they never seem to appreciate exactly what they have right there in front of them. I am not a dreamer. I never have been, really, for here what is there to dream for but proper amounts of food and your health? To not be reaped in the games. To not die in front of people? Gosh, I'm doing it again. This is why I should stick to drawing. Writing like this is not at all my forte. As I said, I'm not a dreamer. I see things for what they are, right in front of me. This is why I can draw. I can capture that thing - whether it be a plant or a person or the feeling I get when the snow brushes against my cheeks. I have said why my parents died, and how. I don't really wish to go inso details about the coldness of my fathers open eyes or the faded smile on my mothers lips, there for all of eternity. So what else is there to tell? That me and my brother moved into our own little house where he cared for me with everything he had? That just months later he was reaped and my heart broke yet again. That I moved in with my grandmother on the other side of the district until she too passed away? That now I live alone with my fire-pit and my sketch-book, trying to get food where I can. I have so many faded memories of being friendless everywhere I went after the death of my brother only a year after the one of my parents. I never spoke then, not even to my poor grandmother, who did her best to care for me with her little life savings. It was only earlier this year that she died. She was old. There is nothing more to say than that, really.

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Yet I am hardly alone. I have my two best friends and my drawing pad. I am fed enough to survive. I work log and hard with nature, which is what I love best. I have done some terrible things, for am I easy to convince and easy to sway. I am too trustingI don't really know what more there is to tell. So I shall leave you now. I am Nettle, the daisy. The one moving wherever the breeze wishes, the plain one with no true qualities. I am Nettle and I am afraid of everything but death.

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