Scutcher Tansy, District 10

If I'm running out of time,
then I'm running out of time
There's nothing you can do,
to try to pull me through
Could tie me down with twine,
Give me back what's mine
I wouldn't want you to,

I look the way I am; like a pig boy from District 10 rooting around in the mud. Happy as a pig in muck about it too- no point putting on airs and grace when you're just a pig boy from District 10. Down here the dirt gets everywhere; behind my ears and under my finger nails. It sneaks under my boots and shirts, weaving into the tangles in my hair. A bath wouldn't do no good either. A drop in a great wide mud ocean. Me and my pigs don’t mind that though. It keeps us camouflaged, almost invisible. Safe.

My mom keeps my dad clean- she has to since the infection. Unnatural clean- it aint how a pig boy from District 10 ought to be. My Dad must look down at his clean hands, scrubbed red raw and miss the mud something fierce. That’s how it goes around here; spring, summer and autumn we wallow in the mud and then in winter when the ground freezes hard and bites cold we hose the pigs down in the smokehouse and then drain them dry in the cleanest room on our whole property. Mud is life, death is sterile. I think my dad knows that when he looks at his hands.

I spent a lot of time looking up at him when I was a kid. But I can’t now. I’m too big for one thing though that aint the main reason. After years of being this runty little scrap of a kid it happened quick enough to leave stretch marks on my sides like growing up ripped me apart a little and the next thing I know I’m looking over my old man’s head from six foot five inches. He’s getting smaller and thinner every day while I just get bigger and stronger. Bigger and stupider and uglier probably but I don’t mind it all that much.

I favour my mom the most looks-wise, I think. She’s got pretty eyes- like a cow. I told her that once and she got mad for some reason. But I like cows, almost as much as pigs and I was telling the truth. If you saw my mom you’d say it too; she’s got big round eyes with drooping eyelids that make her look peaceful and happy (much more peaceful and happier than she really is), just like a cow. I got those big round eyes from my mom only mine are robin’s egg blue. They look better on my mom though. Mine make people think I’m not smart. But if you look at it objectively, I suppose I aint.

Did you know that pigs can have red eyes? They see color just like we do, too.

The rest of my face I kind of forget about- it’s hard to see under all the mud. It’s a little chubby I guess and makes me look a little younger than I am- you can’t see my cheekbones or nothing. My sister Tallow says that girls like it when when they can see a guy’s cheekbones. I dunno why; one winter after my dad got sick all our sows got spooked and ate most of their own babies and my mom and my sister were stealing slops from our neighbour’s pig houses just so we could eat. I saw my mom’s cheekbones clear as a razor in a sackcloth then- saw damn near enough every bone in her body. I don’t understand how anyone could like that; it made my chest hurt.

I chew on my lips a lot when I’m working so they stay dry and cracked and when Tallow taps me on the shoulder, asking me if I’ve caught any flies it means I’m breathing through my mouth again when I aint supposed to. See, I took a bottle to the face when I was fourteen. The whole of my nose swelled up like a pregnant sow and bled real bad- Mom said I’d have a lump there forever but it turned out not to be broken after all. Even so, I got into the habit of using my mouth to breath and it just seemed to stick.

Tallow is the one who cuts my hair. We both have the same kind; it’s thick and gets greasy real quick with a little curl to it. She designs it different each time and tries it out with kitchen scissors. She wants to be a stylist someday and I guess that they have different ideas about hair in the capitol, since it’s never the same length all the way around and sticks up or out in places. Maybe that kind of thing just works better on other people.

I’m not fat, but I’m a fair bit thicker than most people round here. I aint all graceful and willowy like some of the girls I see at school, thin as sticks of hay. Maybe it’s because I work with pigs that I’ve started to look a little like one of them; thick and ruddy with a neck my dad cant get his hands all the way around anymore.It’s good because it helps me be strong and if you’ve ever castrated an angry boar like we do on the farm you’ll know how important it is to be strong as a pig farmer.

I aint all that fast, being so thick; Tallow is skinnier and beats me in every race. I can't do how she does and make my body do pretty, graceful things. I've always moved like a trotting pig; a slow steady plod that aint that nice to look at but always gets me where I need to be. You learn the right way to pick up your feet when you're walking through mud out here, only the habit sticks and on more solid ground it don't look right.

I don't think about clothes much. The ones on my back have got to keep me warm in winter and cool in summer so I own a lot of sweaters. They are all too small now, tight around the chest and unravelling everywhere. All shades of brown and grey and other shades to match the mud. But when the reaping comes, Tallow and me pick a flower from the ones I grow in beer cans and old feeding troughs and we pin them to our sweaters. They're our good luck charms.

My mom says I got a smile like the sun coming out, but all moms say nice things about the way their kids look.

You'll find me in the morning,
hidden within the rose
Down beneath the great lake,
up where the jackdaw crows
do you know what you have done
There were ripples in the waters
I found them when you were young,

When I think about being a kid, it’s always autumn in my memory, the air is cool and there are dead, golden leaves in the gutters. The pigs are fat and happy, Tallow dares me to climb the tallest tree on our land and we’re smiling through the gaps left in our mouths from lost baby teeth.

We’re smiling because whatever happens, we’ll have meat for dinner.
We’re smiling because we know that our dad, this aloof huge man carries us on his shoulders and is our protector.
We're smiling because we don’t know what it is to be old or poor or hungry or sick.
We’re smiling because we don’t know a damn thing.

Everything changed when my dad got sick. I was nine, maybe ten years old when it started. It was slow at first, he was just limping a little around the hog farms but he never complained about it. Mom took it upon herself to look up the symptoms in an old family medical book simply out of curiosity. An ulcer. Common as anything. It’d be healed in a couple of months and there weren’t any need to waste good money on a doctor.

I still remember the smell after the ulcer got infected. It was like a rotten pig carcass, festering and eating away at the flesh beneath my dad’s right pant leg. It was a disease that ran straight on through the heart of everything and nothing got better after the doctor took the leg off. The infection got a tight hold of all of us and no matter how hard we tried, we never did manage to shake it off.

He had a mind to get around on crutches, my dad- but walking on a crutch on solid ground aint the same as walking through the mud. And it sure aint worth anything when you’re trying to run after a piglet when it gets out. Mom found him once; face down in the mud outside the hog pen one morning. I watched through the kitchen window as she dragged him inside, he was covered head to foot in it like a golem forged from the dirt but his angry tears left clean, glistening tracks running down his skin. I got a hiding for that. For seeing my dad cry.

It happened more when the drinking started. More crying, and more hidings for nothing. The pigs picked up on it, they feel more than people think and the infection spread from our rotten house and into them too. Some of the sows that summer got spooked enough to eat their own piglets. They do that if they are afraid, or the piglets are ill and sometimes they do it because they are just plain starving.

By the end of the year, with no pigs to slaughter and no pregnant sows, we were starving too. We moved to a smaller place to keep going, renting off a purple faced, moustache wearing rancher who had a mind to make a money off the useless land at the edges of his cattle ranch and only took a third of the old pigs with us. It was supposed to be so we could save up enough again to get back on our feet without worrying over debts but dad ended up drinking most of the money. My mom got a job on a government chicken battery farm to tide us over but Dad drunk most of that money too. Even people who do good at math can’t make those kinds of sums work- you can’t just make up money out of thin air.

If a pig gets too ill, you take him out to the smokehouse and kill him. It’s just kinder that way. My dad wishes that we’d done the same to him too- I can tell. Maybe it would have been kinder- Tallow and Mom and me would have been better off at any road. That’s math, see? Easy.

I was thirteen when my dad tried to hang himself in the newly built smokehouse at our new place. I found him first; purple in the face, eyes bulging and saliva erupting from his mouth as he choked. It was after a reaping, I remember that I had a daisy pinned to my sweater that day and when I found him I might have hesitated. Just for a second. Maybe.

After I cut him down, he dropped like a stone onto his back above the channels the blood runs along after we slaughter the pigs. I don’t know why, but I laid down next to him, waiting for him to wake up, waiting to feel something. Dad woke up, but I dunno if I ever did after that. Making him proud, looking up to him and all the other things I thought about my father seemed to slip away like they’d been greased up.

I think if I got sick I’d prefer it if someone took me out to the smokehouse and killed me too. Tallow’d be the one I’d ask, for sure. But she’d never do it.

We look out for each other, Tallow and me- always have done. The farm is basically ours now, we built the hog pens and raised all the pigs we have now together. She’s three years younger than me but she’s much smarter than me- but that aint exactly hard. Sometimes, though, it’s harder always having to smart and thinking too much about things you can’t change. Everything that’s happened to us has affected my sister a little more than it has me, I can tell; she’s a little more jaded, feels things a little more and she doesn’t smile the way she used to. That’s why we have to take care of each other.

If it weren’t for Tallow, I think I’d care about the Hunger Games even less than I do now. And let me tell you, that aint much. We go to the reapings the same as all the other kids but the games themselves are something that happens around us not to us. They are a part of the backdrop or the scenery, like fields stretching on and out into the horizon turning from brown to green to gold and pure white as the seasons change. I mean, I’ve watched them- we have to- and I’ve known kids at school, or boys and girls out on the fields suddenly disappear and never come home like puffs of smoke on the wind.

But I aint my dad, raging at the stump where his right leg was. Idon’t wonder what life would be like if he’d never gotten ill, or what would have happened if I'd been born in a district where there was always food on the table. They way I see it, I’m not gonna waste time thinking of a world without the Hunger Games.

Maybe that makes me an idiot.

But I guess I like to think that I can accept the things I cannot change. All there is to do is find happiness where you can, like the flowers I plant blooming in the darkest of spaces.