Tallow Tansy District 10 FINEEESHED

[Fifteen|District 10|Caterina Ravaglia]

[Appearance]

A group of teenagers; the kind found everywhere over, stretching back from generation to generation across oceans and the district lines, convinced that they are oh-so special snowflakes. As if somehow, between the six or seven of them, they have become the sole inventors of teenage angst, hormonal mood swings and overblown emotion. Always dressing appropriately inappropriate by whatever standards the society around them sets down, they believe that they are philosophers, poets, artists and eccentrics. They channel their unique perspectives, their weighty truths and radical ideas into vandalism, anarchism and ambivalence, creating a twisted beauty in their destruction.

Or, more accurately, they are stupid kids who need to stop leaving cigarette butts and the remains of burnt out trash bags behind the school house.

Tallow gets that and, unlike anyone else in the classroom serving detention, she knows she’s not a philosopher poet or whatever. When she gets angry she doesn’t try to see some meaningful channel for it in a book filled with crappy derivative poetry, or feel the need to sit in a circle discussing a fantasy rebellion- no, Tallow just smokes because she’s been hooked since the age of eleven, drinks because it’s something to do and sets fire to trash bags around the back of school because sometimes it’s just nice to watch things burn. She isn’t like the rest of them; she’s not about to announce herself the prophet of a generation under duress or any other ludicrous sentiment.

No, she’s just Tallow Tansy and sometimes she hates these people who everyone assumes are her ‘friends’ so much that actually hurts.

Flicking her pen between her fingers, she slides back into her chair and studies the graffiti that lines her textbooks more intently than any of the crap actually printed between the pages. The boy to her left is trying to catch her eye, she can feel his grin and the weight of the unseemly proposition that he wants to mouth at her behind his lips. Tallow pretends not to see him, slips a strand of hair into her mouth and chews on it.

The burnout boys have always seemed to like her, as though at thirteen she attracted the attention of a set of screw ups that have pursued her as single mindedly, as without mercy, as tracker jackers from then on. Perhaps it is vain of her to suggest so, but it to her it isn’t hard to see why; Tallow is tolerably pretty with big eyes the same color as robin’s eggs and a plump mouth with a cupids bow –curve that looks far better when she frowns than when she smiles- which is lucky considering she is far more likely to do the former than the latter.

But they like that she isn’t too pretty; otherwise how could they snort at the muscled farm hands and their conventional ‘classically beautiful’ girlfriends. These are lazy boys with limited expectations, whether they are aware of it or not, who appreciate a rail thin girl; no breasts or hips to speak of and a long, straight nose more like the muzzle of a snorting brown colt than anything else. They are predictably drawn to a girl whose large ears stick out just that little bit farther than is accepted, adding something mousey to her appearance. ‘Interesting’, they’ll say about her lidded eyes and thick, dark lashes, won’t mind that at five ten and only fifteen years old she can stand shoulder to shoulder with some of them.

Fifteen isn’t a problem for most of them- though they are always far older- and before that fourteen and thirteen never seemed to be either. Perhaps it’s just her; her age is difficult to pin down, she knows that. Her body screams prepubescent, as does small pebble dash acne that attacks her cheeks, but Tallow holds herself with all the poise and the grace of a thirty year old; an expert in the control of her sinewy body and that ‘Interesting’ quality to her eyes can also be interpreted as a weary one. She is a girl that has seen things in her life time.

They always like that; it makes them feel deeper than they actually are. She’s complicated, that means they can pretend to figure her out; but she’s quiet too, low maintenance.She doesn’t cling, does her own thing and has seemingly no desire for anything long term. Tallow makes it easy for them to get out when they get bored. The perfect burnout girl.

If only they knew, though, that Tallow dreams of the capitol.

Ever since she was a little girl, Tallow has watched the games religiously from the moment of the reapings across districts to the second that the tributes step into the arena. It’s not morbid bloodlust or anything of that description, of course she finds the practise sickening. But, oh, the Transformation. The way that they put the shine back into the knotted hair of frightened children, bring out the colour in cheeks still blanched white from shock. She has always thought, and always will, that the stylists in the capitol are nothing short of genius. As a little girl she used to tell anyone who would listen that one day she was going to be a stylist too, but it is a secret desire that age has bottled up and now holds closer to her chest.

At nine years old that might have seemed like a reality- at that age, what isn’t- but now Tallow knows that the closest she’ll ever get is cutting her brother’s hair, touching up the corpses in the local morgue with makeup and- the best she could ever possibly dream for- a salon in town with a regular customer or two and her written in italics on nylon aprons.

Her hair though, is still her crowning glory. The colour is unremarkable, a light earthy brown/blonde, but its weight, the way it shines and hangs over her face is fastidiously cared for. Her hair is the only true vanity she can even afford to have; Tallow would cut off all her fingers for the clothes that tributes wear at their interviews, cut off several just to see them up close and then pay good money to see the look on the faces of her ‘friends’ who pretend to find what they call materialism vulgar. And they think that she is the same; that she wears old baggy sweaters handed down from her brother and dresses and jackets that she stitches herself from old floral curtains to be alternative, to make some kind of statement.

There is only one statement to be made, though: her family is poor as shit. Tallow doesn’t feel special in heavy boots and tattered clothes smoking around the back of the school house.

But she hasn’t told any of them that.

Why hasn’t she?

Why fear death? Be scared of living
Our hearts are small and ever thinning
There is no hope ever of winning
Oh, why fear death?
Be scared of living

[Personality]

Oh, yeah that’s right, she thinks with a sigh. Today she doesn’t have the luxury of avoiding the eye of the boy to her left, not if she doesn’t want to end up going straight home after detention. No, she’ll have to pretend to be interested enough to let him take her home with him, deal with awkward fumbling, make-out sessions, probably something more, his insufferable voice. But she’d deal with almost anything to escape that damn tin shack she’s supposed to call a house, those stinking pigs and her dad for a few hours.

When she’s walking home though, with her bra in her bag it won’t feel worth it. But history has shown that it is. Whatever it takes.

Her textbook is jam packed, Tallow is disappointed to find, overtaken by an urge to doodle. Within the pages outlining Panem’s glorious history in all its loving detail are her sketches. Tall woman, all uneven abstract lines, wearing dresses she’s pieced together from the memories of tributes at their opening ceremonies, taken from the things she sees around her; piles of dead leaves, curls of wire, animal skins thrown over fences. There are faces too, cut off at the neck boasting outlandish, intricate hairstyles, experiments in shapes and lines. Private things.

Flicking through she finds there’s a page in her textbook that has just been savaged by ink, jagged lines that make deep grooves on the inside of the paper. That must have been a bad day, she thinks to herself, though she can’t recall it that rightly. It’s the way with most people with quick tempers, Tallow supposes, and she is in possession of one of those; sarcastic, quick to judge. She’s so skinny and willowy that there isn’t much room for any love inside of her body. Her brother get’s the lion share of it and the rest of the world can just go screw itself. Well, the burnout boys seem to like her nebbish comments and the way that she rolls her eyes. Sometimes at home, her mother will tut at Tallow over the kitchen table say, ‘you have your father’s temper, you know,’ and she’ll always sound as innocent as anything. Like it’s the kind of line you just throw away and perhaps in other households it is.

But in the Tansy family when her mom says that Tallow has her father’s temper it stings worse than anything, makes her want to grasp the table in her fists and up ended, letting the cutlery and the table cloth fall to the floor.

It’s even worse, because it’s right. Scutcher and Mom are the same, slow things, a soft moving pack like sheep trotting diligently through life but Tallow and her father, they are the dogs with their teeth bared nipping at cloven hoofs and ankles. Steering the herd to safety or attacking and drawing blood, it gets hard to tell which one some days but Tallow hopes that she isn’t wrong to think of herself as the former. Most days.

The clock hand finally slides into place to mark the end of this hour’s detention. There will be other evenings like this, stuck in this room; an endless stretch of slow moving minutes stuck in silence from now until the day she finally gets to leave this dump and it is the knowledge of this that sees Tallow slowly slide her bag up, in no hurry to leave the classroom. Why delay the inevitable? She rolls a cigarette at the desk and looks over to see that her friends are some of them doing the same, others sighing, sucking their teeth and dragging their feet. Tripping over themselves to appear disinterested. Pathetic really.

“Tallow Tansy?” calls the teacher taking detention. A bespectacled woman who didn’t look up for her paper once during the entire hour. “Hang back a second ,please.”

Tallow places the cigarette between her lips and shrugs at the boy she’ll probably have to sleep with later. Watching her friends leave, Tallow leans back onto the first desk from the front row. Being a teacher must suck, Tallow can appreciate that. No one gives you a say in what you have to teach to a group of the least interested kids possibly ever, half of them skipping school as and when they like, to help out with family ranches and such. And you can’t inspire anyone, can’t even take the bright ones under your wing…because where will being smart even get them? Woohoo; a ranch foreman, chief goat herder, president of cleaning up horse shit. Dream big! In fact the smart ones, like Tallow, must be the worst for her; watching them slip through the cracks, knowing that there isn’t anything anyone can do.

The teacher is young, young enough to think that she can ‘reach out to these lost kids’, her hair is messy- her split ends desperately want trimming- and maybe she’s attractive in a bookish sort of way. Folding her arms, she looks down her nose at the fifteen year old in front of her, stares her out like a dog trying to assert its dominance. For her troubles, Tallow rewards her with a fake, slow curving sneer before she finally reaches forward and plucks the cigarette out of Tallow’s mouth and sighs, “What is this, Tallow?”

“I believe it’s a classroom, miss.”

“I mean this…your behaviour…the people you associate with. As though you’re determined to get yourself arrested. What is it?

Are you rebelling?

Is it a boy?

Is everything alright at home?”

Tallow raises her eyebrows at her teacher. Always the same questions with these people. No, I’m not rebelling, it’s never ever about a boy and nothing is alright at home,

[/i]she thinks, but saying that would be making her teacher’s job too easy. Tallow couldn’t just spoon feed her, or how else would people like this learn? “I’m not sure the school has any say in who my friends are, miss,” says Tallow in a sickly sweet, fake confused sort of voice. “Seems to me like it aint none of your damn business.”

“Isn’t any of my damn business. You’re a smart kid,” says the teacher heavily. “But you’re not half as smart or funny as you think you are.”

“That’s why I’m at school, says Tallow, all wide innocent eyes the same bluest blue as robin’s egss, ageing down her voice until she sounds like a lisping baby, “To learn from the very best.” The teacher can just come right out and say that she’s a little jerk, Tallow knows she is, knows the teacher thinks she is and she’s really trying her hardest to be. The best little jerk that there is. “Can I go now?”

The teacher says nothing so Tallow simply shifts the satchel sitting on her shoulder, organises her baggy sweater and makes to leave. Imagining up a report card for this young teacher who’s so convinced that she can reach the children, Tallow writes on it ‘must try harder’.

“I’ve seen your drawings…they’re good!”she interjects quickly before Tallow can leave, inserts herself between the fifteen year old girl and the door. That at least has her attention, sends Tallow’s shoulders stiff and awkward. Those are private drawings. Her hands tighten on her satchel as she rearranges her facial expressions back into something cool and impassive.

“Yeah maybe if I study real hard I’ll get to design a cattle prod or a slaughter house some day,” Tallow mumbles “Can’t wait.”

She hates the expression she gets from her teacher next, hates it. Simpering and sickly sweet and full of..here comes that evil word…full of pity. It’s the worst thing in the world, pity, the one thing she won’t tolerate from anyone. The teacher can take her pity and shove it somewhere the sun doesn’t shine.

“Look…I have something I want to give you.”

“O-er miss…kinky… aint that against the rules?”

“Hmmf,” the teacher heads behind her desk and pulls out a book. It isn’t uniform and government issue like the books she’s seen in the library; it’s old and very large, with a shining jacket battered away by time and thick glossy pages. She holds it out to Tallow who can read “Fashion Illustration” written on the front cover and wants it so bad that her hands might actually start to shake with the burning desire coursing through her.

But instead, she narrows her eyes, takes a step back, “Is this a sting operation or something?” Looks around for peacekeepers or any other imagined threat. She’s always been suspicious; but that’s what an alcoholic father will do to a person. Part time jobs to help the family out through winter might result in a few coins extra for pocket money; which if Tallow isn’t suspicious and prudent when it comes to hiding away her stash will end up in the palms of her no good dad. The world is cruel, Tallow knows that. Does her best to protect her brother from it, to protect herself. She won’t be bought by a pretty book.

The teacher just laughs, “No, of course not. But it might be wise to keep it secret and safe.”

“You…” Tallow can hardly speak. “You didn’t have this just lying around I’m guessing.”

She taps her nose and smiles, triumphant…which sickens Tallow, half makes her want to reject the offer of the book. But Tallow is poorer and greedier than she is proud, which is saying a lot. “Don’t ask questions- but I believe in you. So I’ll leave it at that.”

Taking the book, she slips it into her satchel and actual feels it through the battered material. She doesn’t say thank you as she exits the small classroom. But she thinks it. And shouldn’t that be good enough?

The rest of them are gone, there is no sign of the burnout boy she’s supposed to be sleeping with tonight. All of them have vanished into a thick haze of cigarette smoke; vanished up their own assholes for all Tallow cares. Screw him, she didn’t even want to go back to his house anyway. The thought of his wet rubbery lips on hers is enough to make her puke. And a good person would go home anyway; help out on the farm, help her mother with dinner, spend time with her brother.

But is she a good person?

Probably not. Probably just some stupid kid- smart, but not as smart as she thinks she is- who needs to stop leaving cigarette butts and the remains of burnt out trash bags behind the school house. A stupid kid stuck out in district ten and going nowhere fast.

Tallow stops outside the school, lights her cigarette and smokes it down to the stub- taking great pains to flick the butt onto school property before she heads home. Wraps her arms around her stachel and gives the book a faint squeeze.[/color]
[/justify][/size] [/blockquote][/blockquote]

But I can’t give up that quick
My life is a candle and a wick
You can put it out but you can't break it down
In the end, we are waiting to be lit

[History]

They named her Tallow and, really, there is nothing else to say about her parents. Tallow; the white nearly tasteless solid rendered fat of cattle and sheep which is used chiefly in soap, margarine, candles, and lubricants. From her birth she has been waste, another mouth to feed, useless fat to be drained away from the valuable meat. And the feeling has only grown along with her age.

Tallow is thinner than reeds, doesn’t possess the hardy quality that a pig farmer is meant to have. And that makes her an anomaly; the Tansys have all been pig farmers for as far back as anyone can remember. Her father inherited a herd the day that his father died, and used the news in lieu of an engagement ring for her mother. Pig farming is supposed to run through their blood, that smell running deep down and into their DNA.

But Tallow hates the mud, can’t bear to think about it underneath her nails, finds the great fleshy bodies of the pigs repugnant. The noises, the smells- they play constantly in her nostrils, even away from the farm until she is convinced that the stench is coming from her. Tallow can wash and wash, turn the bathwater murky and almost scrape her skin for scrubbing but she can never really wash this place away from her. It’s even in her arteries. She dreams of burning the place to the ground and sometimes stands at the edge of the property, at her family home and has to ask herself, “Who on earth are these people? How did I ever come to be among them?”

Standing at the gate, lighting another cigarette, she sees herself as a changeling child- something mysterious and ethereal that belongs to the forest. Only that sounds more like Scutcher, vanishing off to the forests, talking to pigs as though they can understand each other. He’s the one that belongs to nature, Tallow is more like a changeling child from the capitol or something. Switched at birth and still dreaming of bright coloured clothes and synthetic hair.

Scutcher is in the yard and raises a hand to Tallow and, for him, she dredges up a smile.

Perhaps if he’d never have been born she might not have been waste, they might have named her Hazel or Peony -anything but ‘hardened animal fat’. But no, her older brother was born to inherit the farm, shoulder most of the responsibility after their father was dead and gone. And then when it became clear that he never would achieve quite what was expected of him, Tallow’s mother devoted more attention to her poor confused little son, leaving Tallow to drag herself up pretty much alone. She can smoke, she can swear and drink in the house and find that no one will bat an eyelid. The freedom in it is as stifiling as the heaviest of oppressions; the fact of the matter being that her parents wouldn’t notice if she stripped naked and defecated on the table at dinner.

“Hey, Noodle!” she returns brightly in a sing-song voice. She’ll never begrudge him her parent’s failings- of which there are almost too many to keep a proper track on. She likes being the one person who can really get Scutcher , being the one who he talks to and listens to. Over even their Mom. It appeals to her vanity, gives her a curl of satisfaction to hold that over her mother, and what the heck is so wrong with that? What’s so wrong with fiercely guarding him and making sure that no one else will ever be there to take her place? It’s not like anyone else has ever thought that she was important.

Of course Scutcher trusts her more than anyone; they’ve suffered together for years, him in silence, her…in a haze of cigarette smoke and colourful obscenity. Tallow’s dad is snoring when she pushes through the door and into the house, in his old arm chair, a line of drool sneaking from his mouth and along his chin. The noise rips obscene against the walls, the house is always dark even when the sun is at its highest and now in the faint glow of the lamp she can make out the scabs and scarring on his knuckles clutched around his empty bottle. He’s quick to use his fists, just like she can be- but he’s never once raised a hand to her. She supposes that makes her lucky, she is lucky compared to her brother. But…there is always that feeling that he doesn’t even care enough for her to hit her- as twisted as that might be. He can barely dredge up the energy to hurt the strange, foreign girl who lives in the house. She’ll never be anything more than just passing through.

It used to be different, and dad used to at least try. Before they cut off his leg he’d stand and offer out a hand to her, ‘I’ll teach you how to muck out a stall if you like,” he’d say, as though it was the most exciting proposition in the world. She’d only curl her immaculately clean hand around the balustrade that lined their old porch, before they couldn’t afford to keep it anymore, and shake her head fiercely. Even back then, shovelling pig shit had very little appeal to her.

And now, after a leg ulcer turned diseased and fetid, after it had to be removed, he’s just a lump of all consuming anger and hate, who likes to beat the crap out of people who won’t fight back because it makes him feel like he’s a big man.

Tallow takes of her rucksack and stalks her way to her room. She passes mom on the way who smiles, holding a crate of laundry but says nothing to her, barely makes eye contact as she clutches the rucksack and the book held within close to her chest, to her heart.

Perhaps it isn’t unusual for teenage girls to dislike their mother’s. But surely it cannot be with the passion that Tallow does hers. A quiet woman, who refuses to speak or answer question, who prefers to bury her problems in the thick mud the churns up around them Tallow can’t be sure if she is disgustingly weak or unnervingly cruel. She lets her husband bully her children, lets him drink and shout and rage meeting Tallow’s demands with a ‘hush, girl, you’re getting on my nerves’. She goes to bed with him every night and has done for more than twenty years. More than eight years since he got like this and she hasn’t killed him yet.

It is unfathomable to Tallow that her mother hasn’t even tried. It would be so easy too, with poisons slipped into his supper, ready to course through his system, set his veins and organs on fire. She could smother him, wait until he slips into a drunken stupor and press a pillow to his face, stay on him until the last, weak twitches are all that is left and he rattles out his last breath into a mouthful of cotton. Lure him to a deep ditch, drive a carving knife into his neck, drown him in the sink- there are countless ways to do it and Tallow’s mother has never even attempted a single one of them.

But maybe that’s Tallow’s job. And as soon as she has enough money to run away, she will- and she won’t get caught neither. It is a solemn promise to her family. And Tallow Tansy keeps her promises.

I will kill him.

Tallow pushes her heavy chest of drawers against the door to give herself some privacy and flops down onto the sagging mattress of a tiny, rickety bed in a tiny rickety room and oh-so carefully removes the book from her satchel. Letting it sit in her lap for a while, feeling the weight and the texture of the cover beneath her fingers she takes it in before she dares open the pages.

And when she does, she lowers her head close to the pages and her lips part into a smile.

Pick up your rope, Lord

Words- Laura Marling