Birrin Ceps District 9

Birrin Ceps District 9 Apr 1, 2012 4:54:39 GMT -5

Post by kneedles on Apr 1, 2012 4:54:39 GMT -5

♦ Birrin Ceps ♦

there's bound to be a ghost at the back of your closet
no matter where you live.
there'll always be a few things, maybe several things
that you're going to find really difficult to forgive.

there's going to come a day when you feel better.
you'll rise up free and easy on that day.
and float from branch to branch,
lighter than the air.
just when that day is coming, who can say? who can say?
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full.name; Birrin Ceps
nicknames; none
age; 17
district;9
occupation; midwife

Appearance.

This district is a charnel house, glaucous and eggshell and fire brick; skeletons scraped dry like fallen twigs, the smoke thick from the funeral pyres, potent and intoxicating with the smell of incense, burnt plastic and fleeting lives. Here, I am what is left of a girl; scraped down to the bare bones, a frail spectre of a body, phantom colours, the ghost of a smile. These eyes are a too pale, yellowing green and they stare out at the world in front of them through a filter that is sickly, jaundiced and cold, like the glass in medicine bottles, lined up on the counter of an apothecary, catching the light and filled with poisons and remedies alike.

Like steel and concrete towers, I twist upwards into adulthood, only frailer than the creeping vines and hanging threads of laburnum, too frail ever reflect the red bricks and industry that surrounds me. At five foot ten I stand a little too tall, someone might say; all angles and jutting bones poking through papery skin as though my insides are being smothered by it and is desperately trying to break through to find air. There is something in me that I can hardly contain. I manage myself like a newborn foal, awkwardly bypassing my own feet and negotiating with my hands sprouting from the twigs of my arms and legs. My fingers hardly seem a part of me, long and graceful but always dry, they flicker like the cracked glassy wings of damselflies when conversation becomes animated but remain steady as I work. Steady, firm, practiced and practical. The pads of the fingertips have grown tough like the soles of my feet through the indentation of so many needles between them, between my fingers the faintest traces of ochre, almost golden nicotine stains and premature freckling, spotting and aging on the backs of my hands.

Beneath an apron of blood, coarse fabrics like smog, my skin is a despondent kind of tan- more beige than brown like sun dried paper bags, fresh Irish cream in a tall glass, a photograph in sepia and unwashed linens folded into crumpled heaps. If the sun ever deigns to shine on district nine, battling the smog clouds, a galaxy of freckles forms across the blunt little stone of my nose out to my cheeks mimicking the constellations, grouping into solar systems and orbiting my face. From the neck up, the angular shapes and sharpness of my body fades into something softer and younger, my face is wide, round and flat- a statue almost where the features have been worn down by erosion.

Normally my hair is a disaster; a force of nature all by itself like a hurricane or a supernova, worn at shoulder length in a thick brittle frizz and clumped together into untameable knots of russet brown like a flea bitten raggedly old fox poking through bins in the centre of town. At the crown of my head, my hair kinks and curls, some strands of hair seemingly standing to attention at strange angles. To tame my hair, I use head scarves; scraps of old worn down cloth in clashing patterns, stained with oil and grease. The acidic rainstorms that catches us, bouncing off the paving stones, slipping through the steam escaping the soap works is the only thing to take the bounce out of my hair, depressing the russet curls like piles of broken bricks, transfiguring it into something hanging limp and tired and foreign. I am aware of a faint, wet dog smell lurking within the twisting and twining weedy knots when the rain falls.

Usually though, I am dowsed in an ever present thick, heady antiseptic scent - as strong smelling as kerosene or the bubbling broiling vats of hot fat in the soap factories, cold impenetrable and sterile. It keeps the skin of my hands raw and cracked from the scrubbing of bristles around my knuckles til the all the layers are stripped away almost down to the bone and I am coarse to the touch. Clean hands are vital, when the shimmering dust of metal shavings rises up from the iron works and into the air, and the corpse of a starving dog is allowed to fester in the streets where it dropped dead. My grandmother had a switch when I was a child saved just for when I forgot to wash my hands, thin and stiff, felled from redwood with more than enough drag to break the skin deep enough to leave welts though the switch itself never once snapped. In our business the dirt is almost as good as a death sentence for the people we served, I’ve seen far too many young mothers lost that way to ever look upon infections or bacteria with any kind of favour or mercy.

I know that I smoke too many cigarettes; the hot taste of ash and the earthy burnt up tobacco leaves tends to linger on my breath if not my hands. It turns my teeth to yellow, like rows of stained glass windows and wears at my gums which are a dark shade of pink almost brown. Along with the colour, a diastema separates my two front teeth, all of them small and worn down like pebbles by a beach, I grind my teeth when I’m thinking, nervous or fighting off the seductive siren call of yet another cigarette. As such, I smile with a closed mouth, my thick pink lips pulled up to one side, sarcastic even when I don’t mean it to be as the smile never seems to reach my glassy eyes.

My grandmother’s clothes and mine are virtually interchangeable, shabby enough to suggest quite rightly that I take no pride in it. Dresses are worn very loose and long, like conservative sackcloth , very rarely suggesting anything feminine in my figure though the patterns are usually overly feminine to the point of almost obscenity. Pinks, greens, reds and oranges are combined with no feel for complimenting colours or clashing though there is a certain fluidity in the way that long skirts and full sleeves move that is at least pleasing to my eyes in the lightest of breezes. I think of sailboats flapping in an ocean breeze, salt on my tongue and the call of an albatross even though I've never seen the sea.

Personality.

We stand as though on an assembly line, a cog, a wheel, a spoke pushed together to form something that is greater than the sum of our parts but cold, impersonal and unsightly. There is no intelligent design, no gods in our machine, only a perpetual motion device that neither creates nor destroys. It only keeps on turning, feeding and forming itself from scrap metal that engorges with time. They are trying to mechanize our souls with their whistles and their time cards; clock in, clock out, live in the machine and live for the machine until the day that you die.

But human beings cannot be automated- we’re too soft and too fleshy, packed with heat and damp below the skin, ripe against the mechanical sterility of the factories. Our gristle and bone is ugly, our under arms moist and our demeanours too unpredictable, lives too fragile to serve the purpose of machines. I’ve seen it when the earth spits out another newborn son our daughter, another mewling pathetic offering to the government and I have to appreciate the inherent fallibility of us all. We are weak; grasping for the warmth of the womb, the comfort of the thick lengths of cord that keeps us tethered to our mothers, crying out into the air through tiny lungs for reasons we never fully comprehend.

My grandmother says that midwifery is woman’s work- she doesn’t trust physicians who offer the service. One might assume that there is a tenderness involved in the birthing of a child that requires a delicate feminine touch but this is not the case. The business of life and the business of death run too similar ; my grandmother never soothes or speaks softly, only barks orders, bullies and briskly goes about her work. If you behave like that, then mother and child is more likely to live- a soft smile, a coo might be pleasant to look at as you haemorrhage on old towels and bedsheets, but I would rather live faced with all the dirt and the rasp in the world than die looking upwards towards the stars.

Some of the infants will die before they’ve taken their first real breath of air- well, smog from the factories - some of the mother’s will die in the process of giving a child to the machine and their final sacrifice will go without much fanfare or interest. There will be children who live, only to die on screens, become caught in the grinders at the metal works, start hacking up pieces of their lungs the way a mother hawk regurgitates food for her children. All of the children born will die, most of them before their time. Some lives are measured in the time it takes to cough, and I have seen them extinguished like matches on the breeze, sometimes in my arms. I’ve been an apprentice to my grandmother since I was nine; I am no stranger to death. Perhaps a labouring mother will find no comfort from me in the form of a gentle smile, a calming touch, but there is comfort to be found in our steely eyes and set mouths that read ‘we will do what we can to ensure that you live.’

It can form calluses over the heart , this work and it tans the outer edges of a person’s skin thick, hard and impenetrable. You’d think that I’d develop some kind of strong maternal streak, that biological imperative that demands we women care for those pathetic mewling weaklings, for the good of the species! I am more inclined to save the mother, besides, we are a wretched species as it is. If I could have chosen, I would rather be a hawk or a kestrel and fly over these walls and fences that keep us penned in. If I could have chosen, I wonder if I would have still been an apprentice to my grandmother. It is a prudent career path, a valuable trade and there will always be birth just as there will always be death- it is the only life I’ve known after all so I tend not to dwell on the hypothetical and the what ifs. As a child, though, I seem to remember a fascination with pottery- maybe I would have been skilled at that.

I'd still rather be a hawk or a kestrel than a potter. If I wish hard enough, maybe one day I'll sprout wings.

Hope for the best, but always expect the worst was the lesson my grandmother instilled in me from a young age. I go one further and prefer not to dare to hope at all. Not so much glass half empty- I imagine myself staring at the tepid water in a glass, leaking a little from a fracture as fine as an eyelash and I wonder if the glass will ever be filled again. But I’m not supposed to think, or to imagine (which I admit I am prone to do), really, when there is meat and reality ever present around me. District nine grabs me with a bony hand pulls me back through the foul, thick smoke coiling like serpents into the air, back down to the streets, rows of red brick houses for the factory workers, to the sounds of steel against steel, grinding gears like knuckles cracking and the school room lies. Isn’t it wonderful to be in Panem? Aren’t we indebted to our rulers, to our machine? And my grandmother thrusts me a newborn child, slightly grey as I peel away the thin, translucent caul away from his face and it is only when I see that he is breathing that I begin to really pity him.

Sometimes I harbor the private notion that I might be funny, though it is a quiet sort of humor built on dark observations and mean sarcastic mutterings that do not elicit much joy from anyone. I am under no delusions that it is because I am too great a wit to be appreciated and that a comment will sail over the heads of those not as smart as I- the cheerless jokes I make sometimes wring truer and crueler than a straightforward put down, or a punch in the face. Is it a defense mechanism I wonder, though I would prefer not to diagnose my personality with the preserved psychology of the past, it doesn’t feel forced; these things slip out of my mouth as though buttered , and more often than not are instantly regretted.

Deep down, in a private recess of my mind, I dream of destroying. Of crushing soap between my fingers, snapping the heads from matches and holing myself up in the glassworks, shattering vast panes into shards like the fine glittering frosting wrapped around pastries. I dream of doing something that hasn’t just been bullied into me by my grandmother. There is a taboo pleasure in the concept of destroying a link in the chain of the machine.

I think I must despise my grandmother more than the capitol; she is at least the more tangible evil, better the devil you know as an antiquated saying once went . I suppose I must hate her more for the glimpse she gives me of my own future; I will never rise to the high echelons of government and hold so many lives tightly by the throat, the mind or the pocket but I am sure that my bones will twist brittle and bitter until I am the same as her. Everything comes down to brass coin for my grandmother and I have seen her turn women away, swollen with child, hunched over in agony because they have nothing to pay her for her services and it instilled in me a deep disgust. She is cruel and wrinkled like a sultana, the juices of compassion drained out of her in the dry heat of the sun demanding nothing but blind subservience from me. I am a tool to her, of little more value than a stethoscope or a pair of cool metal forceps. Between her lips a cigarette always sits as she murmurs bitterness and hollow laughter. She is brilliant, I will admit that and grudgingly admire her for it, if midwives can be artisans then she is the very best of them; nimble fingers stitched up torn skin in record time when the old woman was in her prime though her eyesight is failing her and her deft fingers have become gnarled and arthritic like twisting, knotting tree branches.

Perhaps I will miss her when she is dead; most people become more tolerable when they become nothing but hindsight. I will say though, for my grandmother- she has never once bartered my life for bread by buying tessera.

Living in a woman’s world for the most part, men and teenage girls are alien to me; I was long grown at nine when my grandmother began my apprenticeship. There was no room for childish behaviour at the business end of a long delivery, or for girlish delicateness when it came to the gore and the blood that often preceded or flanked the birth of a child. I think it was my grandmother who made me cold, but nestled between factories and rows upon rows of houses I would probably have gotten there all myself. One thing that I do know is that being a midwife, I will never have a child- never put my body through torment only to provide another spoke or wheel or cog . I will probably never love a man without seeing him as week and mewling, placenta covered and still attached to his mother. I do not think the industrial smog around my heart will ever clear and I would rather die than learn to love this ever turning machine.

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History.

When I was nine, my mother sold me for one hundred dollars and a baker’s dozen of stale rolls. I’m getting ahead of myself, but it has always been a sore point- if it were my daughter’s life for sale I might have at least demanded fresh bread.

I suppose that my parents have never appreciated the fragility of life and their own offspring in full; my mother concealed the thick bulge of me inside her belly beneath heavy woolen jumpers and loose fitting smocks as she stood in the district square on the day of her final reaping. Seventeen years ago, she was young, round of face, dark as sloe berries, marshmallow soft and pretty-more afraid of the stranger growing inside of her than of the Hunger Games. I would have waited, surely and refused to risk getting pregnant while there was a chance of me going into the games- but my mother did not have my grandmother to bully a fearful cautiousness into her the way that I do, only a far off notion of beauty and a desperate need for reassurance. She was the kind of girl who would curl up into herself like burnt crisps of paper without love or approval.

What then, was my father’s excuse? My grandmother had raised him single handedly among three other brothers after my grandfather’s messy demise lost to lung cancer, the smog of the factories thickening in his lungs, chunks of it hacked up when he coughed and concealed in bloody handkerchiefs like smuggling scraps of half chewed, regurgitated meat.The men in my family have never had the best of luck. My father had eyes like watery shallow pools and the moss that wisps across the surface, I daresay they entranced my mother. They were both far too young, holding hands under the wrought iron gates as the whistle blew to signal the end of another shift. They were both too stupid to prepare themselves for what they would do to us; myself, my brothers and my sisters.

Worst of all, they were in love. Reading poetry checked out of the school library, I imagine they thought that what they were experiencing was unique and extraordinary- as though they were the only two people to ever feel a biological imperative and create life together. I can see them sitting on the concrete outside of a general store, sharing a cigarette, a smile or a lingering kiss, watching the sun break forth from a cloud, reflecting in the puddles in the paving like so many glass sculptures catching the light and vainly believing that it was shining just for them. What they thought was beauty and poetry and true love was just hormones, heady and enthralling, and the rare burst of luminosity on a crap part of town.

It took them a shockingly long time to realize this, as though their wits were drowning in thick, sickly sweet molasses. You would have thought that after the birth of their first child they might have guessed that it is impossible to simply live on love alone. My mother and father both got jobs at a matchstick factory while I languished in a one room hovel above a green grocer’s, watched over by an elderly neighbor and his arthritic pit-bull, it was a wonder that my first year of life was not my last. My brother followed a year later, and no doubt my parent’s found his curls and freckles delightful, my younger sister’s eyes were huge and green as poplar trees, and of the three others that followed all were cherubic, all giggling, cooing and never colicky. I found my parents smugness unbearable; they were so proud of the way their love have taken seed and blossomed into something pretty that they forgot that we were starving half the time.

Looking back, I want to go up to them and shake them and tell them to stop. Tell them that loving isn’t enough; I needed new shoes, my sisters needed someone to plait their hair and my brothers needed someone to tell them not to throw rocks at cats and little girls. As children we ran riot, stole from the sack lunches of other children so we would eat that day- there was nothing that we weren’t wanting for. Oh, but we were loved. It was the flimsy kind of love like a pressed flower in a slip of note paper that a boy passes, blushing, to a girl he’s always admired in class- pretty to look at but insubstantial and easily blown away; it couldn’t protect us or comfort us when we were sick. Any smart person would have seen what future there was for us; there were ominous black storm clouds on the horizon.

My brother (the second eldest child) and my father died in quick succession when I was seven, my father had never been slow about anything; smiling or laughing or falling in love with my mother and starting a family but this was a record time for him. There was an afternoon of shivering and cold sweats, his face turning grey like churning cement and then the next morning my father was dead- influenza, the kind of infinitely curable disease that must be treated like a cold in the higher districts but is a death sentence for people like us, especially when mingled with the thick tar already sitting in my father’s lungs. For all his failings, I can’t help but remember the man fondly-remember what I said about people appearing better in hindsight?

For all her starry eyed mooning over my father, kissing in the kitchen and smiling over matchstick assembly lines, my mother found a replacement with sickening ease- another man, Uriah Wroe, from the same factory as my father, a friend no less. Love is fickle, above all things. I have to wonder whether she didn’t feel that when this new man brought her limp posies in oil smeared bundles and palmed at her breasts in firm, work beaten hands that this was unique and extraordinary too. At seven years old, even I was disgusted with her predictability; Uriah even looks a little like my father- the same close cut pale hair hidden under a flat cap, the same strong arms revealed under rolled up shirtsleeves, flecked here and there with titian strands like wisps of gold and bronze.

There was a marked difference, though, between this man and my father. While both men loved my mother- and I don’t doubt that Uriah does- my father could at least devote his entire heart to her. There was, and still is a Mrs Wroe. I still see her in the street; a sallow faced woman who was probably once very pretty but has been drained with age and widened with child birth. Their oldest child, a son, is in my class and once called my mother a whore in an anger that dissipated a little when it elicited no reaction on my part. Mrs Wroe pretends not know about the affair that has lasted almost ten years and produced four children, and we pretend not to know that she knows in a never ending loop of deception that benefits no one but still must be maintained.

I have three half sisters and a half brother now, and the arrival of the first two proved incredibly problematic. It was now that my mother, still soft and naïve after everything began to realize that her wide eyed reverence of love above all else was killing us all. In my father, she at least had someone to muddle along with and shared a meager wage with. Uriah Wroe could not provide much when he had a wife and sons at home too, and was unwilling to when it came to another man’s children. As my father’s progeny, we fell out of favor with my mother as she despaired of us while Uriah Wroe’s children blossomed in her belly. She was not cruel, but she wasn’t kind and even the flimsy love she gave us began to withdraw like a timid animal shying from the light.

We were too young for tessera, and my mother couldn’t afford to wait, so she scattered us into the wind like the delicate puffs of dandelion seeds, hoping we would find ground and take root but not stopping to ensure that we did. Some of us went to relatives, some of us to friends to earn our keep and it was my grandmother who, in need of an apprentice, took me from my mother for the meager price of one hundred dollars and the stale bread. My mother wept an ocean of tears when we parted, I wish she hadn’t, that she cried and I didn’t made it feel as though it were my fault.

I hated my grandmother with an infinite passion from the first day. Taking me in was a huge sacrifice and an expense, she never failed to remind me. At best I was a nuisance, at worst a hindrance, she had a switch and she was quick to use it if I misbehaved. After school, there was an endless parade of pregnant women waiting for me, endless lessons and pouring through textbooks. I was ill disciplined at this point, a hangover from my parent’s lackluster style and if I missed my mother a little, I missed my siblings- my real siblings- with the ferocity of a missing limb. With my grandmother though, tears were met with derision and sneering, and if I dared to turn away from spilt blood of thick gunky after birth then my grandmother would seize my head in her gnarled hands and force me to watch and shake me if I dared shut my eyes. In the delivery room I became afraid that she would catch me blinking.

As I reached puberty in my own lackluster way, the minute swelling of mosquito bite breasts and the pathetic dribble of a late first period delayed by ill health and hunger, my grandmother started her own new cycle- the last one. Her glassy eyes grew milkier and unsettling as her eyesight began to fail, and her fingers began to tremble and lock up when she needed them. I became more involved until things bloomed into the way they are now; I do all the work in the delivery room while she barks her orders at me and demands a running commentary of every fluid, every dilation and contraction. It must kill her that I am all that she has left in the world, her sons are dead and her husband is long gone- it certainly pains me to think that she is the closest thing that I have to a friend or a confident though I confide nothing in her, and rarely a friendly word is shared between us. We eat our meals in silence, glaring at each other over watery soup, we bicker over house –keeping, we wash our hands meticulously and we birth babies. Then we go to sleep. Lather rinse repeat. I guess I’m more a part of the machine than I had hoped.

School is little more than a distraction now, and it isn’t unheard of for a labor to force me away from the class. Babies do not wait for the most convenient time and in the spring we are pulled under a heavy coat of lethargy from nights delivering as the birthing season begins, as though females follow the same primal mating seasons as sheep and cows.

I have better things to do than worry about the Hunger Games. Death follows birth and will find us all in the end, these games are just a morbid forward button on the inevitable. Who’s to say the golden haired boy from district four with his brains dashed against the cornucopia wouldn’t have met his end a year later at home where he stood, by taking a fall, by a falling star, who’s to say the whens, the whys and the hows ever mattered?Who’s to say he wasn’t marked from birth when the midwife uncoiled the umbilical cord from around his neck that by all rights should have killed him from the offset? Not me. [/size]