Della Conagher District 5 Finished

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[Appearance]

“What are little girl’s made of? The old sayin’ claims we aint nothing but sugar and spice and all things nice, but- chemically speakin’ that aint nothin’ but an erroneous asserveration of fact. Little girls, like all human beings, are sixty five percent oxygen, eighteen point five percent carbon, nine point three percent hydrogen, one point five percent calcium and one percent phosphorus. Then you got your nought points of a percent; your potassium, your sodium, your chlorine, your magnesium, iodine and iron. And by the time all of that’s mixed up together to make a person, it don’t leave much room for things like sugar and spice.

Structurally, we’re all the same, but I’ve never been your average little girl. Mostly because half the time people used to think I was a little boy. It was my dad who started up the perplexity at first; he raised me by himself and being a roughneck from out in the oil fields he didn’t have much time to be messing around with girl things like plaiting hair and pretty ribbons so he used to take scissors and crop my hair so close to the head in uneven chunks that I looked like I had the beginnings of alopecia areata or something. My aunt and some of the mother’s of my friends from school used to lose their damn minds when I rolled into school as bare as a bald eagle but even then I never cared. These days I still like to keep my hair short- for practical purposes, so I don’t ever have to worry about tying it up when I’m working, about it coming loose around machinery or that horrible feeling of sweaty hair sticking to the back of my neck. I suppose it cuts down my morning routine a little, but that I’m not too bothered about- I’m the kind of girl that rolls out of bed when she wants to, and won’t be rushed anywhere.

My dad wanted boys, no doubt about that and he brought me up sort of just…ignoring…the fact that I wasn’t one. Which is just as well. I don’t go much in for feminine stuff, more content to wear dungarees and not shave all my body hair off like I’m one of those hairless cats or something that girls seem to like. Everything I wear is for function- is it okay to get it covered in oil, or dirt or grease or whatever else it is I’m working with, is it comfortable? The rest aint so important.


But I don’t look like much of a roughneck either; I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m tall but very slight compared to my dad, his friends and all the riggers who I know are strong from working the machinery. They breed our stock pretty tough, it’s good money if you can get the work but I know from my daddy how dangerous it can be on the oil fields. For one, you end up being pretty far out from any kind of medical assistance, working with highly combustible material means that burns happen pretty often. My daddy’s known men who’ve suffered fractures, lost limbs, spinal cord and brain injuries due to heavy equipment falling as well as any number of incidents from falling off of tall rigs during harsh weather. The government don’t care about it much neither, there’s good money in oil and it keeps Panem going- that hairbrush you use in the morning, the umbrella you used to protect it when you got caught out in the rain, the fuel for the machines at work and the lunchbox you was using to keep your sandwiches in- that’s all oil and that’s all what my daddy is out there risking life and limb for. Half the kids they send up don’t have a clue what they are doing either, without any kind of necessary experience or training because it’s the kind of work that chews a man up and spits him back out again, over the hill before he’s reached forty five. The hours are long, the conditions are sticky and hot and brutal so it aint no wonder why a man’s concentration levels can drop, and he can do something wrong, stop paying attention and wind up with one less leg to begin with. You see them all around town, on crutches, empty shirt sleeves pinned up to stop them from flapping loosely in the wind. My dad tips his hat to them, lights his cigarette but will still sit out on the porch at night, strumming on his guitar saying ‘I wouldn’t change my job for the world kiddo.” I can’t wait to go up on the rigs, put some muscle on my weedy bones, some colour in my creamy milk coloured skin.

Despite the short hair cut and the distinctly unfeminine style, I still think I must look a lot like my mom though that is simply a deduction considering there aren’t many pictures of her that I can find anywhere. From what I’ve heard from my father, she was a very pretty woman- but honestly, what man is going to call his dead wife ugly? My dad is broad and tall with rust coloured hair thinning on top of his head and a red beard flecked with gold on his face while I am smaller with a square jaw, prominent cheek bones like hollows in my face. Nothing about me is overly feminine, but the curve of my mouth is plumper than a boys, the delicate structure of my bones anything but masculine. Androgynous they call it, treading a kind of no man’s land between both- a million miles away from the boy my father wanted but not exactly a girl either. Not sugar and spice, not slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails either. My lashes are short, my eyebrows thick but far blonder than the nut brown color of my hair framing cautious grey blue eyes. Smart grey blue eyes, perceptive grey blue eyes, I’m always looking. Always seeing. Not that you’d know it from the way that I handle myself, with the same lazy gait as a rangy cat in the strip of sunlight streaming through the curtains.

[Personality]

The word ‘genius’ doesn’t get thrown about all that often in district five and I aint even too sure I’d use it on myself but I suppose my cerebellum and my working memory must act in an accelerated fashion to support the Vandervertion theory regarding child prodigies given the rate of which I can retain specific information in large quantities- though I aint no expert on neuroscience or nothin’ I just know what I’ve read on the subject. I really like reading, whether it’s a mechanical instruction manuals covered in oil that my dad brings home from work or poetry from the edges of the district and I like to find problems- problems maybe that other people don’t see, and I like to think about solutions to them. That’s all I’ve ever done. And usually my solutions involve fire and some kind of explosive. I’m a big fan of those.

Crude oil is made up of a complex mixture of hydrocarbons and impurities such as oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and metals and has a flashpoint of less than one hundred and fourty one degrees farenheit, which means, when put into the most unscientific layman’s terms possible, a pretty little light show that you better hope to ripred you aint caught in the middle of. We can see the oil fields from our back yard, and when there’s an explosion out on one of them the whole district sure as shoot knows about it. As a little girl I used to stand out in the yard, the side of my palm pressed against my forehead so I could see right out into the distance and watch the smoke rising, thinking about the temperature at which the flames were burning out, the time it would take to thoroughly cremate any subjects caught at the epicentre while calculating the total damage cost the fire was doing. It was better than a day at the funfair.

I’ve always been a naturally curious sort of kid so I started messing around with stuff at home, kitchen ingredients at first and if you know what you’re doing and are determined enough, any organic material can burn. It started out with baking soda and vinegar, grinding up sugar dust fine enough to cause a reaction with the oxygen any give room and a lit match makes a nice, tiny little ka-boom, and you can make smoke bombs with a little salt peter which gets used as garden fertilizer. My dad lost patience with this after a while- when I burnt up the kitchen curtains- and started pushing me to learn how to make things as opposed destroying them, and I picked up a love for engineering.

Experimentin’ carries through into a lot of my life I guess- I was a curious kid, always asking questions and demanding answers my daddy just couldn’t give me and other times things just seem to click in place. Geniuses are supposed to have a denser concentration of neurone receptors in the frontal cortex and enlarged paretial lobes so I guess I have to assume that some part of that made the fact that I didn’t want what other girls wanted click as soon as I knew what I wanted was. And what I want is namely other girls. Lots of different ones, at the same time, all the time- I’m sure there’s something in the brain that can explain something like that- the neuropeptides oxytocin or the arginine vasopressin which compels people to pick out partners.

At school, I tend to rush through the work I’m given- it’s all easy, except history for some reason; I can remember the burning point of some many chemical compounds but I can’t get names and dates right, I guess I aint good at wrapping my head around anything that aint in the here and now. And after that’s done, I sit in class spending most of my time picking out a girl for the day’s fantasy.


It could be the blonde in our school’s poor approximation of a library, knotted blonde hair twirling around her fingertips, mouth poised to a pout over a textbook. I imagine the taste of her momma’s packed corned beef sandwiches she slots that frowning mouth into mine. Or, how about the smiling dark one from the street earlier on? Soft around the middle and in all the places that matter, pillowed and protected by plush fat. Either would do. They all would do. These smiling things; all of them pieced together with eyes and moist lips, hips, teeth, breasts and behinds. How much of it, I wonder, is lust? And how much of it is jealousy? I fantasise about tiptoeing fingers crawling inside of them, and then the rest of me. Pull her body close to mine and then just melt. Melt right into her. I guess you could call me shallow when I say I don’t really care about their personalities, their separate likes and dislikes…just that I think they are beautiful. But there you are.

Sometimes I do wonder what it’s like to be looked at. To be eyes and teeth and lips and smiles while I’m nothing but plain and short haired- good for a fumble, and an experiment, (and trust me there aint a shortage of pretty girls who want to experiment with me, I keep a full dance card) but they always go back to their boyfriends in the end.

The bouncing and the giggling comes second nature to them while I speak slow and laugh in a deep rumble. Effortless, effervescent; they skip through life with the mysteries of happiness held tightly in their fists and slipped into the secrets of silk underwear- something that even a genius can’t understand.

The only man I’ll ever love is my dad and I do a whole bunch. We’re like two peas in a pod when it comes to our habits, the certain way we organise our plates before dinner, so the vegetables are on the left side and the meat on the right or else the whole meal is ruined, the way that cream soda is our favourite thing in the whole world when dad can get his hands on it- don’t ask how- though it makes both of us burp worse than anything. Don’t ask me where the being smart thing came from though, my dad’s the first to admit he’s as dumb as a plank of wood and he’s never said my mom was much better. All the same he’s taught me a tonne of things over the years, like how manners don’t cost nothing and that swearing is vulgar, how to properly pig out (clean) a pipeline on a rig and, with a little success- how to play the guitar. I’d rather be blowing stuff up to be honest, but my dad was so patient that I forced myself to learn. But though I play technically well, I don’t play like him- with me it’s like forcing a dog to stand on its hind legs but my dad can just… shut his eyes and breathe out music. In the light of the moon with the fireflies dancing on our back porch it’s more beautiful than an explosion on an oil rig.

I wish I could tell him that I like girls. He wouldn’t be mad…just disappointed; he’s always wanted a big family and I know my mom dying hit him hard- way harder than me since I don’t hardly remember her. I can sit and I can imagine everything he’d say down to the last detail, knowing that I’m so smart I’d probably be right.

Sometimes being clever makes people real cowards….at least, I know it does for me.

[History]

My mom and my dad knew each other their entire lives really, both from the same part of town to families that got on rather well and my dad told me he'd been love with her since he was fourteen. Trouble was, because of the age difference, she never noticed him until much later. She was quite pretty and sparky and drew my dad in during the middle of his adolescent stirrings. I can imagine him watching her sunning herself out in the front yard during summer, him gangly and knock-kneed, her eight years his elder and not interested in the slightest- entranced as he mumbled to himself that he was going to marry her one day.

Unfortunately for my dad, someone else got in their quicker and she married young, when she was twenty or so- the way that lots of women seem to in this district- to a man from town, a no good factory working loser or so my dad liked to say- receding hair line and great fat gut though I can't help but feel like my father might be twisting the facts just a little. After losing the love of his life, my daddy threw himself into work, headed off out into the oil fields the minute he escaped the reaping. He'd go back from time to time to visit his parents and see that my mom and her husband had moved into the house across the street with her parents. One night he was fixing my grandmother's pilot light out on the back porch when she burst out of the house in tears, fingers trembling as she went to light a cigarette, the sound of a man shouting in the background.

He was at her side in an instant before he even knew what he was doing, taking her lighter in his hand, taking the metal casing and pulling out the flint inside. Wordlessly, he rubbed it on the side of his jeans, popped it back and the spark was ignited. "Hey, kiddo," she whispered- my dad still shivers when he gets to that part in the story- "do you wanna run away with me?"


It was mad and she was married and it wasn’t like they could get very far what with the district lines and all but he said, "you betcha" like it wasn’t a big deal at all. Dad doesn’t elaborate on the rest but I imagine they kissed, piled up whatever they could and found a ride. They headed out for the oil fields, where there are cabins set aside for workers and they knew so much and so little about each other, spending evenings sitting out on our porch playing music, eating the heads that grow wild in the long grass that runs out at the very edge of the fields. It was the perfect romance, my daddy said, though all I can think of is how very stupid they must have been.


That blissful period ended pretty quickly after the summer did, my mom's husband came looking for her and when he asked around the oil fields, people out there obliged. It's not that they sold my parents out- men from the oilfields actually happen to be fiercely protective of one another, but through some subterfuge he managed to wheedle it out of them eventually. With a bundle of flowers, grease slicked around his comb over he came back for my mom and she refused him. She was pregnant, she wanted a divorce and to stay out in the oil fields with my dad. There was an altercation, her husband refused and went for her, but my dad got in faster, all guns blazing, fists flying and ended up being shipped out of the district to a detention centre for grievous bodily harm. "I'll be back in no time, look after my son for me" were the last words he ever spoke to her.


I was born out in the oilfields and my dad doesn’t know what happened and my grandmother, who’d moved out with her to help with the pregnancy, is quite elderly by now and is impossible to get anything salient out of these days, though her apple pies are still as damn good as anything so the story gets a little patchy from there. She didn’t exactly die giving birth to me, but it was almost definitely what finished her off. I’ve done some research into maternal deaths and forty five percent of them happen within the first forty eight hours, seventy eight percent of which is through internal haemorrhaging though as the hours between birth and fatality increase the chance of this decreases and is more likely to be caused by infection. It was a week after I was born that my mother died so from that I can only assume that infection, not uncommon in areas without proper medical facilities i.e the oil fields of district five, was what claimed her life.


My dad got out of the detention centre a year after, to find his wife dead and a baby girl waiting for him. He never told me what happened while he was there, I’ve asked him before and his technique is usually to pick up his guitar and say ‘let’s play a song little darlin’drawing a line under the whole thing. People used to say a lot that he should have gotten remarried – or just married a first time since he never got to marry my mother- that a little girl needs a female influence in her life, but it must have been pretty rough for him, having loved someone for his whole life and only being able to be with her a short time. I’d understand though, I just want my dad to be happy.


So I grew up the biggest tom boy anyone ever saw, preferring to wear short pants and run around with other little boys poking at dead things with sticks as opposed to nursing little rag dolls that the little girls in town had. Even if I’d wanted to, I would have had no mother to make one for me. I don’t know when my dad started to notice that I was smarter than the other kids, but by the time I got to school it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t being challenged. Not that I was disruptive, just that I would let my head turn towards the window until the teachers sharply yelled at me to get back down to earth. They pulled dad into school and said that I needed to be stimulated more, both at home and in class and he went away, scratching his beard over what to do with me until I started begging him to let me mess about in the kitchen. I don’t know, maybe he was a little disappointed since he assumed that I meant I wanted to cook pies and do all the things that sugary, spicey, all things nicey little girls want to do. He shouldn’t have underestimated me though and within a day I was stinking out the whole house with the smell of smoke, laughing maniacally through a face blackened with ash.


And I’ve never looked back…

Words- Tf2 Meet The Engineer Video