63rd Reaping [D5]

There are more reasons than the cold of the dawn that I wish my bed wasn't empty this morning. The white bedsheets no longer hold his musty, sweaty smell – the smell which always told me I had a husband who worked hard for his family and came home to his wife and made her euphoric and cooked for his children and all other sorts of warm smells filled with love and unbrokenness. The pillows have drifted back into their fresh, unpressed shape, their goose-feather hearts reminding me that Braxton isn't the only bird in this house who couldn't fit amongst Magpies. And, because staying with his own family, his own nest of chicks who are still all as fragile as egg shells, and just as pale and uncorrupted

(all except for Elodie who I'm sure is hiding secrets from me, which a good daughter should never do) was clearly too great a task for the pitiful man who I loved and married and cared for, I am alone again.

And today is Reaping day.

I wake early, to the bawling of a baby two houses away (I hope they'll be the unlucky ones, with their fourteen year old daughter and sixteen year old sone, and they'll move away and I won't be disturbed by that caterwauling ever again) and rise to start what I know will be a difficult, and horrific day. Every year, for as long as I can remember – back to my first Reaping, when Rosa and Cissy clutched to our mother and left me alone and terrified – a parent has wailed and screamed for their child, a brother shouted and protested, a tribute snivelled and sobbed as they made their painstaking way up to the stage. Even now, with a young victor smiling encouragingly from the front seats, with the older relics of champions around her, standing by the microphone and speaking their name is something that the poor children never manage to do. With the combine hoarseness of their nervous voices and the agony of the families, the Reaping makes for a cacophony that I cannot hope to control. And events I cannot control are not events I enjoy partaking in. However, my duty as a mother, for my own children that I have to show I love and care for and would never, ever hurt (no matter how they hurt me, how they interfere in what I must do and disrupt my designs) and I know that I would feel all the more comfortable with the strong arm of Braxton to link mine through, his deep voice to let me know that some things are better chaotic, and uncontrolled.

Breakfast is a simple meal of oaty bread and fruit, which I leave out for my children to take at their leisure (because I care for them and I would never let them go hungry, and never let them get hurt beyond necessity…) and then I am retreating back up to cold stairs and into my bedroom, where the large feathered coat and black, ill-fitting dress wait for me, creases and folds grinning at me maliciously from the fabric. My mind is as lively as a hummingbird, although my physical movements are still drowsy like a stork's. Aching, feeling my age even though I still deny that it could possibly be having an effect on me (was that one silver hair from anxiety?) I shrug on the garment, sweeping my hair, which looks to the same effect as the hem of the fraying dress, away from my shoulder joints and down my back.

Suddenly, a chill creeps into the room through one of the many invisible crevasses of this ruined house, and traces a line of deathly kisses down my bared arm. Just as Braxton once did, but provoking more fear than love. I am seized by wooziness, the air still trickling down my skin like icy water (or the blood of my youngest daughter hours after I have committed my crime and it still drip, drip, drips from my fingertips and wrists and elbows) and my knees buckle. I have barely hit the floor, palms spread and knuckles white as the bone beneath, before I am wretching, heaving back the breakfast I so recently consumed. Just as I try to reject to truer meaning of this day – the desolation I would feel should any of my little birds be summoned by Death, my stomach rejects the food I have given it to calm myself. My shoulder blades press together under the uncomfortable fabric of the clothing, my hair sticking to my cheeks and swaying in gusts of vomit-saturated breaths. Even before my hopelessness has truly begun, I am a mess of despair and concern.

The shuffle of feet on the landing and the scrape of one tile coming loose on the roof alerts me to the rousing of at least half of my brood. I wait patiently in the front room, knowing they'll want to take time to exchange secret words of care and love that they want to keep secret from me.

I know of their lack of faith, of the things they keep from me and the furtive words and indicative glances passed behind my back. I know of how cruel they are to their own mother, who raised them from nothing and let them push her back into that nothing like she never existed at all. My face is clean once again, save the delicate blushing scrape on the corner of my mouth where I polished too hard with the towel, to remove all stains from my skin. The people who live around me whisper too much already, and I refuse to give them a single mark of the tension that turned my insides to talk about as well.

The routine for the morning of the Reaping has been the same every year since Braxton's absences became more than just "late night at work, lots of papers, no, why would you be able to smell alcohol?" and I saw that it was necessary for me to grow my parental wings to account for the loss of my husband's. I wake early, barely eat, dress, and wait tirelessly for my seven children to join me, hoping, hoping beyond hope, that I may still return with seven children when they day is over. One for sorrow, and two for an even greater sorrow, if how my nursery rhyme goes now. My children join me and together we make our way quietly through the District (no shouting, no weeping, no looking up at sceptic eyes filled with rumour and mistrust) and I part with them there, telling each individually how much I love them, and that I'll see them soon. With all the cold courtesy that I can muster, to show them they should be brave, too. And every year, we meet again behind the Justice Building and travel home together, and, though I would never admit it, my ears are always prying to hear the screams of parents who are having their children torn away from them. Just so I remember how lucky I am. Just so I remember how I am so in control.

The Square is quietly alive with the babble of layered voices. Here and there, a whine floats up to the raised platform, more fitted to a gallows or executioner's block, where the parents and infants push together, but it is hard to say whether it comes from a terrified teenager or their guardians as the bid goodbye. I press my lips together, not a tremor runs through them. Slowly, the chatter and anguish are both worn down, and the white noise formed by both gives way to the even whiter suits of the Capitol escorts. Embellished with almost-invisible crystals and sequins, they reek of wealth and power the same way our house reeks of rot and emptiness, and I can smell it from here. The microphone sings out one tone, forcing silence into the mouths of the children below and the adults above.

"Happy Hunger Games!" echoes around the square, its source a man in his mid-twenties, but whose face is so altered that he could easily have been sixty, and I wouldn't have known. "It is time, to…" I manage to catch, until a high-pitched ringing fills my ears, a screeching, hissing note that fills my head and makes spikes of pain shoot through my retinas. I would vomit again, but my clenching stomach reminds me that there's nothing left inside my stomach to expel. My eyes clench shut, and as I raise my palm and press it against my ear it's clammy already. The gloved fingers worm their way into the glass orb which contains the hundreds of names of all the children in our District I stretch out my fingers and seize the thick hand of the man next to me only to realise that it's not Braxton (none of them are, he's not here like it has always been and it's just me and my children) but my awareness continues to fade. The world is draining around me, the colour less saturated and the faces less defined. The base of my spine aches, a frantic tug that climbs to my rib cage and makes my lungs work faster. My breath is guttural, my heart rate increasing, as the escort tugs a name (a girl's name, any of my girls' names?) and holds it triumphantly in the air.

And then, just for an instant, everything jumps back into focus around me. In place of the buzzing frequency, all I hear is a drugged silence that hangs almost tangibly in the air around me. At first I think my perception of this event is still muffled, tainted, but then I see people moving away from me (shuffling slowly and carefully, like they think I won't notice, but I've spent my whole life noticing and it's no longer me that's ignorant) like I'm a cursed woman.

And then I see Elodie, my cuckoo child, pushing through the itching crowd to the path leading to the stage.

The moan starts low in my throat, an animalistic signal of the turmoil inside my head. My precious daughter, my own beloved chick, who I made mine all those years ago and who I, drops her arms to her sides, where they brush the fabric of her thin dress rhythmically. In the same way a funeral march is rhythmic. Lips slightly parted, I glance round to the quarantine of human bodies that press so tight against each other, yet still half a metre away from me. The rumbling sobs in my chest build, tumbling from my lips like sleet, and crashing into the air around me. All the families in all the years before, who I scorned so for the way they reacted to their children being chosen, the inevitability of not a single volunteer taking their place, now that family is the Magpies. Now that wailing mother is me.

"No!" I wail, the syllable drawn out into a long, undulating wave of noise. My diaphragm heaves with my panicky breath, my gut churning painfully as if my own organs would have me throw up again, but all it does it make me wince and groan louder. I was once a marble statue, majestic and immovable, but now I am a gargoyle.Worn away by the elements (surprise, sorrow, regret, fear) and twisted into an inhuman shape. "Elodie, no!" The sound is a howl, ragged and stuttering as I pull myself to the edge of the platform, tugging off my heavy coat so it's easier to run towards her. Feathers malt away from the fabric as if from a dying bird (but now Elodie is the dying bird and she should be shedding her feathers, not me). My aching knees jar, once again reminding me that I don't belong here in the capacity that the children that turn to face me with wide, curious eyes are younger, and stronger than me. And as are the Peacekeepers who now block my way.