FIN // ONE // INERTIA RAE
Jan 30, 2014 17:51:35 GMT -5
Post by Onyx on Jan 30, 2014 17:51:35 GMT -5
▼
head in the sand
feet in the clay
When I was twelve, I was burned at the stake.
It all happened so fast, I didn't have time to cry for rescue - let alone try to defend myself. One moment, I was asleep in bed, sketchbook still open on my lap and pencil poised as it had been when I dropped off the edge of consciousness. The next, one warm, dry hand was against my mouth, pressing my small, thick lips tightly shut. Then an arm wrapped around my long throat to stop me screaming, and I was dragged flailing from my bed in strangled silence.
The sigh of my nightdress on the wooden floor of my aunt's spare room was accompanied by the stuttering patter of two pares of bare feet, belonging to my cousins - girls half a decade older than myself - but the rest of the house was silent. My own parents, light sleepers who were so paranoid that even a cough would have woken them, would have been there in an instant to see what trouble I was causing. But Sola and Amalia had it differently, a father half deaf and a mother who stopped caring as soon as the twins were old enough to be Reaped. So even though I tried to thump my small, dark feet against the floorboards, and even though I bit down with fragile teeth on the fingers that were held in place, I knew that no one was coming to save me.
I wasn't scared by many things, but since that night fire has never failed to put me on edge. I prefer the dark; no candles, no lit hearths. "Your hair's so messy, Nertie," they taunted, "so long and knotted, wouldn't you prefer it short?" I could feel as they tugged at the two long, black plaits that came almost to my naval, untying the ends and clawing through with their fingers to separate the springy strands. My eyes stung with tears, I knew what was coming. No, please, don't, please, I wanted to beg. I was used to begging. All the times they'd tortured me before, spilling ink on my sketchbooks, tearing my clothes, hiding my belongings, it all built up to this. And how could it possibly get worse afterwards?
The stove flared to life with a roar and the gas was almost as pungent as my own fear-fuelled sweat. "We're doing you a favour, honest," one giggled - though I couldn't see which - and the other replied, "you'll thank us for this later."
When hair burns, you don't feel it. You're just aware of the tickling as the strands contort and crumble, and the warmth on the nape of your neck. It's the smell that you notice - that putrid dampness, asphalt-sour. I thrashed and bucked with my legs and hips, scared to fan the flames but more afraid to sit and endure them as they were. My scalp stung where all the hair had blazed away, leaving behind scabbed, paler patches of skin. Smoke curled around my face, barely there- the ghost of my treasured locks dispersing and disappearing. They doused me with water and stumbled back to bed, but now I was too deep in shock to scream.
When my aunt and uncle found me in the morning, I was still too dumbstruck to explain myself, and so I let their pity and concern wash over me, stinging like seawater on my tender scalp. My parents returned from the Capitol parade, which they had attended every year since before my birth and which always brought the dreaded stay with my cousins with it, and their unfounded apologies made up for the lack of regret from the twins.
For a time, I was anxious at every noise, retreating into my room and avoiding contact as much as I could. However, this soon developed - as I was just beginning to - into something much more destructive, and much more vengeful.
Soon, it will be my four month milestone as a student at The Beaucroix Reformatory for Wayward Young Ladies, a title which only seems to ring true to the parents and guardians who send us here. From my point of view, the girls here may have done something which warranted their entry - but never warranted the time they've spent imprisoned here as a sentence. On the day I arrived and was first introduced to my fellow inmates I realised that my 'crime' only seemed extraordinary to those on the outside. The other girls just rolled their eyes, threw me a casual "tell me about it" and went on to explain their own unfortunate betrayals - so similar to my own although so very different.
I had never had an interest in the supernatural – I had enough real mundane fears to ever bother worrying about ethereal threats – but it was perhaps my parents’ own superstitions and anxieties which compelled me to do more research into ‘witchcraft’. I read volumes of personal accounts of experiences with the paranormal, traced old runes into my sketchbooks to protect against illness or bad luck, learnt to read and write backwards. At first it was almost a game, but over time I felt the effects that dedicating myself to this passion were having. With something to occupy my mind, something to always go back to, I began to worry less. I felt like I had a secret, and so I became more confident around other people. I was more balanced, and more sure of myself, too. On the night after my fifteenth birthday, when I decided to string a ring through my nose with a needle and thread, I finally felt as if I had completely transformed from the girl my cousins tortured so brutally just three years before.
From there, my hobby developed further, and soon I was staying up late with the curtains drawn, reading tarot on my bedroom floor or swinging a pendulum to answer some trivial question. I was easily frustrated when it didn’t work, no longer remembering that when I started I was so convinced that this was all pretend. On the other side of the crest of social interaction this interest had caused, I became more introverted, less trusting of those around me. My parents would catch me sometimes, talking to myself or scratching protective spells into the doorframes of the house. My paranoia had returned, and to me it seemed that everything was out to get me, and I needed to do everything I could to keep myself, and my family, safe.
For my parents, this irrational, unstoppable fear was the tipping point. Whether they were afraid of my insanity or they just couldn't handle it any longer I'll never know, but when two representatives of Beaucroix came with their smiles and open hands the following morning, I knew deep in my gut that I might never see my parents again. I don't miss them now. I dream of them, imagine their ashen faces regarding me through all the stages of my life, sometimes with apprehension, sometimes disappointment, but always in my dreamscape contorted by hatred.
They call it a Reformatory, but no one here has ever heard of anyone being fixed and returning to normal life again. We're the top shelf toys, cast aside, broken through use or through neglect. All we have here is each other.
It all happened so fast, I didn't have time to cry for rescue - let alone try to defend myself. One moment, I was asleep in bed, sketchbook still open on my lap and pencil poised as it had been when I dropped off the edge of consciousness. The next, one warm, dry hand was against my mouth, pressing my small, thick lips tightly shut. Then an arm wrapped around my long throat to stop me screaming, and I was dragged flailing from my bed in strangled silence.
The sigh of my nightdress on the wooden floor of my aunt's spare room was accompanied by the stuttering patter of two pares of bare feet, belonging to my cousins - girls half a decade older than myself - but the rest of the house was silent. My own parents, light sleepers who were so paranoid that even a cough would have woken them, would have been there in an instant to see what trouble I was causing. But Sola and Amalia had it differently, a father half deaf and a mother who stopped caring as soon as the twins were old enough to be Reaped. So even though I tried to thump my small, dark feet against the floorboards, and even though I bit down with fragile teeth on the fingers that were held in place, I knew that no one was coming to save me.
I wasn't scared by many things, but since that night fire has never failed to put me on edge. I prefer the dark; no candles, no lit hearths. "Your hair's so messy, Nertie," they taunted, "so long and knotted, wouldn't you prefer it short?" I could feel as they tugged at the two long, black plaits that came almost to my naval, untying the ends and clawing through with their fingers to separate the springy strands. My eyes stung with tears, I knew what was coming. No, please, don't, please, I wanted to beg. I was used to begging. All the times they'd tortured me before, spilling ink on my sketchbooks, tearing my clothes, hiding my belongings, it all built up to this. And how could it possibly get worse afterwards?
The stove flared to life with a roar and the gas was almost as pungent as my own fear-fuelled sweat. "We're doing you a favour, honest," one giggled - though I couldn't see which - and the other replied, "you'll thank us for this later."
When hair burns, you don't feel it. You're just aware of the tickling as the strands contort and crumble, and the warmth on the nape of your neck. It's the smell that you notice - that putrid dampness, asphalt-sour. I thrashed and bucked with my legs and hips, scared to fan the flames but more afraid to sit and endure them as they were. My scalp stung where all the hair had blazed away, leaving behind scabbed, paler patches of skin. Smoke curled around my face, barely there- the ghost of my treasured locks dispersing and disappearing. They doused me with water and stumbled back to bed, but now I was too deep in shock to scream.
When my aunt and uncle found me in the morning, I was still too dumbstruck to explain myself, and so I let their pity and concern wash over me, stinging like seawater on my tender scalp. My parents returned from the Capitol parade, which they had attended every year since before my birth and which always brought the dreaded stay with my cousins with it, and their unfounded apologies made up for the lack of regret from the twins.
For a time, I was anxious at every noise, retreating into my room and avoiding contact as much as I could. However, this soon developed - as I was just beginning to - into something much more destructive, and much more vengeful.
-
When my hair was at last long enough to remove the bandanas I opted for over any form of wig, it not only brought back my confidence and removed some of the constant paranoia that plagued me, but made me somewhat more wicked, too. Running my hand across the tufts and stubble, I would spend hour looking at myself in the mirror - the absence of the veil I used to draw close to my temples changed my face considerably.
My eyes, slanting downwards at the outer edges and giving me a look of perpetual lethargy, now seemed rounder, darker and larger against my brown, shadowy skin. The slopes of my face had become more defined - I looked sharper and gaunter. As a soon-to-be fourteen year old, this metamorphosis from doe-like innocence to maturing ferocity sparked within me an urgency to prove I could live up to my new appearance.
My eyes, slanting downwards at the outer edges and giving me a look of perpetual lethargy, now seemed rounder, darker and larger against my brown, shadowy skin. The slopes of my face had become more defined - I looked sharper and gaunter. As a soon-to-be fourteen year old, this metamorphosis from doe-like innocence to maturing ferocity sparked within me an urgency to prove I could live up to my new appearance.
-
Soon, it will be my four month milestone as a student at The Beaucroix Reformatory for Wayward Young Ladies, a title which only seems to ring true to the parents and guardians who send us here. From my point of view, the girls here may have done something which warranted their entry - but never warranted the time they've spent imprisoned here as a sentence. On the day I arrived and was first introduced to my fellow inmates I realised that my 'crime' only seemed extraordinary to those on the outside. The other girls just rolled their eyes, threw me a casual "tell me about it" and went on to explain their own unfortunate betrayals - so similar to my own although so very different.
I had never had an interest in the supernatural – I had enough real mundane fears to ever bother worrying about ethereal threats – but it was perhaps my parents’ own superstitions and anxieties which compelled me to do more research into ‘witchcraft’. I read volumes of personal accounts of experiences with the paranormal, traced old runes into my sketchbooks to protect against illness or bad luck, learnt to read and write backwards. At first it was almost a game, but over time I felt the effects that dedicating myself to this passion were having. With something to occupy my mind, something to always go back to, I began to worry less. I felt like I had a secret, and so I became more confident around other people. I was more balanced, and more sure of myself, too. On the night after my fifteenth birthday, when I decided to string a ring through my nose with a needle and thread, I finally felt as if I had completely transformed from the girl my cousins tortured so brutally just three years before.
From there, my hobby developed further, and soon I was staying up late with the curtains drawn, reading tarot on my bedroom floor or swinging a pendulum to answer some trivial question. I was easily frustrated when it didn’t work, no longer remembering that when I started I was so convinced that this was all pretend. On the other side of the crest of social interaction this interest had caused, I became more introverted, less trusting of those around me. My parents would catch me sometimes, talking to myself or scratching protective spells into the doorframes of the house. My paranoia had returned, and to me it seemed that everything was out to get me, and I needed to do everything I could to keep myself, and my family, safe.
For my parents, this irrational, unstoppable fear was the tipping point. Whether they were afraid of my insanity or they just couldn't handle it any longer I'll never know, but when two representatives of Beaucroix came with their smiles and open hands the following morning, I knew deep in my gut that I might never see my parents again. I don't miss them now. I dream of them, imagine their ashen faces regarding me through all the stages of my life, sometimes with apprehension, sometimes disappointment, but always in my dreamscape contorted by hatred.
They call it a Reformatory, but no one here has ever heard of anyone being fixed and returning to normal life again. We're the top shelf toys, cast aside, broken through use or through neglect. All we have here is each other.
inertia rae - sixteen - district one - odair
