T I M B E R [ClairexHenry]

I didn't talk to him. Or look at him. I just stayed on my side of the train compartment curled into the nook of a sofa, chewing off the skin growing around my nails. I had both hands in my mouth, afraid letting them lay idle they might conspire to tear off my scalp or claw out the eyes of my district partner. 

I fucking hated him. I hadn't yet looked at his face for fear that my baby's breath-thin gossamer string of sanity might snap all together and I'd attack him with tooth and claw and all I had a mere... what? Week? Two weeks left tops to own? Before the Games take my life and confiscate my right to control whether I can breathe or burn?

I hadn't heard his name, either. The Peacekeepers had a struggle getting me unto the stage. Not because a five foot-two, one hundred-pound fourteen year old girl was a particularly difficult fight, but because my body was physically denying it. The Games, my death, the years of growing older and learning and knowing and finding that I was abruptly told will never happen.  I collapsed all together in their hands, a pitiful sack of flesh filled with bones and not much else they had to force up the stairs. And when they announced his name, I drowned out every last syllable with my own wails, hoping that maybe, if I could cry loud enough, for long enough, I could drown the whole world. I knew the moment my name was said, I was the only one who would ever sob over my own grave. And it just wasn't fair. I wanted so desperately to drown the world, have us all die in a breathless cathedral where there was no future to be had. If I couldn't have a future, I wanted to murder everyone else's.

And it crossed my mind for half a second. That perhaps I didn't hate him; the boy just as helpless as me in this cattle cart on a one-way trip to the slaughterhouse.  That maybe I was angry at this whole situation, the inevitability of me dying no matter what I said or did or where I ran or who I could stab. I was going to die before I could see my fifteenth summer. Maybe I was angry at the Capitol and its industrialized child extermination. Maybe I was angry at myself for thinking I was so untouchable, for never addressing for a moment in my life that one of those children on the television with a spear through the eye and a cannon shot to summarize their life's worth could so easily be me one day. Maybe I was angry at the universe for making me dream knowing fully well that none of the sickest of nightmares could compare to my reality. Maybe I was angry at th

The fact that my district partner was making a fucking arts and crafts project with the food when we were moments away from having no moments left.

I winced at every krrrrr-krrrr-krrrrrrrrpt! of the bread he was ripping apart. I turned around on the couch to face him for the first time,

"Ay! How about you stick that bread in your mouth, before I find a place on you to stick it in."

" These beautiful moments we shared together
All end now
They'll make me drink this potion
I'll sleep forever, until I wake under the
t h e  g l a c i a l  g r o u n d  "
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