(WIP) ginny islay | district 2

Perfection is not a free gift, nor is it a reward you can earn for being good, or kind, or just. It is exactly the opposite; it’s a knowing deal. You choose your ultimate price, and you’re given your flash in the pan, with the knowledge that one day, the bill will come due—and that’s the day you finally pay.

Go get me some water.

Did you hear me, Ginny?

I…I, alright, I will.

The price my mother paid was her humanity. She could not bear for her twelve year old daughter to witness her on her deathbed, when the hands of time had finally wound themselves around her throat; when her immaculate hair became frayed and matted, and her skin—which had a melting quality that women paid fruitless dollars to achieve—went dull; she could not bear to be seen as something less than a goddess, a star, a Juno or Venus or whoever you so choose, as a human. So as she lay there, dying, she sent me away.

Those were the last words I ever said to her.

I can still remember the way she looked. I did not see fear, nor acceptance, nor dignity in her eyes; I saw such a stillness, in my naïve state, I could almost convince myself that this was not the inevitable. This was not her way of taking her mortal fate alone. This was just a mother asking her daughter for a glass of water.

I rose from my seat beside her bed, and the next few minutes were the longest of my life.

I took my time walking to the kitchen, filling the glass under the tap. If I went slowly, I could delay it. I could have my mother for another few moments. I could pretend that everything was going to be alright—that I would walk into the room, and she would thank me for the drink, and we would fall back into this same old routine we had the sicker and sicker she got. I stretched out those last few normal moments of my life into an eternity.

She did not answer when I knocked on the door. When I pushed it open, her eyes no longer looked still; they looked glassy and blank. She was dead.

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You might think that after all that happened to her, I would never choose the same fate for myself. In that case, you have never lived in District Two.

If you really think I would not pay my ultimate price—and we’ll get to that, just listen for a moment—to be looked at the way my mother was, then you never saw her walk down the street. You never saw the revered gazes that followed in her wake, whispering in jealousy and awe, staring up at her telescopic glory with squinted eyes.

She was not human. She was some ethereal being that belonged not here nor there, who sat present when the world was born and would sit there as it died. She was the embodiment of light, no, the creator of it, reaching down a ray for my six-year-old hand to grasp as we strolled. She didn’t have me because she wanted children; she had me because it’s not right for someone with that kind of God-given power to never pass it on. It is too selfish.

My mother was never selfish. Like Prometheus, she stole the most precious belongings of the Gods and bestowed them onto mankind. She taught us how to have eloquence, composure, a face that never broke—whether it was turned to brutal murder or her daughter’s newborn face. She was something more than God, more than any of us could ever be.

I’m glad I never saw her die. I think my glass world may have shattered if I did.

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The moment my mother was gone, the eyes of the district shifted to me. With her last exhale, she had placed the entire world upon my cast-iron shoulders; I wore it with grace.

I didn’t know what my price would be when I took the deal. I’m not sure anyone does. I simply, naïvely offered it up, saying: Alright. Give me what you gave to her, and take what you must in return. I would become the epitome of who my mother had been. And it seemed the universe had shaken my hand in a deal; now I was the one attracting enraptured eyes on the street, leading a string of jealous whispers from those too cowardly to make their own.

I wouldn’t trust that Ginny Islay.

Why not?

She’s not like the rest of us. She plays her own game.

It is an incredible feeling, to lead. Isolated in the center of it all. Untouchable, always seen.

I was stupid enough to believe no one else would have my courage. Maybe it’s not courage—maybe, it was just more blind stupidity. The rest of the world was too smart to meddle in the affairs of the universe. There was only one boy brave enough to take the plunge—to leap off the edge of the cliff, and sacrifice whatever it took to fly.

I never found out what price he paid. I don’t think I ever will.

I won’t tell you his name, because if I do, you’ll get him tethered to this world, and then you won’t be able to see what I saw. Like my mother, he was born not of the God we sang about in our hymns in church, because that God created man, and he was more than just a man.

He had hair the color of corn silk and eyes the color of the sky. The new sky, born in the wake of dawn, fresh and full of life and infinite possibilities. He didn’t seem to carry the world, not like I did—he was free, he jumped off the edge and grew a pair of wings, and I had never wanted anything so badly as my own from the moment I met him.

I knew him for three months. In those three months, we would cross the threshold from strangers to forever entwined. We would fall in love, and he would teach me how to be free, and I would teach him how to be beautiful; a passionate, dripping, aching, blood-stained beauty, but a beauty worth just as much as that newborn sky. I cannot tell you how many seconds I spent in the safety of his arms, the moon keeping watch above, because these are more seconds I stretched into my own infinity; you could count every star that glittered above us, and you would not have enough to count all the days we spent. I span three different universes; the one of my mother, the one of the world, and the one I only share with him.

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I was seventeen when I gave birth to our daughter, and the day she was born was the day I paid my price.

He had disappeared when he realized. He rose up into the sky, but this time, he was mist, no hand outstretched to bring me along. I told myself he would come back; I told myself, this baby winds us together, you can’t just leave, you wouldn’t, you won’t. Do you know what price is worse than death? A life where your heart has been ripped out of your chest; it’s been carried into the sun, and it’s no longer yours to own.

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Eliana helps to mend the gap. She was not the price; she was the universe’s consolation, like my mother’s solitary last moments. She is soft and quiet and smells like heather, and the fact that half of his blood beats through her little heart is sometimes enough to kill the ache. I can hold her, and I am rising again, up to the clouds wherever he is drifting. Like twine, she ties us together. So long as I have her, I can regain a piece of my heart, a stray beat here and there, a drop of blood. Nothing like it was before. Enough to keep me alive now afterwards.

I made another deal the day she was born, but this one was with myself. Maybe the universe, too.

Promise you’ll never let her pay the price that I have, and take what you must from me in return.