Arthur Luna - D12 - Fin

How do you sleep at night knowing that you will never be understood by the people that brought you into the world?

You don’t. You just do.

I have been a rock to this family in ways that I never thought was possible. It all started when I picked up a hammer and a saw for the first time.

There is beauty here in twelve, and with a strike in the stone, I can create it.

---

I never knew how much it meant to my father to follow in his work, and maybe it was because he never thought he would have a son to share it with. Times were never easy in twelve, with most people dropping like flies when they didn’t eat for weeks, but he found ways to get us what we needed.

When I was growing up, I didn’t act like the other boys around us. They taunted and teased me because I couldn’t do what they did. They were strong here in twelve, and while my mind might have been strong, my body was not.

They looked at me up and down like wolves, and thought about how delicious I would have looked.

They wanted to rip my body from limb to limb and show me the blood that would eventually paint the ground in vibrant reds and blues, even though there was nothing like blue blood.

It was a state of mind, if anything.

It took time for me to realize that I was like the boys that I grew up with. That while we might have been different on the outside, we weren’t so on the inside. We all cared about surviving till the next day.

We all wanted to wake up to the prettiest of sunrises.

But no matter what I said to them, I was never going to be like them.

I was told so many times that I was worthless. That my father wasn’t a man because he didn’t work in the mines. That they hoped we starved to death because that would be one less person to worry about here.

One less person breathing the air.

One less person taking the nourishment that everyone yearned for.

---

However, I learned to love myself.

There were times where I would follow my father to his job for the sheer curiosity, and instead of yelling at me, he would let me join in on whatever project he was working on.

Most of the time he worked on building porches and stairs on houses that looked like they should have been torn down ages ago. However, people held onto what was broken here, because what wasn’t salvageable to most, turned out to be livable to some.

And while I found myself wondering how people could live like this, I realized that this was the last district on the list of twelve. That there were eleven other districts that probably provided more important things that coal.

Here, anything was possible because people simply did not care.

---

Deep in the forests of twelve, my father taught me how to be a man.

With his axe in hand, he showed me the proper way to cut down a tree.

With a flick of his wrist, he made deep gashes into the trunk, and after the third thrust, we watched the tree tumble to the ground.

When we looked at the stump, we realized these trees were just as weak as the people in twelve. They were brittle, undernourished.

They were dying.

However, that was not the only thing he showed me when we were in the forest. When a squirrel crossed our path, he stopped me from taking another step and told me to stand back.

He picked up his axe behind his head and quickly chucked it at his prey, and with a small shriek, the it landed right in the squirrels back.

When he sent me to pick it up, I whispered a small pray, apologizing to the squirrel but also thanking ripred for blessing us with something to eat.

While I did not think killing anything was necessary, I knew that it was the only way we could survive here.

Death was the only answer.

---

Fast forward a couple years and we are thriving.

We are not rich people, but we do well for ourselves now.

My father said it was because I wasn’t afraid to go out and get what I want, and I always said it was because he taught me what it meant to work.

He taught me what it meant to believe in myself.

He taught me that people would talk, but as long as I did want I wanted to do, then who cared what they thought.

I watched the boys I grew up with go into the mines while I worked above ground, fixing porches and creating things that I never thought could come from my own two hands.

My father gave me a chisel for my seventeenth birthday, telling me that there was another surprise waiting for me a little later.

I slipped that chisel in my pocket and didn’t think about it until my father brought me into a workshop that I had no clue existed.

When I walked in, I found rock sculptures that I never thought I would see in my life. Some of me and my sister when we were growing up. Some of my mother from when she was younger, and some of animals around the district that my father just happened to remember from his trips out into the forest.

He told me that this is what kept us afloat all of these years. He would find ways to sell these to the richer people of the districts, and while he was a carpenter of sorts, he moonlighted as a sculptor.

He was finally ready to teach me his ways. His passion. His love.

And I looked at him and wondered what he really had to do in order to keep this from us for years.

---

And now I stood near a river, chisel in hand and a stone half the size of me.

I carried a log with me so I wouldn’t grow tired on my feet.

I held up the chisel high and started to strike it with the hammer my father told me to keep close to me.

And remember.

There is beauty here in twelve, and with a strike in the stone, I can create it.