knox de sol . 1m [fin]

pogue Graphics 1,811 POSTS Pronouns: He/Him last seen Apr 16, 2024 18:41:45 GMT -5 Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?	knox de sol . 1m [fin] Sept 7, 2020 18:10:05 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by pogue on Sept 7, 2020 18:10:05 GMT -5 Knox . Eighteen . One ... Credit to Christian Blanco on YouTube for the last name. Please check out his “Tales of the Hunger Games stories, they are fantastic!
	Last Edit: Oct 1, 2020 14:28:37 GMT -5 by pogue

pogue
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1,811 POSTS

Pronouns: He/Him
last seen Apr 16, 2024 18:41:45 GMT -5

Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?

knox de sol . 1m [fin] Sept 8, 2020 23:27:19 GMT -5

Quote

Post by pogue on Sept 8, 2020 23:27:19 GMT -5

K N O X D E S O L

Your father taught you that war was a beast with priceless scales and rows upon rows of sharpened teeth, ready to gobble you up at a moments notice.

At least, that’s what you could translate from what Benny told you he had heard, amidst murmurs of deals gone wrong and worse things to come. He’d initially been against the idea of listening in on the conversation taking place behind the locked mahogany doors of your study, ever the hesitant one between the two of you. But at eight years old you’d developed a nasty little habit of giving snake bites on the school playground, and it only took one little twist of the wrist before your cousin was pressing a glass cup to the wood and his ear the former, the imprint of your fingers still beating bright red against his forearm.

You remember asking what you could take with you from your room, melody of crickets playing a somber tune from outside a cracked open bedroom window. Your father said nothing, but when the tears had pricked on the edge of your eyes your mother had let you sneak a super hero action figure into the depths of her bag. It didn’t make it through the trip.

You cried that morning, when you watched the forests slowly swallow up the horizon of Four, ocean bleeding into the tree line underneath grey skies. Not because you’d miss it, but because you knew deep down that it wouldn’t miss you.

There were always faces attached to daunting forms, some withered and old with wrinkles counting the days they had left on their faces, some young yet just as tired behind the storms of their irises. They made their way through whatever place you called a home for that period of time, skulking through the shadows and dragging whispers of the war you’d heard so much about yet never fully learned along behind them. No matter what they looked like, they always escaped behind closed doors with your father to discuss matters of deals that were made to be cut from one end.

And your mother would lean in close, candlelight dancing across her face, and she’d tell you not to remember their faces.

So you didn’t. But you remembered the numbers of them, counting them on your fingers and then in little tallies carved into the wood of the walls when you ran out of your own digits. Life got better whenever your father spoke to someone behind closed doors, and he was like your own personal super hero. You clung to the thought of it, desperate in a youth that was already cut short.

And you learned, on your own, that war was not faces and bloodshed and loss and sacrifice like both sides loved to claim. It was just numbers to be counted, numbers to be made, a beast that could swallow you up, just not if it got to others first.

Always learning things from behind closed doors, it meant you never really learned anything at all.

You always left before you could see the wrinkles in the faces of those who met your father twist and contort with anger, deals gone sour clinging to their obscenities when they realized they’d shaken hands with the devil and let him dance out into the forests yet again.

Once the trains became too risky, you took to the forests. The trees took what was left of your youth and dug their roots into it, choking out the half-pledged breaths of childlike wonder until all you could hear from within your chest was the sound of the leaves screaming all around you. Your skin hardened like the bark you ran your fingers against in those days, carving little tallies to count the number of times a hovercraft buried you all in its shadow, the trees bending and swaying like a wave crashing against the sands of the beach. You wondered if Four had been swallowed whole by that beast of war, if the sands and the ocean were no more, and you wondered if where you were going would be next.

You buried your youth in those woods, amongst the smoldering ashes of forgotten fires and sleepless nights drowned in the echoes of crickets, and you never felt that same spark of playing uncle on the playgrounds, of your fingertips brushing against clothing and the word ”you’re it” dripping from your lips, of being a kid who wasn’t asked to understand anything yet.

When your Father assured you and your mother that it was the last night spent within the trees, that it was the last fence you would be forced to crawl through with metal snagging against your clothes, that District One was your home now, your final home, you remember feeling like it was no more than lies dripping from his lips, a thought that pressed heavy into your shoulders even as the years passed by and you grew up, heart hardened like the skin of the trees and memories of your childhood melting into one another.

And you can’t help but think, when your name hits the dead air and your heartbeat roars from within your chest, when you’re walked through the crowd by ghosts in white begging you to join them, when you watch a home that never wanted to know you slip into the distance from the train window, counting the trees like you once did years ago,

It’s lonely in the belly of the beast.

Last Edit: Sept 8, 2020 23:29:20 GMT -5 by pogue

pogue Graphics 1,811 POSTS Pronouns: He/Him last seen Apr 16, 2024 18:41:45 GMT -5 Is she trying to interrupt our henna session?	knox de sol . 1m [fin] Sept 8, 2020 23:31:02 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by pogue on Sept 8, 2020 23:31:02 GMT -5 He's done! Lets all kill him now. L△LIA

L△LIA RP Tutor 3,567 POSTS last seen Jun 24, 2019 15:25:10 GMT -5 BOOM SH△KALAKA	knox de sol . 1m [fin] Sept 9, 2020 17:53:53 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by L△LIA on Sept 9, 2020 17:53:53 GMT -5 ACCEPTED!
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