Wyetta Waters🌊 D12

There are things you grow used to, one’s others can’t imagine. You grow with strong calves here, since we’ve always lived on the hillside. Because it isn’t safe to go down below. It can be scary during rainfall or snow, but there is beauty around us, so I don’t mind. Beauty is nature that returns over the rubble concrete in spring. It is too far below to venture towards, not that we’re allowed. We’re old enough now, but papa and mama say there could be radiation still even though it’s been decades since. Beauty is the large elk that passes, the foxes that leave treks behind, and the woodpeckers and owls that create melodies of fall and winter, with cicadas erupting during summer. My favorite thing was to wander towards the south, towards the river bed and past the stream.

If you look up, you can glimpse our log cabins over the horizon. But past it lies my favorite place. Here the land is flat, allowing for our vegetation to grow. Flowers run abundant, rabbits try to steal our vegetables, and deer at times too. If you stay still enough, they come forth and will eat out of your hand. Sometimes it makes for a great distraction if you need a kill, although I always feel guilty and would rather let one of the other sisters take care of it. I never was the best at skinning. I’m good at small things, like crushing herbs for mama’s roast, looting the old when allowed, and creating something from nothing. My prized possessions were my matching bow to papa’s in fact and making balm that all my sisters steal. But I was there that August day. The day our earth wasn’t so peaceful.

I wasn’t born when Panem attacked, turning its back on us, but I could imagine it was similar in fright. Did the kids who played in the forest notice the fire erupt? Did they focus on the land that burst forth, or did their thoughts wane towards who was at their side and the ones less fortunate? Mama said then she could only think that, that day was their doomsday. That the fire would destroy all the beauty around, and they’d all become ash like their loved ones who were buried under concrete and rubble. Here in this forest the fortunate rebuilt, mama met papa after the refugees got together, and from there, their cabins were forged. What once was a handful had swelled into a decent size, but that day it all vanished.

That day Panem reclaimed their bastard child, it’s wrath having laid dormant from under the earth. It waited, waited, and fed off our hope. It fed off the memories of mama sitting me out back on the stump, using the sunlight to braid my long coiled black hair. It consumed the rocks by the bank where mama and papa fell in love, and the rocks they taught us how to fish. The trees that papa kept track of our height collapsed onto our homes, washing away our existence.

Now I stood in mama’s shoes that day. But my thoughts didn’t wander towards fire, it didn’t wander to if my dad had been hunting in the woods. As the carrot leaves slipped out from my palm with the earth rushing forth, all I could wonder is if my sisters were helping mama prepare the roast. Because I didn’t want to be left without any of them; I couldn’t only be left with the burn mark behind my umber forearm. They existed, no matter what Panem told the others. We existed, and us Waters will always survive. Water always finds a way to survive, and we wouldn’t be an exception.