Tutor Writing Challenge! [May]

miriam rosenthal^[1]
Year 4 DD

This would be the last image Miriam would have to remember her husband by: face nearly covered with black bruises, one knee twisting out of its socket, his moans of pain drowned out by cheers as the ragtag group of rebel teens dragged him up the stairs of the wooden platform erected in the town square.

And when (if, she tried not to think, just as she tried not to vomit her breakfast-rations all over the shoes of the girl guarding her) they finished, and loosened her from the red scrap of handkerchief tied too-tight around her wrists and the metal pole scorching against her back in the hot August sun, and she went home and explained to a seven- and four-year-old why Daddy wasn't coming back ever - it'd fade, and then his face would be forever gone.

Sure, she could list off its features - messy dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, a slender jawline, a nose that the newspaper cartoonists loved exaggerating when they wanted to portray him as greedy or heartless - but that sort of thing had always been rather ... flat. Missing all the emotion of seeing an actual picture.

(I will be sure to take lots of photographs of us, then," he'd said to her once a couple years before they'd married, after a long and confusing conversation about mental images. "So you can always recall the feelings.")

But the rebels had burnt all those albums to ashes, too, the afternoon when the mob that took down the factory barged into their home, ripping paintings from the walls, toppling bookshelves, the manuscripts Hershel had painstakingly collected and preserved flying apart into so many loose sheets of paper to be ground under their boots.

📚

"I knew it!" one of the teens crowed triumphantly, slinging Architectural History of the Early Panem Nationalist Era across the room at his friend. "Take a look at this sympathizer boug shit -"

The other boy snatched it out of the air and whistled. "Shouldn't surprise me that the egghead one'd be hoarding filth like this." With another toss, the book flew out the door and into the growing pile next to the two keeping watch on the front porch. "Burn all of it."

"No! Please!" Miriam found herself rushing forward at the first teen, who was continuing to yank books off the shelf. A hardback classic literature anthology, with its gilt edges and embossed leather covers intended as a reproduction of mid-21st-century Revivalist style. A volume on art culture at the height of globalism. "Please don't - please give them back!"

That volume had been her engagement gift to her then-fiancé. The first warm afternoon the spring of junior year, as other students played frisbee and frolicked in the university park, they'd snuggled beneath the big maple tree and dreamt together about a place of their own - where Miriam would nurture their children with far more gentleness than her two incessantly workaholic parents, and Hershel would teach them how to be curious, and in the evenings after he came come from work they'd curl up against each other in quiet companionship as she engaged in her embroidery, or him in his endless passion for history -

- a passion that was just about the exact antithesis of what the rebel movement inside Six had grown to become. Old ideas and customs, they'd decry, cultivated by the ivory-tower elite to poison the minds of the people and rationalize exploitation. Old culture that needed to be destroyed.

It hadn't started like this, four years ago when the war first broke out. And the Capitol had just as little interest in keeping around what didn't fit their narrative. But as the fighting dragged on - well, polarization had a way of distorting and exaggerating impressions; reserved became reclusive and cold, uninvolved became aloof, cautious became conservative became reactionary, and all that'd made Miriam fall in love with her husband became, in the rebels' eyes, his condemnation.

In one fluid motion, the boy dropped the book and pinned Miriam painfully hard against the bookshelf, looming nearly a foot over her as one pale, calloused hand encircled her shoulder and the other pressed his gun against her head. "OooOoOh," the second boy mocked. "Is the rich lady afraid of losing her precious stuff?"

"You sure we shouldn't lock this one up too?" he shoots back, not taking his eyes off Miriam. "Just 'cause she isn't listed as owning the water softener factory doesn't mean she's not just as much pro-capitol scum as -"

"My husband isn't a -"

"Shut it!" The barrel presses harder. "You don't get a say anymore. It's our turn to be on top."

"Yeah! Ours! They ain't so mighty when the tables turn -"

"Oi! You two!" A third voice, husky but feminine, emerged from the kids' bedroom and came to a standstill in the middle of the ransacked room. "Finish your work, and quit torturing the poor housewife. It's not like she has any say in what her husband does."

"I -" Miriam began, but the boy let her go, and the words died in her mouth as she slumped to the floor.

"Men," the girl scoffs, approaching Miriam as the boys headed for the remaining rooms. "I'm sorry." She towered over her too, six feet of muscle and tanned skin and combat denim to Miriam's petite, sundress-clad frame. "I promise you. After we win, you will never again be under a man's thumb. You will have a place of your own in the new world, liberated from the shackles of domestic life, free from the ugly compromises to capitalism often obligated by womanhood!"

"Huh?" All Miriam could do was blink, staring down at the whorls on the hardwood floor; her fleeting glance at the girl's eyes seemed to show no warmth, only pity.

The girl shook her head. "Someday, I hope you understand."

📚

At least her kids didn't have to watch.

She'd have a few years yet before she needed to worry about Harrison or Benedict being coerced by their classmates - like her older brother's children had been - into joining the youth tasked with helping root out Capitol supporters amongst their neighbors and teachers; too young to understand the full extent of the war but just the right age for peer pressure and high school popularity-politics to splay themselves across the landscape of the rest of the district.

From what Miriam knew, they'd nabbed a good deal of useful information for the rebels fighting at the front, and stopped a shipment of weapon parts from making it to the Capitol. They'd also tortured her old physics teacher until he "confessed" to writing worksheets that propagated counterrevolutionary views, and ruined a man who's face bore passing resemblance in a frenzied fervor to identify a blurry photo of a back alley chlorine trafficker.

Her old bullies, Miriam thought, would've thrived amongst them.

"This man standing here!" A tall teenage girl announced, dragging Hershel up by the collar to the cheers of the crowd gathered below. "Capitol sympathizer, wealthy scum, bane to his workers, has spread his corrupting influence for too long across our district!"

Lies, Miriam seethed. All of it lies. Hershel didn't have a political bone in his body - and hell, the co-owner of their factory, the people-manager to Hershel's project-manager, was standing right there amidst the cheering throng, already ingratiating himself with the rebel group.

"We must put an end to these men! They will have no place in the new world we shall create! Right?"

Wild shouts of "Yeah!" and "Tear down District Six!" and "Take out the trash!" erupted all around them. They were too eager, she thought, to revel in so much carnage that it stained the wooden boards of the town square red. Too eager to continue looking for targets each time they rid themselves of another wave of perceived enemies. Would they know to build again, after the fighting was over? Or would they never recognize when to stop?

"Right?" another girl hissed into Miriam's ear, slamming the barrel of a rifle into her back and shoving her into a more upright position. Then, louder and aimed at the crowd as she kept her gaze on her,

"Will you stand with us, and denounce your former master?"

No, Miriam wants to spit. Your path is leading to nothing but destruction. But she was tied to a pole, with a gun at her back and two boys to pick up from school later that day, and a growing suspicion about why she hadn't had a period in three or four months -

It was simple triage, she told herself. Her husband was beyond saving. Her children still needed her.

She swallowed and nodded.

The girl jabbed her with the rifle again. "Can't hear you."

"Yes."

"Say it louder."

"Yes!"

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, I -" she choked back a hiccup and lined up the rhetoric she'd heard so often sung in the streets. "I stand in solidarity with those who aim to bring District Six towards a new dawn."

"And would you agree that such men," the girl gestured at Hershel, "who stand in the way of progress and revolution, deserve only death?" The rifle pressed extra hard against Miriam's back on the word 'death'.

Miriam straightened, set her shoulders back, and took a breath. "Yes."

The girl nodded in approval. Miriam looked at her husband - her best friend - one last time as five rebels stepped forward and racked their pistols in unison. With his arms tied, a gag shoved in his mouth, and pain obfuscating every bit of body language they hadn't removed from the equation, it was impossible for Miriam to tell what he was feeling in those last moments.

Betrayal? Forgiveness? Understanding? Or just resignation?

Miriam closed her eyes.

A volley of gunshots sounded.

Footnotes:
1. family tree