Dead Trees

Chapter 1

"Maple Timbersmith!"

The district liaison's voice echoed through the District Seven square. A girl with auburn hair and freckles, who looked to be a year or so younger than me, timidly mounted the stage and stood to the right of the ridiculously dressed, middle aged woman who had drawn her name from the reaping bowl.

The liaison began walking to the other bowl that contained the name of every boy in District Seven. I figured the bowl had about fourteen copies of my name in it, one for each year since I had turned twelve, plus the nine I gained from tesserae for my brother Clay, sister Ira and myself, since Ira had become too old to be eligible for it.

She was halfway to the bowl.

Surely this wasn't the year I was reaped, the year my joke of a father had finally decided to walk out on us, the year my baby brother had started working in the forests with Ira and me. It sounded stupid, but chopping wood in the forests with the two made the mundane labor a lot more enjoyable even if peacekeepers had become more demanding about lumber quotas and we had been forced to work longer and longer shifts. This was meant to be the year where life got better, no, this could not be the year I was reaped.

The woman plunged her well-kept hands into the bowl and drew a name at the bottom of the bowl. The escort had always been the face of the games to me, the people who sent off my friends to die, but even I had to admit, she without a doubt had the nicest hands in the district. Not calloused and rough like those of someone who chops wood when they're awake and is haunted by dreams of chopping wood when they're asleep.

She folded out the slip of paper, with her unnecessarily long finger nails which clinked together as she fumbled with the paper.

"Blight Gallows!"

Of course, something had to go wrong this year but I felt like this was a harsher turn of fate than I deserved. Surely fourteen entries weren't enough to get me a one-way ticket to whatever hellscape the game makers cooked up this year. I had only been claiming tesserae for three years, some people had been doing it since they had become eligible and for bigger families than I was claiming it for. I stood there in the crowd as those around me stepped back,

"Blight Gallows," the liaison repeated with a hint of impatience.

Was this some sort of hallucination, had I been bitten by a snake while working in the forest and was I suffering from shock. After all snake bites were common in Seven and I seemed to have a habit of stepping on them or not noticing them, so much so that some of the foresters had begun calling me 'bite'. It became clear that I was in fact snake bite free when two peacekeepers pushed their way through the crowd and grabbed me to lead me to the stage. I walked slower than usual as I tried to wrap my head around what this meant, which caused my feet to drag a little bit. I ascended the steps onto the platform and stood on the other side of the escort.

"Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce your District Seven tributes for the fifty-seventh Hunger Games."

Maple and I were moved to separate rooms in the Justice Building where I would have one last chance to say good bye to my family.

Ira and Clay came in and without a word hugged me, it felt like we were there for twenty minutes and even after we stopped hugging it took some time for someone to say anything.

"Don't worry about us," Ira said trying to ease my mind, "we should have enough to keep one of us fed, then Clay only needs to claim one tesserae."

I loved my sister; since our mother had died and father had left us, she had been the head of the household and watched over me and Clay, but she did not have a gift for easing one's mind. This only reminded me that even after my Hunger Games had finished and twenty-three kids had died, Clay would have to survive five more reapings.

"It could be worse, you're strong from all the wood cutting and you know how to use an axe."

Now I really wished she would stop talking, the next days would be reserved for talking about the games, right now I wanted to think about more pleasant things with the short time I had left in my home district. I didn't want our last interaction to be me telling her to shut up, so I just pulled her and Clay close and we waited until our hour to say good bye was up.

"I almost forgot," Clay said as I was leaving the room, it was the first time he had spoken in the hour. "I was making this for Ira but...well...I can make another." He handed me a wooden carving in the shape of a tree that wouldn't be bigger than a pebble, looped through a thin piece of string, "So you don't forget us in the arena."

A peacekeeper came in and lead me out into the hallway where Maple was waiting and together, we began our march to the train station for our journey to the capitol.