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THE SI HOUSEHOLD WAS QUIETER THAN USUAL THE MORNING OF THE REAPING, the family's somber attitude about the day tainting the atmosphere inside their glorified shack of a house. Rhiannon tilted the pot over the stove in an attempt to use the remaining heat radiating from the coals below. The noise from her scraping the bland grits from the sides of the metal cookware were the only sounds echoing around the house, her father, Orville, having already left for his shortened shift at the mines and her grandmother, universally referred to as Wai Po, meditating in their shared room.
The sun had just begun to peek over the windowsill in the kitchen, casting a ray of light over the side of Rhiannon's face. The layer of sweat across her face from the summer heat glistened in the sun, making the sixteen-year-old girl appear almost angelic. She begged to differ, standing atop rotting floorboards in worn clothes two sizes too small, awaiting her fate for the year's reaping.
A few weeks prior, President Snow announced that for the second Quarter Quell - the more glorified version of the Hunger Games that happens every twenty-five years, complete with a twist to make the Games more "exciting" - each district would offer twice the number of tributes for a total of forty-eight versus the traditional twenty-four. Now, every eligible child between the ages of twelve and eighteen had two chances to be chosen - excluding the additional entries given due to receiving tesserae to spare their family from starvation, which nearly every child in 12 has had to sign up for at least once in their short lifetimes.
Rhiannon, for example, has nine additional entries in addition to her government-issued five. The matriarch of the Si household passed away three years ago, and each year Eucommia Si's absence was increasingly felt in every crevice of the home - hence the tesserae. Orville struggled to make enough money to stay afloat even before Eucommia's untimely demise, but what he especially lacked was Eucommia's craftiness. How she'd combine flowers and herbs into their otherwise bland stew in order to give her husband and daughter the illusion of a richer meal, how she'd be able to make clothing last well past their prime with her skills as a former tailor's daughter.
The father and daughter's relationship has never been the same since the woman who held the raggedy shack of a home together took a permanent leave of absence - well, saying "took" sounds like it was by choice. It was not.
Rhiannon doesn't blame her father for her mother's death - not to the regard he does, anyway. She remembers the events leading up to the mine explosion, and her mother's funeral, like it had just occurred yesterday. It was a particularly rough winter for everyone in District 12, but particularly for those in the Seam. In the Si household, specifically, things were worse as ever. A recent injury acquired in the mines rendered Orville useless; Eucommia, notoriously stubborn when it came to her loved ones' well-beings, forced him to lay off work for a few weeks to recover; Eucommia, herself, wasn't working much since even her merchant clientele whom she washed clothes and cleaned houses for were low on funds; and Wai Po had come down with the flu, for whom the Sis had spent most of their money buying herbal concoctions from the apothecary.
