The anchor of love||| Johanna Mason

The remembered reaping

The day of the reaping is the same every year: sorrowful. Mournful. Predictable; at least it was in 10. Nobody volunteered, nobody cheered; it happened on the same day every year at the same time every year. It was dreadfully predictable. 2 children would be selected, reaped, to die. 2 children from their district be taken, and the district would hope and pray that they would make it back. They never did, and the community would mourn and then move on. Ready for the year after when the process would begin again. The hope made and killed, the mourning process of grieving mothers' sisters and aunts would start again. People lose their friends and potential lovers. Again. This year was no different.

It casts a shadow over the districts, all of them she knows, and horrid anticipation. Making us wait for the names drawn in the long process that spans a day to see if our lives are to be taken from us. When we are to be fighting to the death.

Tuesday was a reaping day. A normal day any other week, a simple work day, one where food and money could be earned to eat and celebrate. What should have been a normal day of work and earning, getting just enough food to live for a day, was taken away. Leaving many, much like myself, hungry at that moment. Another way the capital is unaware of our troubles.

The 69th reaping day to be precise. My 5th, I am 17 years old.

This is the 69th year that 23 people, children, are forced to their deaths for the price of our ancestors. People we never met, all due to the treaty of bloody treason.

This is a treaty made to keep the peace after the dark days. There is too much bloodshed for peace to occur. No, the treaty was made to cause fear of a future uprising, just as the games were, removing hope from us all.

The Treaty of Treason gave us two things - new laws to ensure that the Dark Days never happen again, and the Hunger Games, where each district, once a year, was required to offer up in tribute one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen, to fight to the death in a huge arena until only one survivor remained. This was the ultimate display of power and authority by the Capitol over the districts.

District Ten can claim a whole total of 3 victors in 69 years, two of whom are dead. One from alcohol poisoning and the other from suicide. I was and am not under any illusions about the life of a victor. Our remaining victor, a 30-year-old man named James Richardson, is the town crazy. Unsurprisingly, we've had no winners in recent years, not with him as a mentor. He is about as useless as Haymitch Abernathy, although significantly less drunk. The pair are close, as good as brothers. Everyone knows that, especially in 10. The lone 12 victor is often seen visiting, drunkenly falling off the train to the station. Clearly, not minding the gap between the train and the platform edge. It was, I suppose, due to how they won games close together and shared trauma in similar ways. The victor of the 50th and 54th close in age and love. Shared experiences together, lost together, trying to cope together. Both become examples of how victors who rebel face the wrath of the capital. Everyone in 10 knows about this; James is often seen shouting his ramblings of hate for the district, swearing not to provide another child to his fate. His own rebellion is not known in actuality, but in theory, everyone knows in District 10 what he did. He chose to ignore the life he was given after the games, never allowing a tribute to become a victor of his own free will, ignoring his duties as a victor. James never prepared for the games, I knew, he let them catch up with him each year, just ready for his annual mental breakdown. The public one. Notably, last year, he got pots and pans and hit them on everyone's door, waking them up for the reaping in an uncommon way.

It fuels my hate for him more. His refusal to even allow hope for a surviving tribute from 10. His allowance for us all to die. His disinterest in who dies every year. The rudeness in the face of scared children the way he once was hurts. Deep.

Our sole surviving victor was currently absent from the reaping. His chair sat without him. We were crowded into our designated area like pigs in a pen, and his chair was empty. Just another way that the rules don't apply to him, I suppose; he feels better than us. He was probably off shouting to himself in the meadows again, as he often does. It's a well-known secret of our district, our crazy victor. So, I suppose it's better; a sick part of me knows that it's rude and unfair that I enjoyed his pain, yet I could not help it. For the pain he has caused our district every year since he won, I hoped his craziness brought him terror. I felt he deserved it in a sick little way. For killing innocent people, not seeing the real cause of that murder. The capital. Snow.

And yet the unremarkable ceremony continued, nothing to report of any significance. Even without the only mentor present, nothing happened; nobody regarded the absence, not one person even seemed phased by it. Nothing happened at all until my bloody name was called, loud and clear.

"Kane Casia." The loud booming of the microphone made it sound foreign to my own ears as disbelief flooded my system. My name was in there a few times, but not nearly as many as my peers. By the time I had awakened myself to my senses, I knew it was too late to project the desired persona; it seemed I was stuck as the weak girl this year. The shocked, crying girl seemed small and unremarkable in every way. I climbed the steps to the stage, shaking and trying my best not to cry any more than the tears that stung in my eyes. The Noise disappeared as I stared ahead, not even blinking, just staring at nothing. I had no clue, at the time, who my district partner was, just a vague memory of shaking an equally shaking and clammy hand as my own. We both knew we were going to die in a week's time. And were both scared.

The time after, a blur of the colour of the cluttered and well-decorated train, my mentor clinging onto the furniture, trying not to be sick, Motion sickness, he called it. I didn't care. In actuality, I hoped he had been sick at the time; I had little interest in much aside from the looming fact that my death was around the corner; it was an ever-consuming thought that refused to leave my brain. I didn't eat until the district escort forced me. A peach-coloured lady, tall and stick thin, almost sickly, all it did was rush the thoughts of being prepared for the capital into my head.

With the difference in beauty standards, I would undoubtedly lose my protective layer against my worst enemy. Boys. Keeping facial hair. Judging the disgusted looks thrown my way on a day-to-day basis, it worked. I repulsed the very people with whom I was supposed to show interest. I never did. Yet I knew then, looking at the escort who understood so little remarking on my manners and skin, that I would lose yet another part of myself; the dark unibrow I had, along with the stash growing proudly on my upper lip, would be removed. Not only would I lose myself and my individuality as I became another part of a game that would take my life and everything I was before, but they would also take away my happiness and sense of safety. Ruthlessly removing the only barrier I had to prevent my eventual marriage. Stripping me of everything eventually that I valued about myself, everything that protected me in my home. I just knew it.

I started to plan. Quelling, removing, killing the hope that was beginning to brew. As I stood there on stage, preparing myself for the capital onslaught that was to come, I knew I would be unremarkable in the games; I knew it. I had little skills, little in the way of survival.

I had knowledge sure, in theory, of the quickest way to kill an animal in preparation for my job once I turned 18, the slaughterhouse. I knew where to hit, yet I had never done it before. And no practical experience in such things, that was the second thought that flooded through my head. What little skills I had or the ones I thought might have been useful. I could identify types of flowers that were poisonous food types, too. Yet even with all of these unremarkable skills, I knew one thing.

The odds were not in my favour. At all.

Nobody came to visit me, being the town pariah and all. No sorrowful goodbyes, no love-filled hugs and secret kisses the way I had imagined the last meeting for tributes had gone, none of it. I stood there, waiting for anyone, anything. A semblance of noise, a scuffle of footsteps outside my door, yet it was silent. Deafeningly so. Nothing and no one came to see me; I suppose nobody wanted to. In the end, I tried not to be upset, definitely not. Yet I was. I was deeply hurt at the lack of impact I had on the close-knit town; not even one person wanted to say anything. What made it worse was watching my district partner walk out of the room, adorned with praise, a loved community member clearly. Not that I knew who he was; I didn't. I don't know now either, standing where I am I wish I had tried to. At the very least smile at him a little, make his life easier, and mine by proxy by having a friend in what was our last days of normalcy.

I should have tried harder.