The anchor of love||| Johanna Mason

The sorrow at the Alter.

The train passed blurs of felids and flashes of cities until it reached the capital, the final destination. The last place I would see before I died or was at the very least sent into the arena, in hoped, prayed to gods I banned in Panem that I would see a meadow before I died, that my arena would be pretty at the very least. My prayers went unanswered. My arena, I was sure, was far from the desired picture painted for myself in a haze of shock and sorrow. Thinking up these fantastical landscapes of pretty colours kept me going through my long journey to the capital.

Yet I felt no joy from that either; I barely moved an inch from my original seat and couldn't move through the fear that once I did move, the time would speed up, and I'd be dead. Lying in some celebrated arena, my blood betted on and partied over.

I remember being escorted from the train, two guards holding each arm as I stood. Getting dragged along shaking, nearly in tears into the district centre. I looked like fresh meat to the trained tributes. To the capital. Of that I was sure.

I was in shock. Completely and utterly. Unable to move, unable to eat or speak. I knew I would be dead by the first cannon.

It wasn't until the prep team waxed me of every hair not attached to my scalp and washed me down of the filth I was apparently covered in, even when I said how it hurt after the 3rd wash and scrub, that I awoke slightly. The pain and discomfort at being naked in front of people, blue in skin and purple in hair, that I realised where I was what was happening to me. I screamed.

Loud.

Thus, painting myself further as weak. However, unintentionally so. I hated how I must have looked to everyone, like a meek rabbit ready to flee and hide, yet that was what I was at that moment. So shocked by the turn in events of my life that I was reduced to nothing by prey, an animal for amusement to kill, for the capital to set their rabid dogs onto my flesh and tear and tear me apart until nothing remained.

"You may sit up now." Even their voices sounded foreign to my ears, having spent so long in self-secluded silence, voices unusually high and clipped in tone, making them sound shrill to the normal accent I was used to hearing, the low droll and twang of the district 10 people. Not that I socialised much with them either. I was likely not mourned as I was whisked away to the capital. A social pariah of sorts.

District 10 is old-fashioned, as it were, or as we are called. It was all I knew: you were to court the person you intended to marry at 18, and never before that, and only then if you were definitely going to propose. The woman would not approach the man. The child is born in a marriage.

I was none of these things. My parents had hardly known each other and had a short fling before my mother died in childbirth. My father followed in death shortly after. I was raised as a child without a home, just a house; a financial burden on my aunt and uncle, started work at a young age and never attended school to make ends meet. It was tough yet it gave me muscle, working on the animals from the age of 7. Strong muscle. The kind that your body grew up with and adapted around.

In truth, I wasn't all that used to people speaking to me altogether. I was outcasted, only employed as everyone knew I did good work. I only brought shame to my family through existence.

The capital would call this my chance to bring pride to my family in my district. Yet I knew two things, even then. 1. They wouldn't want me back. 2. Even if I had managed to return, there would be no pride in it.

I sat as commanded, silently. Of course. And moved to the next required table, which would be moved into a personal room, as they explained, for my personal stylist to "assess the problematic material". That quote stuck with me throughout the preparation process leading up to the parade.

Once I was situated in the clinically clean, darkly coloured room where every surface was made of a shiny material that distorted my face and appearance, I was left to wait. Wait for my stylist, known for dressing up my district like farm yard animals, was one of many meetings I dreaded attending. For the past five years that they had controlled our tribute parade looks, I had believed they were making a play on words or the situation, sending us to our slaughter. Just like the animals we were dressed as. Even if in the capital, they believed it to be a district uniform. As if we dressed as cows regularly.

If they had ever seen our uniform, I was sure they would think differently about how to dress us. Those who worked in the slaughterhouse wore blood-covered aprons, and those in the fields attending to animals wore clunky boots that could easily kill with a kick to the head. Our district was not weak. Just portrayed as such by our useless mentor for the past 15 years.

This year was no different, and when I saw my outfit, I cringed outwardly at the horrific sight in front of me. A sight proudly presented by a woman who towered over my slight frame, unusually tall, yet taller in the heels worn on her feet. Hair much like the district 12 escort, fake and colourful. Instead of making me feel plane, the way she apologised for making me feel, it amused me. Highly.

"If I were to die in a week," I remember thinking, "I am grateful for two things.

That I had no one to mourn me, not properly. And that I saw this awful sight first hand and laughed at the face of it."

Now I just had to wear it. A moment in my history that ashamed me to where I was now, stuck on a podium waiting for the countdown to hit zero and my canon to ring out.