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i.
IN WAKING LIFE, Harlow Caraway was nothing but a naive girl with soft shoulders and a softer heart. Not one filament of corruption in her gentle hands and bird-like bones. Almost foreign to the misreckonings and cruelties embedded into Panem's soil.
Almost.
But she did know what it was like, when the world was large. She could see it, the sun breaking the line of the horizon and burning through the morning sky. It set the fields and trees on fire, stalks of daisies crackling golden from within, burning off the morning dew. It pooled soft and rosy where the sky and land met at the farthest point you could see, and because she couldn't see any farther she didn't know what else was there. She didn't think about borders and perimeters and fences, she didn't think about other Districts, she didn't think about the apples she pulled from the trees and where they went when they didn't stay with her. Harlow only knew that the sun kissed the earth with gentle lips and illuminated the whole of the forest and from where she stayed sitting, in the very highest branches, she was at the top of the world.
Money was scarce, such was food. But her home had warmth and laughter, the walls buzzed with tiny but grand gestures. There was light too. It flooded like the river in the summer with no way to keep it all inside.
These were things she could always remember, wished to remember: the laughter lines etched onto her father's faces, the soft cadence of her mother's voice, the mischief of her siblings. She wished to remember the way the air shimmered in earliest June, caught between the chill of the night and the warming day; how the small apples fit in her palm as if the two were made for each other and how the tart juice will cling to her lips the rest of the day even after she'd buried the core and the stem when the peacekeepers weren't looking; the smell of woods and pines and wet soil and astringent crocuses that heralded winter's end.
The jeweled blue sky; the breeze catching her as she jumped from branch to branch.
Like a bird.
Ten year old Harlow didn't know it yet but she had written those memories into places where they could not be touched. She wrote them into her voice, her feet and her spine, and when she danced at the start and end of the day she'd always feel the soft hands of an early summer breeze. When she straightened suddenly in fear, she'd remember the sensation of catching a branch in her hand, more sure than anything else, and she'd be braver for it.
Harlow Caraway loved District seven ; it loved her back.
ii.
Her dad taught her sleight of hand by passing a coin back and forth between his fingers so fast that she could never track it, except when he slowed down. He showed her what it took: quiet, focus, and a smile to distract whomever you’re fooling.
