The Eternal Night - The Hunger Games

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I've been writing this listening to nothing but Music of Panem's wonderful unofficial Hunger Games soundtrack. Go and download it, it's breath taking.

I've wanted to do this for a while and finally got some time to get around and start it. Please realise, this is the 58th Games - before Katniss and Peeta's time - and some minor details may not be keeping exactly to Collin's plot basis.

Comments are much appreciated - critical or not.

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I am observing the scene from a birds-eye view, holding an almost god like observation upon the two young boys beneath me. The youngest, a boy I know – or I should say, knew – all too well, attempts to fasten his scrawny hands around his opponent. The boys shaking hands fail on him and the other, who has the benefit of power and agility, hurtles the boy effortlessly to the ground. The boy’s head collides with a rock and I hear his skull crack. Blood instantaneously flows from a hidden wound.

 Suddenly I am no longer looking down from a higher place. Now I am the boy lying on the ground. I am coughing and sputtering blood, looking up at the hefty boy shadowing over me. My enemy. Sweat is trickling down his face, blood down mine. I don’t even have time to cry out as he raises a dagger and drives it deep into my chest.

 I wake with a start.

 The dim glow of the rising sun is sneaking its way through the grimy window above my bed. The image of my brother’s final moments haunts me even when I am awake. Hardly a day goes by when it does not. It takes me a few moments to calm my breathing. I have to convince myself that the pain I feel in my chest where the dagger burrowed deep into my flesh is completely illusionary.

 My name is Paige Garner. I tell myself. I am not in the arena. I am in District 12 and I am safe.

 For now.

 The impression of security seems to becoming more of a delusion nowadays. As a child, I was – like any other child – brought up on the idea that the world is a decent place. A peaceful place. One in which safety is a promise. It didn’t take me long to realise what I lie my parents had been feeding me. The world is not a worthy place, it’s not peaceful and it most defiantly is not safe.

 And today, of all days, is the day that proves nobody - not even the wealthy ones - are safe.

 Today is reaping day.

 The day in which a boy and a girl from each district between the ages of twelve and eighteen are selected at random to fight to their death in what’s known as the Hunger Games.

 It’s the same day that, four years ago, I watched my brother stagger up onto the stage. “Jackson Garner!” Effie Trinket had cried in her undying gleeful Capitol tone.  He had stared down at me with his piercing blue eyes. I could almost hear his internal shrieks of despair. My mother was wailing somewhere in the crowd.

 Our family was lucky. Jackson died quickly. It was only a matter of hours before he received the dagger wound that punctured his heart. Other families were not so fortunate.  Some had to sit through days, even weeks, of watching their child starve or bleed to death.

 I rolled over on the thin mattress that was my bed, surprised to see the bed where my parents slept empty. Of course, the holiday today meant nothing to my parents. Mum washed people’s clothes for small pay or a trade of oats and reaping day was always her busiest day. Everybody wanted to look their best for reaping day. Stupid, really.

 Reaping day should be a day for grieving for my parents but I’d never seen mum so much as shed a tear. When I suggested we spend breakfast by Jackson’s grave on reaping day, she had shook her head firmly and said there were families suffering far fresher heartbreak than they were. Grieving on reaping day is left purely to those two families whose children are unfortunate enough to have been chosen for the years Hunger Games.