The Fourth Annual Writer Games: Canon

The Assault | Fintan Bailey

It might just be that I'm high on morphling, but the arena is actually really beautiful right before sunrise. Infinitesimal crystals of ice gather on the ground, on my eyelashes and fingertips, diamonds yet to be melted away by the heat of the day. The purple of the night is just starting to give way to the ashen light of day.

Even the trees, still withered husks, have a hint of elegance in their twisting branches, reaching for sunlight to feed leaves that have long-since died. They are dancers frozen in space and time, or perhaps moving impossibly slowly to melodies composed of notes we can never hear.

The first hints of the morning already appear on the horizon, a thin aura of light that almost seems to be emanating from the ground itself, a promise of new life that will be born of this death. It may take years, but someday, the tree that I'm leaning against will fall and a sapling will take its place. The new will feed on the old. Branches will reach for the sun, and leaves will feel the sun's warm light once more. Roots will grow beneath the ground and feed on the nitrogen from the rotting trees, on the iron from our blood, on a million kinds of biomass the old forest left behind.

It's nice to know that something will come out of all this devastation, that even death in its finality isn't the end of all things. Maybe beauty can come out of the Games too.

Or maybe it can't. I don't really care. I'll be dead before either happens, so it doesn't really affect me that much.

There are more terrible things in the world than I could possibly comprehend. The ache in my stomach is a familiar feeling for most of Panem, though if it eats any of them alive, their deaths won't be celebrated with a cannon. Nobody will take note of their name or age or District.

People think that the Hunger Games are the worst thing that happens in Panem every year, but twenty-three televised murders aren't the biggest monstrosity in the country. Even forty-seven weren't enough to start a single riot. The worst part about the Games isn't the deaths or our suffering or the Capitol's revelry, even though all of those suck monumentally.

The worst part is that the Games are a mask.

The only reason that the Games are still around is that they're a distraction. The Capitol could just as easily round up twenty-four random children and arbitrarily kill all but one of them. They could feed every child's name into a computer, and just ask for it to spit out two from each District instead of spending boatloads of money on cameras and escorts and arenas, not that anyone in the Capitol has ever had to worry about money.

But, if we're all focused on the Games, we forget about all the other horrible shit the Capitol does on a daily basis. If we channel our hate towards that girl from District One who killed that boy from our District, we can't channel it towards the President. If we focus on the teenagers on TV starving, we forget our neighbors are too. We look at the Victor and say, "It's terrible all the things he had to do to survive" and think it's perfectly acceptable that we have to work ungodly hours in inhumane conditions because at least we aren't killing anybody.

Morphling is nice because it helps me to see all of these things for what they are. Before, I would have given myself an ulcer worrying about each of society's ills. I would have had an aneurysm trying to piece it all together and figure out the root of the problem so I could find one magic solution.

Now, I can just see it and know that it doesn't matter. If I win, then I'll have enough money I won't have to worry about hunger or illness or fighting to survive. If I lose, then I'll be dead, and nothing will matter anyway.

Maybe none of it ever mattered as much as I thought it did. Everybody seemed to care, but nothing ever changed. They were just singing gibberish like life was a song whose lyrics they couldn't understand.