Perhaps the things which happened could only have happened to me. I do not know. I never heard of things like them happening to anyone else. But I am not sorry they did happen. I am in secret deeply and strangely glad. I have heard other people say things—and they were not always sad people, either—which made me feel that if they knew what I know it would seem to them as though some awesome, heavy load they had always dragged about with them had fallen from their shoulders. To most people, everything is so uncertain that if they could only see or hear and know something clear they would drop upon their knees and give thanks. That was what I felt myself before I found out so strangely, and I was only a girl. That is why I intend to write this down as well as I can. It will not be very well done, because I never was clever at all, and always found it difficult to talk.
The task is made more difficult by the fact that these are not the types of thing that people speak of at all. These are the things that you bury deep within your own heart. Many who read this will think me insane. Many more will think me delusional. All I know is that the story I write here is a story that truly happened. I am not the best one to tell it, but I am the only one who can. If what I write is unbelievable, that is for others to judge. It is enough the story is written to let people see clearly. It is enough for them, and it is enough for me.
I say that perhaps these things could only have happened to me, and as such, I am the only one who can tell of them because, as I look back over my life, I realize that it has always been a rather curious one. Even when those who took care of me did not know I was thinking at all, I had begun to wonder if I were not different from other children. That was, of course, largely because of the Mirror and the fact that our little house next to was in the most wild and remote corner of Panem. When my few relations felt they must pay me a visit as a mere matter of duty to the orphaned Katniss Everdeen, it must've seemed to them as if their journey was a form of pilgrimage to a wild and savage place. A place made strange by the presence of the Mirror. when a conscientious one brought a child to play with me, the little-civilized creature was as frightened of me as I was of it. My shyness and fear of its strangeness made us both dumb. No doubt I seemed like a new breed of inoffensive little barbarian, knowing no tongue but its own. More at home in the woods and with my bow than with any living person, hunting for game in the presence of the Mirror.
A certain clannish etiquette made it seem necessary that a relation should pay me a visit sometimes, because of the strange circumstances of my life. Indeed, that was how Haymitch first came to the mountain. But I was a plain, undersized little child, and had no attraction for anyone but Sae, who was my great-aunt, and Haymitch an old friend of the family, who was also a perpetual drunk. It was from Sae that I learned to hunt, and it was from Haymitch that I learned to read and write. They were both like me in the fact that they were not given to speech; but sometimes we talked to one another, and I knew they were fond of me, as I was fond of them. They were really all I had. All I had among the living anyway.
I did not know I was different. I believed that all little girls lived in remote cabins. That they were taught by their drunken relatives and that every little girl lived next to a lake like the Mirror. I know now that the Mirror is an old volcanic crater that filled with water and became a lake. It is said that the lake has no bottom. This may be true. It is true enough that they never recovered my father's body. I am an orphan and both my parents were dead before I was born, my father lies dead at the bottom of the lake. My mother lies dead in a corner of the cabin.
This was not always so, once my father and mother had both been very young and beautiful and wonderful. Or so Sae tells me. My father was a trapper who lived here in this cabin by the mirror, but my mother lived in the town and had been the prettiest girl in the town. Rumor had her married to the baker, but rumor has it so often it was wrong. One day my father came down from the mountains and saw the apothecary's daughter. He was tall and strong with a voice that made all the birds fall silent to listen. A voice that was beautiful high and clear and so filled with life that it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. He stayed in town for a month and at the end of that month, he took the apothecary's daughter back to the Mirror with him as his bride. They lived two splendid years together. they were quite alone, but for Sae, and spent their days fishing or riding or wandering the mountain together. I don't know how it was that I myself seemed to see my young father and mother so clearly and to know how radiant and wildly in love they were. But I knew it. So, I understood, in a way of my own, what happened to my mother that morning when the sun rose upon the Mirror and my father was not there. He had gone out on the lake the day before when a sudden and unparalleled tempest came over the mountains. All the rest of the day and through the next day my mother and Sae had prayed for my father's safe return. Yet the next morning the Mirror was as blank and smooth as if my father had never been there. Seeing this my mother fell like a stone and has never moved since. It is because of this that I say she was dead before I was born. To this day she does not seem like a living thing, she lies white and cold, dead in every way that matters. I was born two months later, but the event did not disturb my mother's body. Sae feeds her and takes care of her, but she never moves. Perhaps if my father was still alive he could call her back to life, I am not enough. I understand in a way of my own, but even now I wonder why I am not enough to recall her to life.
Yet despite the fact that the Mirror robbed me of both my parents it was not long after I was old enough to be told this that I began to feel that the Mirror was in secret my companion and friend, that it was not only a lake to me but something else. It was like a thing alive, as the forest moved around it the still waters of the Mirror seemed as if they were a very patient friend offering me a chance to play with them. Often, I would play in the forest as a child. Yet however far I wandered I could always hear the Mirror calling to me, telling me to return to it as I slipped through the forest. Strangers say that the Mirror is the most beautiful and the most desolate place in the world, but it never seemed desolate to me. From my first memory of it, I had a vague, half-comforted feeling that there was some strange life on it one could not exactly see, but was always conscious of. I know now why I felt this, but I did not know then.
If I had been older when I first began to see what I did see there, I should no doubt have read things in books which would have given rise in my mind to doubts and wonders; but I was only a little child who had lived a life quite apart from the rest of the world. I was too silent by nature to talk and ask questions, even if I had had others to talk to. I had only Sae and Haymitch, and, as I found out years later, they knew what I did not, and would have put me off with adroit explanations if I had been curious. But I was not curious. I accepted everything as it came and went.
I was only six when I first saw Prim. Haymitch and Sae were as fond of each other as they were of me, in their own way and often my schooling came by the side of the Mirror. We would sit out there and spend the day, Haymitch would teach me from his books and correct my work. Then Sae would take me into the forest and teach me how to aim a bow, to skin the meat of the game I caught, and later in the evening how to create a meal out of my squirrels and rabbits. Under her tutelage, I became very good with my bow and could soon shoot a squirrel in the eye from a hundred paces. Yet not all my hours were spent in study and there would be hours when Haymitch would be buried in his liquor and Sae would be busy in the house and in those moments, I would wander about next to the banks of the Mirror and play in my own way. I do not think it was in a strange way. I think I must have played as almost any lonely little girl might have played. I used to find a corner among the bushes and pretend it was my house and that I had little friends who came to play with me. I only remember one thing which was not like the ordinary playing of children. It was a habit I had of sitting quite still a long time and listening. That was what I called it, listening. I was listening to hear if the forest around me and the depths of the lake I sat by made any sounds that I could understand. I felt as if it might if I were very still and listened long enough.
On one such day a great mist came up from the lake and I could barely see a handbreadth in front of me. The Mirror would often do that, have great mists or storms come up around it and make it impossible to see far in any direction. It was part of the life of the place. Such a storm had claimed my father, yet I knew no fear and, on this occasion, I simply ceased playing and sat still to listen.
I had sat listening for nearly half an hour when I heard the first muffled, slow trampling of horses' hoofs. I knew what it was even before it drew near enough for me to be conscious of the other sounds—the jingling of arms and chains and the creaking of leather one notices as troopers pass by. Armed and mounted men were coming toward me. That was what the sounds meant; but they seemed faint and distant, though I knew they were really quite near. If I had continued to play I doubt, however, that I would have heard them, I only heard them because I had been listening.
Out of the mist, they rode a company of wild-looking men wearing garments such as I had never seen before. Most of them were savage and uncouth, and their clothes were disordered and stained as if with hard travel and fight. I did not know, or even ask myself, why they did not frighten me, but they did not. The man who seemed to be their leader was a lean giant who was darker but, under his darkness, paler than the rest. On his forehead was a queer, star-shaped scar. He rode a black horse, and before him, he held close with his left arm a pretty little girl dressed in a long blue skirt and a shirt that was untucked in the back making her look like she had a duck's tail. The big man's hand was pressed against her breast as he held her; but though it was a large hand, it did not quite cover a dark-red stain on the white of her shirt. She was a slight girl with hair as blond as mine was dark, and with big blue eyes that looked at the world with the brightness of life. The moment I saw her I loved her.
The black horse stopped before me. The wild troop drew up and waited behind. The great, lean rider looked at me a moment, and then, lifting the little girl in his long arms, bent down and set her gently on her feet on the mossy earth in the mist beside me. I got up to greet her, and we stood smiling at each other. And at that moment as we stood the black horse moved forward, the muffled trampling began again, the wild company swept on its way, and the white mist closed behind it as if it had never passed. Of course, I know how strange this will seem to people who read it, but that cannot be helped and does not really matter. It was in that way the thing happened, and it did not even seem strange to me. Anything might happen on the shores of the Mirror, anything. All I knew was that a beautiful happy little girl with life in her eyes had come to be my sister from the Mirror that stole my father. I knew intrinsically that the Mirror had sent her and I was glad to have a friend.
I knew she had come to play with me, and we went together to my house among the bushes of broom and gorse and played happily. But before we began I saw her stand and look wonderingly at the dark-red stain against the white of her shirt on her childish breast. It was as if she were asking herself how it came there and could not understand. Then she picked a fern and a bunch of the thick-growing bluebells and put them in her girdle in such a way that they hid its ugliness. I did not really know how long she stayed. I only knew that we were happy, and that, though her way of playing was in some ways different from mine, lighter happier and more filled with light, I loved it and her. I knew she had come to be my sister and, in my heart, I could feel a desperate need to protect and care for her. But she was not mine for long that day, all too soon the sun came out and the mist lifted and I felt a change come upon the earth. As the change took place I could saw her run to the side of the lake and hide in clump of scrub oak near the edge of the lake, and she did not come back. When I ran to look for her she was nowhere. I could not find her. All that was there was the Mirror and, in its depths, all I saw was my own face looking back at me.
I quickly ran back to the cabin and began to make my inquiries of Haymitch and Sae, at six I believed that they held all the answers to every question in the universe. Thus, I asked them,
"Where did she go?"
Haymitch had been nursing his whiskey at the kitchen table and Sae had been feeding my mother soup with an eyedropper, but both looked up at me as I asked and as if they were one they both began to pale. They looked at me strangely and Sae relinquished her bowl of broth and Haymitch his whiskey as they sat at the table and gave me their full attention. Both were trembling a little and I could see the tired lines near their eyes.
"Who was she, Katniss?" Asked Sae.
"The little girl the men brought to play with me," I answered, looking at them strangely in my turn.
"The big one on the black horse put her down—the big one with the star here." I touched my forehead where the queer scar had been.
At that moment Haymitch grew paler still and his face took a ghostly cast as the words were shocked out of him, "Dark Manuel and Little Prim," he choked out.
With a child's tenacity, I asked again, "Where did she go?"
Sae scooped me into her warm shaking arms and hugged me close, for once I did not struggle but enjoyed her embrace as she said, "She's one of the fair ones. She will come again. She'll come often, I dare say. But only when the Mirror sends her and in her own time."
Childlike I was content with that answer and soon found myself distracted by Haymitch as he asked me to read to him. Later in the evening, Haymitch brought it up again for the last time,
"Did she talk to you sweetheart?"
I hesitated and stared at him quite a long time. Then I shook my head and answered, slowly, "N-no."
Because I realized then, for the first time, that we had said no words at all. But I had known what she wanted me to understand, and she had known what I might have said to her if I had spoken—and no words were needed. And it was better.
She came many times. Through all my childish years I knew that she would come and play with me every few days, though I never saw the wild troopers again or the big, lean man with the scar. Children who play together are not very curious about one another, and I simply accepted her with delight. Somehow, I knew that she lived happily in a place not far away. She could come and go, it seemed, without trouble. Sometimes I found her and sometimes she found me. I knew however that I would only find her when I was alone and only when I was listening for her. After our first meeting, she would dress in other colors but the ducktail remained even as the red stain was gone; but no matter what she wore she was always my Prim, with the big blue eyes and the fair, transparent face, the very fair little face. As I had noticed the strange, clear pallor of the rough troopers, so I noticed that she was curiously fair. And as I occasionally saw other persons with the same sort of fairness, I thought it was a purity of complexion special to some, but not to all. I was not fair like that, and neither was anyone else I knew.
Among other things, although I aged Prim continued to be the same little girl that came to me so many years ago. Until one day she no longer came to play. I missed her at first, it was not with a sense of grief or final loss. She had only gone somewhere.