My mother doesn't talk about the past, at least, not to me. Late at night, Mother wakes up screaming, and then she and Father talk for hours, whispering the night away. Sometimes Mother gets terribly quiet and still. She'll sit in front of the fire for days and days and not speak. When that happens, Father lovingly brushes her hair. He brings Buttercup, our old, dirty-yellow cat to sit in her lap. He weaves wreathes out of flowers and puts them on her head.
Sometimes, I think that if my Father died, Mother would grow still and silent forever. And sometimes I think that if Mother died, Father would simply cease to exist, because all of Father is also Mother.
Sometimes Mother vanishes for days. She always comes back with things for us—a dead deer, a basket of berries.
Sometimes she or Father is gone for weeks. When they return from those trips, they have different things for us—new clothes, new shoes, medicines, or ingredients for delicious food.
My mother does many things for me. She lovingly brushes and braids my hair. She sings to me when I'm sick. She helps me with my little garden. She teaches me many things—how to start a fire, how to shoot a bow, how to catch a fish with your bare hands. But she never, ever talks about the past.
Father does. He tells me stories about Aunt Prim, or who would have been my Aunt Prim, if she had lived. "You're named after her, Rosie," he told me when I was five. He tells me how he fell in love with Mother, how brave and beautiful she was in their first Games, and how afterwards he didn't know if she loved him as much as he loved her.
"But she does now," I whispered to him.
"Yes," he whispered back, and smiled. "I think she does."
My father is the one who tells me those stories. He's the one who teaches me how to bake, how to frost a cake, how to make bread. He tells me things about drawing, too, and tries to teach it to me, but I like to watch him draw better. Every few months, he draws our family, and we frame it and hang it on the wall. I look to look at all those pictures, all the way back from the days when it was just him and my mother, up until a few weeks ago.
My brother is too little to see those things yet, too young to understand how fragile everything is. He doesn't look into Mother's eyes and see broken glass, like I do.
My brother is named Jay—Jay like the Mockingjay on the pin my mother has. He's only eleven, but I'm thirteen, and I understand things he doesn't.
My mother has a golden locket with a picture of a Mockingjay on it. Father gave it to her, many years ago. Inside is a picture of Grandmother and Aunt Prim. There used to be another picture, I think, but it's gone now.
Sometimes, when Father and Mother come back from their long trips, they'll bring me a book. Once, Mother gave me a book called The Complete History of Panem. It talks about all of the horrible things that happened: the Capitol, the Hunger Games, the uprisings. My mother is in it a lot.
It helped me understand what they tried to do to her, to us. They tried to tear us down and makes us slaves. They tried to transform us from humans to beasts. They tried to pull us from our homes. They tried to break us.
But we're still here.
And we're still unbreakable.