Early morning. Still dark.
My hands find the rope, untie my father's knots. After twelve years of apprenticing I know them well. The last of the tension teases out between my fingers, and the hanging carcass falls with a thud to the dirt floor below. Boar pig. Seven days hung. Headless and stripped of flesh and fat the meat has now tenderized, and fresh pork will fetch a steep price on Reaping Day.
Reaping Day, when all the families of 6 celebrate but two.
Reaping Day. The one day of the year I don't want any closer, yet the one day of the year our livelihood wouldn't survive without. Three days from this morning I'll face the lists for the last time, stand and watch as two people I've known since childhood are carted away to the Capitol, never to return.
Perhaps I will go instead.
Bl'yad. I heft the body onto the rough-hewn table. Throw back the dense woolen curtains to the outside and let the sun's first grey rays lend what little light they can. My father's knives are always clean, but the smallest cut may still prove disastrous. I can count the number of butchers in the District who still have all their fingers on one hand.
We don't have much land. Share the common pastures for grazing sheep and cattle. Most our profits come from local farmers coming into market, or culling their herds for their winter stores. But every year we raise a small herd ourselves, saved just for Reaping Day and the Hunger Games. As all of 6 pours into Selo for the Reaping and stays for the long wait to be over and the victor crowned, the price of food for so many mouths soars. My father can make more money of our small sales in a Hunger Games' time than the rest of the year combined. We, too, bring our Tributes. A week ago I slaughtered and gutted our herd of fifteen speckled swine. All well-sized and ripe. I'd fed each, seen them every day since they were piglets. No matter. When the morning came, they were all Reaped alike. I slit their throats and hung them, collected the blood and organs for sale and sausages. Split the salo from their skin and sold the cracklings in the village market. Hung the meat to tenderize. Now I've got to cut and package it in paper before noon. Secure it to the wagon. Trudge next to it for miles and miles to Selo for the Reaping. There isn't much room on the cart, and my mother takes what's left. She gave birth to five children. Lost four in the course of one winter. Her health has never been the same since.
Father is a butcher. In any other place or time my name would only be in the lists six times, once for each year. We wouldn't've needed the tessarae...
…but tessarae pays the medics. Both for my mother, and for my sisters who sickened years before. Perhaps they miss me. Perhaps they long for me in death. We've had to take out tessarae for their sake, but it's my name, not theirs, that waits for that whore Pushkina's smooth, manicured hands.
My name or not, this Reaping Day will be my last.
And either way, I'm fucked. Eighteen. Unmarried. No prospects. It's a thing unheard of in my Village. Children mean more mouths to feed. More fuel for the fires in the long and windy winters. I can't blame the parents who turn girls out on the street like urchins after twelve…and can't blame the men who snatch them up. Seems a better life than whorring. It'd be my life, too, if it weren't for my father's business. My father's business and me. I don't have a husband, but not for lack of my mother's trying.
But marriage means fucking. Means kids of your own. And with the Hunger Games…who the hell would want that? How could you make another child knowing they're going to have to face the Games one day the same as you? And how could you do it knowing you might get reaped while pregnant?
…it's not like they grant a continuance. Pregnant girls board the train, but they never get off again. By the time the Stylists have finished with them the baby's gone. They cut it out.
There's not a medic in our Village. The nearest one is half a day's walk. When people need something they come to my father. Infected hands, feet, teeth. I've watched him take them all. Helped him. In all my long life there's only been one time he's sent me away, and only one thing he never let me see. Even after she'd gone and he'd buried that little bundle my father wouldn't face me. My mother didn't speak to him for days.
I told him we didn't need the money. He said he would've accepted any. That I didn't understand. That he hoped I never did.
You won't have to worry about that, papa. I couldn't get fucked by a man if I wanted to.
Bones and ashes. That's all that's left for me here, anyways. Bone and ash.
I pull the cleaver from a tight leather sheath. Whet the edges against porous stone. It's time.
I hew the spine in one heavy blow. Sever the hocks and split the rump. Crash the steel of the knife's edge down and into the splintering wood over and over again as pink trails of blood go dancing down into the drain.
Outside, the dogs have heard the sound and smell the fresh, faint traces of stale blood. I see them grinning and laughing between the thatch, one even so bold as to place paws upon the sill of the empty window. I cut a small slice from the rump, chop it deftly into ragged pieces. Toss it.
There's a sudden fury as the pack descends. Tearing and fighting, hackles raised and teeth barred. The scraps are gone in seconds, the weak, the tired and the old blinking morosely up at me from the fray, knowing they'll go hungry yet another day.
Fuck. It's not like I can buy my way out of the lists. I think better of it. Cut the sides of ribs into bony nubs of marrow, fat, and small, stringy lumps of grisly meat.
"Bones," I call. "Bones!"
They're not my dogs. Not pets. I won't make that mistake again. But they are a pack, my pack, feral and wild. No rope or wooden barricades to fence them in. They run freely through the forests, up and down the slopes, they eat and fuck and come and go as they please. Perhaps I envy them their freedom. Short, wild lives lived without a sense of drudgery or fear.
The money from the pork sales cannot buy back my tessarae. Won't change the outcome of the Reaping. This year we've lived in plenty.
I see no reason not to share.
The world spins on around us. The wavering, sickly sunlight grows on the horizon until a pallid disk appears. Already the trains have left the Capitol, bringing Pushkina closer and closer to the station at Selo, and in three days time I will have to face the Hunger Games, one way or another. But for a moment—this moment—there is a pack of wild dogs cracking bones, gnawing meat, licking stains of marrow from their matted fur with bellies full and content.
It can't last. It can never last.
But for me—like them—it can be enough.
AN: For more Petra, try Lamb to Slaughter.
For good Hunger Games fan fiction that is both compelling and complete, see Legacy by Irish Luck 19. I promise you, it's well worth a read*.
*Lasgalendil has no disclosures to make except friendship. She cannot be held legally responsible for Irish addiction, lost sleep, mental and emotional anguish up to and including tears or psychiatric hospitalization as a result of this recommendation.