I stand under a tree, staring up through its leaves at the darkening sky, dreaming about being among the clouds; about being away from district eleven. I dream about a place where there are no giant electric fences, no peacekeepers with their guns trained on people, no working in the fields from sun up until sun down. A place among the clouds, a place with my parents, that is where my mind wanders to. Closing my eyes, I actually feel like I am with them again. It is a past memory, all that I have left of my parents, but it brings me a moment of peace. I am young, I am carefree, I am not uncaring… yet.
In this memory, my most favorite of us, I am too young to be doing any real work in the fields, so I am allowed to just run. My parents are working of course, having a child does not excuse you from your duties in the fields, nothing does. But while my father picks oranges out of a tree, he lifts me up on to his shoulders and lets me pick off the highest branches. When I was that young, I used to think working in the fields with my parents and older sister, Winnow, was the coolest thing ever, so being able to help my father made my day. I remember dropping one of the oranges on my father's head, expecting him to get angry, but hearing him laugh instead. His laughter bounced off the trees and through the fields, bringing warmth into my heart.
The memory of my father's laughter is interrupted by the sound of a peacekeeper's boots grinding the fallen apples into the ground as he approaches me. Most peacekeepers ignore me, so it comes as quite the surprise when this one not only acknowledges my existence but speaks to me as well. "Find that runt and tell her to give the signal" is all he says, but I know what and who he means. Everyone would know.
I glance back up into the trees and scan the ones around me, and I quickly locate Rue – the runt – three trees down picking apples with a faraway look on her face. I walk to the bottom of her tree and just watch her for a few minutes, not wanting to interrupt whatever she is thinking, knowing that if her thoughts are somewhere happy how cruel it would be to bring her back into such a harsh reality. I hear her mumble something to herself that I can't quite here, but I take that as my cue to pass along the peacekeepers message. It takes a few times of calling her name to get her attention, but finally she looks down to me. "The peacekeepers say the work day is over," I explain to her.
"Okay," she replies as she drops her last apple of the day into her already full bag.
"Want me to take that for you?" I ask, imagining how difficult it must be for such a tiny girl to carry such a heavy bag. The guards, and some of the townsfolk as well, don't call her Runt for nothing. She's tiny and looks very frail, and almost birdlike. Even the way she hops around in the trees suggests it.
"Sure," she says with a smile, something else I am not used to, "thank you."
All I do is nod in response, unused to the kindness that this girl is showing me. As I walk away I hear Rue's signal – one low note, two high, and then another low – picked up by nearby Mockingjays and carried through the rest of the fields, telling the other workers that the day is done. As I walk toward the lines of peacekeepers and bins that will soon be filled with today's harvest, I cannot help but think about Rue and her kindness. It is so very rare that I get any sort of recognition, let alone a smile. I am sure that my physical features are what first turn people away from me, but also the hard façade that I put in place to keep people out; to keep them away from my heart. I do not pay attention as my bags are taken and emptied into the bins and I am patted down by one of the two peacekeepers, making sure I have filled my quota and haven't stolen any of the precious fruit that is needed in the Capitol. I will never make the mistake of stealing from the fields, no matter how hungry I am or how very little I think the fruit will be missed. My parents unintentionally taught me that lesson long ago.
I have done this so often through my life that I do it almost mechanically, completely without thought, so I am well out of line and on the road when I remember that one of those bags was not my own, but Rue's. I know the punishment for not filling a quota or not working throughout the day, which is what they will assume Rue did if I do not make the peacekeeper aware that the second bag was in fact hers. I do not want the runt to have to work through the night when the most dangerous of creatures come out, so I turn and start making my way toward the line once again.
I am half way to the fields when I hear Rue scream out. I pick up my pace, knowing that her turn must have come in line and they found her hands empty. I am cursing myself for being so stupid as to not give Rue her credit for her day's work, especially when she works so high up in the trees, the most dangerous place because of how thin the branches get. When I finally make it to the gate I am horrified at what I see. A peacekeeper, Talon, the same one who told me to find Rue earlier, has her wrist in a tight grasp and is snarling at her. I can only imagine the pain Rue must be in. I quickly find the peacekeeper that was in charge of my line.
"Excuse me," I say, having to force the words out, hating being polite to a peacekeeper, "I hate to bother you again sir, but one of those bags that I turned in today was not my own. It was Rue's." When he just looks at me in disbelief I dare glance over at Rue, seeing Talon push her roughly and watching as she almost loses her balance, I rush on now needing this man to believe me even more than before. "She was struggling with it, so I offered to carry it to the bins for her and didn't realize that I hadn't explained to you earlier until I was half way home."
The peacekeeper does not say anything; he just turns and walks toward the scene a few lines down. I hold my breath, afraid that Rue may be punished still, but hoping that I have helped her. I watch as the peacekeeper bends down and whispers into Talon's ear. After a moment Talon says something to Rue with a pained look on his face and I let out my breath in a sigh of relief, knowing that the look must mean he has no choice but to let her go. I stare at Rue, hoping she will look my way and see the apology in my eyes, and that she will know that this was never my intentions. Finally, she catches my eye and I see her nod, and I take that as her acceptance of my apology. Feeling relieved that she is okay and that she forgives me, I give her a small smile, but she turns her back so quickly that I am afraid she misses it.
Secure in the knowledge that Rue is okay I once again head for home. I am late for dinner, and I know Grams will be worried about me. I try not to think about Rue as I walk, so instead I think about the peacekeepers and their harshness; working through the night, whippings in the square for the smallest of offenses, and sometimes even hangings. All of this, of course, leads to me thinking about my parents and the way they were unfairly taken from me, leaving Grams to care for Winnow and me.
It was during our largest harvesting season when it happened, the time which most punishments are carried out. For those weeks every person who is not too old nor too young is called to work in the fields from the time they awaken until the night falls upon them; kids are excused from school, shopkeepers must close their stalls and can only open during the night, and there is absolutely no exception for missing a day of harvesting. It is also the time when families go even hungrier than usual, because nothing is spared from the fields and the shops are rarely open. It is not uncommon for multiple people to either grow ill from hunger, or to die from it.
My parents were desperate. They had two kids and an elderly woman to feed, and no money to buy any food for our empty bellies, and Winnow and I were beginning to grow ill from the lack of food. With so many more people working in the fields during this time, security is a little less attentive, so one day my mother and father smuggled a few practically rotten apples and oranges out of the fields and brought them home to us to eat. The fruit was almost inedible, it would not have been accepted into the bins for the Capitol and would have been thrown into the trash anyway, but that did not stop the peacekeepers when they found out about it.
I'll never forget that day, it will be forever burned into my memory. My family was happy that night after filling our guts with the fruit, finally able to go to bed without empty stomachs for a change, and excited to have gotten away with taking the fruit. My parents weren't going to make it a habit to take the food though; they just needed to get us through the harvest so that they could go back to getting food from the shops and working fewer hours. I was laying in my mother's lap on our small couch as she hummed to me, rocking gently, and I was just beginning to feel my eyes close when there was a harsh knock on the door. The distinctive knock of a peacekeeper.
Mother and Father's eyes locked for just a moment, both of them knowing what was coming while Winnow and I sat there clueless. Only a second passed before my father answered the door. When he opened it up the peacekeeper standing there was none other than Talon. He was younger then, fresh to the business, but that didn't stop him from pushing my father to the floor roughly and hitting him in the face with the butt of his gone, sending blood gushing out of his nose. My mother screamed as she pushed me onto the couch and ran to my father's side, ignoring the peacekeeper standing above her. I wish I could say that Talon was nicer to my mother, seeing as her children were in the room and she was a woman, but he was just as cruel. He kicked her square in the chest, sending the air out of her and her body to the floor.
It all happened so fast that the rest of us didn't have time to react, not that any of us could have done anything to stop it or to help my parents even if we had had time to do anything.
They dragged them away after that, and held them over night in the tiny prison that is near the square in District Eleven. And then, the next morning, they whipped my parents in front of the whole town. The streets were overcrowded, people were in shops looking through windows, climbing on top of anything they could, and some were even on the rooftops. They didn't do it because they wanted to, it was mandatory, and refusal would earn you a whipping of your own. Whereas the strangers in town had to find their own spot, the family of the criminal gets a special place, right in front of the whipping post. Where they get to look into the eyes of their loved one as the leather slices through their flesh, where you don't miss even the tiniest flickers of pain that crosses their face.
That whipping was my parents' last whipping. They each got a hundred lashes dealt to them by the strongest and most heavy handed peacekeeper in our District. About half way through my parents lost consciousness, and by the end they both had died, either from lack of blood or just from the pain itself.
We never learned how the peacekeepers found out my parents smuggled the fruit. It was gone by the time they got to our home, and nobody in the District would tell on someone who was just trying to feed their children with the food that they had picked themselves. It's still a mystery to this day. I wonder, even now years later, if during those last moments my parents ever regretted taking the fruit that kept their kids alive and basically signed their death certificate.
These thoughts, along with ones of Rue, I put out of my mind as I cross the doorway to my home. I am inside less than a minute when Grams has her arms around me and is telling me how she was worried when she saw our neighbor, another field worker, get home and I was still nowhere to be seen. Grams hasn't always been this way, protective and worrisome, that didn't happen until after my parents were murdered in the square. Now she is constantly afraid of losing me and Winnow.
It takes me awhile to calm Grams down and to explain to her what happened at the field gates, but once I do we both sit down to our dinner; toasted bread in warm goats milk. It's a simple dish, but a delicious one nonetheless, and also one of the only things we can afford to eat. Winnow doesn't eat dinner with us, she rarely does anything that involves being a part of our family. Grams thinks it's because she is afraid of getting close to us like she was to our parents, and something bad happening, that she loves us but feels it would be safer to do so from a distance. I think the 'keepers killed her heart along with my parents and that Winnow is now incapable of love. But I don't tell Grams this.
When dinner is gone Grams goes to the couch where she will fall asleep, just like every night. She has a room, and a bed, but she says she feels safer on the couch, that if anyone were to come through that door they'd have to get through her before they could get to her grandchildren. I don't have the heart to tell her that they could easily get through her, that a frail, old woman wouldn't be able to stop peacekeepers with loaded weapons. Instead I just kiss her on the forehead, tell her I love her, and go to my bed down the hall.
Lying in bed, in the dark, with nothing to distract me, it is more difficult to push the thoughts of Rue away. Even though she has forgiven me, I still feel terrible for the trouble I caused her today, for almost being the sole reason she had to work in the fields through the night. I will make it up to her, I think to myself, I don't know how but I will do it.
I feel my body begin to relax one muscle at a time, feel myself slowly begin to drift, my eyes growing heavy and my mind getting foggy from exhaustion. A normal day in the fields is usually hard enough, but the added stress of endangering and then saving Rue has worn out my body and mind. I am hoping that I do not have the nightmares tonight, do not see my parents blood splatter onto the cobblestones in the square as I sleep; I am wishing for just one peaceful night. Nothing is worse than those nightmares, I think. And then I remember something that has slipped my mind until this moment.
Tomorrow, reality will be worse than nightmares; if not for me, than some pour soul who lives in District 11. Actually, 2 people from all twelve districts will be living a reality worse than any nightmare for the next few weeks, and for all but one those days and that reality will be there last. How I have forgotten about this horrible day that will begin the moment the sun rises, I do not know. Not even the incident with Rue or the memories of my parents should have put it out of my mind, but they did. I don't know if I am grateful for it or not.
All I know for sure is that tomorrow I will wake up and make my way to the square, I will get in my designated line and wait with everyone else like cattle, and I will listen to our mayor talk and to the anthem play. And then, just like every other person in town, I will hold my breath as names are drawn from two glass balls – one female, one male – and hope that the name that is called will not be mine. Tomorrow is the Reaping, and that brings only one guarantee.
The games have begun.