May Tenth
She'd burned her fingers prepared the food they'd finally been able to eat. She stared at them now, every so often bending them to inspect the damaged flesh around her long-destroyed fingernails. For the first time in what seemed like years, she had food resting uneasily in her stomach. In actuality it had been months, the months after her father went into the mines and never returned.
In the main room of their meager home, her mother continued to sit. Her face, once radiant in it's content, was hollowed and blanked. Neither of them could remember the last time she'd seen the sun, but at this point neither cared. Her purpose was to make sure all three of them survived and stayed off the radar of the orphanage; it didn't matter if they were alive, not her or her mother. She wanted Prim to be happy, to live a childhood that had been taken from both of them.
Her little toy wagon sat by the door. She'd kept the tessarae they'd gotten in it for safekeeping, to keep it in one place. It would be another month before they'd get more, so she had to make it last. It wasn't enough, but nothing their forsaken District could offer them was. As far as she was concerned, Prim was her only light, the only thing she had to fulfill her now. Now her light was fading, flickering desperately against the pain of starvation and fear.
Today was a day that she heard children outside with their mothers. There wasn't much to celebrate in District Twelve, but it was a well-known holiday around Panem to celebrate one's mother this time of year. She could remember it clearly now: Her and her father always sang little songs for the woman now all but dead in her position. Prim painted her drawings on scraps of metal or wood using a mess of acorns and mud her father prepared for her. They usually climbed in the same bed, their hollow bodies fitting together like a puzzle of a family who knew every day was a day to celebrate their all being alive.
Her parents were both gone now.
Prim emerged from inside the bedroom. She'd assumed her little sister had merely been napping, as she often did after receiving any food, but she was holding something in her tiny hands. A thin sheet of metal made less crude with a couple of little flowers and weeds balanced on top, and even the mixture of paint decorated the center. It read 'Happe Methers Day', innocently made to the point that even she smiled.
"I'm sure Mom will love it," she said softly.
"I already gave her hers."
Gray eyes met light blue ones and she carefully set it on the table, opening her arms for the child in front of her. Prim immediately climbed into her lap, carefully folding herself into her embrace, her breath soft and reassuring against her neck.
She couldn't be a mother. She was only twelve, just a child herself. But with her own mother as undeserving of the notion as she was unaware, she supposed in a way, she was.
