PART 1 – MY GAMES
Chapter 1:
My earliest memories are of smoke and sweat and salt. The squall had nearly drowned us in our little boat, but we never feared the waves as much as the fire. Ever seaman learns to fear fire. Too much water can drown you, but too much fire will burn you right up.
We didn't return to shore until the fires receded, and then, starved, frightened, half-dead, with nothing but our boat and each other, we started over.
I was the fourth youngest of ten children, all born to the promise that they would live to experience true freedom, which, of course, none of us got to see. Sometimes I thought that there might've been an eleventh child lost in the war, but if there was no one ever told me. Besides my earliest childhood and the big family, my beginning was really quite boring. I was born into a middle class family in District 4. My mother was a seamstress and my father was a businessman and entrepreneur. He, along with my two eldest brothers, who in their time eventually married and had children, bounced back after the failed revolution by building and renting out fishing boats to the downtrodden fishermen. The eldest made fine, sturdy vessels that were a bit expensive even to rent, where as the 2nd eldest then filled the void by making less reliable, but cheaper boats that one could not only rent, but buy. My father was a fairly lucky and generous man. I overheard once that there was speculation that he made it out of the revolution with his entire young family intact because he was some sort of spy for the Capitol. However, no one who knew him would argue that he was entirely harmless now.
Our youngest was newly conceived and I was barely five years old when the war was lost and the Hunger Games began. They didn't call it that then, of course. At its conception, it was quite clearly a very angry person's very angry idea. A clever idea, too. A very deliberate scare tactic. The Capitol, still as raw and bleeding as the rest of us, simply swooped in and told us they were talking a boy and a girl from each district as tribute and had them fight to the death in little more than a big cell. It was televised at the last minute and very poorly and it caused a very big, very angry uproar amongst the wounded districts. They were just a bunch of scared children. There were no survivors that year.
No one expected it to happen again, but it did, and with a little more finesse. The two tributes from each district were still chosen at random, but in less of a 'torn from their beds in the middle of the night' way, and more of a 'you're coming, you have no choice, and there's nothing you can do to stop us' sort of way. The children were thrown together into a small prairie arena that looked like it was constructed just a little less hastily than last year's cell. A few shoddy knives were provided to children who looked a little less scared and a little more broken than the kids the year before. The camerawork that year was still fairly poor, but was better than the 1st year's. The Game barely lasted a day. Again, there were no survivors.
I don't remember much from the first few years. The Capitol commanded that we watch our children die, but they couldn't enforce it very well. It was years before the Capitol pieced their hold on the districts together enough to set up a screen in the square since none of us were spending our hard earned money on televisions until they required it by law.
The advancements came quickly. Possibly because of its televised nature, the annual battle of the tributes quickly became a form of entertainment. There was a survivor the third year, one with some knowledge of nature survival that fought his way through the other tributes and then lingered in the arena. They let him sit there for a day, a week, pondering over him, and then they sent him home. The next year the age range for the tributes was set for children between the ages of 12 and 18 and they announced that whoever won the battle royale could return home a survivor. Not a hero. Never a hero. A Champion, maybe. But not a hero. Not to us.
They also started giving the kids weapon training, hoping to be able to provide them with the tools to inspire some more interesting deaths. It took a few years before they bothered giving the tributes some survival training, but only because spending all the time and effort on the arena that they did, it wasn't worth their while to have the games last only a few days at most. And then the arenas got bigger and more complex.
They started introducing the tributes as well, after a few years, rubbing their identities in our faces just a little more. At first they would just drag them up on stage, like the victims that they were and simply give a name to the face, a face to the name. Steadily, however, the introductions got more important, the kids were cleaned up, making it more entertaining to the people of the Capitol and more of a mockery to the rest of us.
The scare tactic that was the soon to be named 'Hunger Games' was highly effective. It made us angry at first, but being forced to helplessly stand by, so soon after having our communities decimated by the failed rebellion, as the Capitol took our friends, our sibling, and our children, two by two, away to be slaughtered for sport. Make us watch.
It broke us very quickly.
We apologized. We apologized for even thinking of rebelling. We promised we'd never do it again. You may find that weak, and decades down the road, when the Hunger Games had come into being and mutated so drastically as to be painted up and turned into some sort of… well, game – a game with fun and prizes - we'd take back our apologizes. But those first children: The children than entered that arena for the first time, the children that would enter those arenas the first dozen times, two dozen times, three dozen times – that was us. Their faces were the faces of the districts when they entered that arena, when they were pulled and paraded in front of the audiences of the Capitol like the prisoners of war they were. They were all scared and broken. These games would change them. These games would change everything.