Andrea D'Amour- District Three female

One of the branches on the trees I sat underneath had been broken. Not broken like it just kind of fell off. Another person had broken it. I could see where they'd torqued it back and forth and left little fringes on the end. Whoever it was, they were long gone. I wondered who it was that had passed by before. Was it one of the dead ones and this was their last trace? If they were still alive, why had they gone? Where were they now? They would never know about me. We passed like strangers in the night.

There was another branch in my hands. I was scraping it against the rough bark of the tree. Little threads of wood split off as it slowly grew sharper. It wouldn't be sharp enough to kill a person. It wasn't strong enough, either- if I stabbed someone with it, it would snap. But I wasn't aiming to kill a person.

The sun was dipping nearer the horizon. It was almost dusk. Dusk, the time when lower light brought cover but before night turned the water cold. Then my targets would come out.

I could already hear them. Little percussive sounds like wooden balls bouncing off tight guitar strings. And some more organic noises, everything from drones to chirps. I took up my spear and started to hunt.

It was anticlimactic. There were so many bullfrogs that I found one in less than a minute. It sat there, its eyes glowing wetly in the dim light. I was mostly hidden under the water. When I popped up and stabbed it, there was nowhere for it to go. My spear wasn't strong enough to pierce it. It was the pressure of my arm pushing down on the spear that more or less squished the frog and crushed the spear into it.

The frog wasn't dead, just mutilated. I felt bad seeing it scream and wriggle around the spear. I yanked the spear out and jammed it as hard as I could against its head. I shuddered as its skull crumpled in my hand, the spear shoving through until it poked me in the palm. The frog stopped its struggles and just kicked spastically in death.

How do I eat it? It was the size of an apple. I knew frog legs were fancy people food, but I didn't have any means to prepare it. I had a still-twitching, warm, entire frog in my hands. I hadn't eaten in three days. It made me sick what I was about to do, but there was nothing in my stomach to vomit.

I bit the frog's clammy leg. Foul-tasting slime and mud coated my tongue as my jaws clenched down. My teeth penetrated skin, then raw flesh, and then the bones cracked in my mouth. I chewed the white, chunky, moist mouthful, swallowed, and bit again.


Katrina Moonshadow- District Seven female

A long time ago, before Panem was a country, there was a war. I didn't know much about what things were like before Panem, but I knew there was a war fought far away in a jungle. There were booby traps and people hiding in the mud and everyone was wet all the time. It felt a little like that when I slipped to the edge of a vegetation pad under ankle-deep water and started smearing myself in mud. It felt dehumanizing. I was camouflaging myself like an animal, like something only valued based on how well it could hide. I was a primal thing slicked with mud to hide from the predators that I, a human, was no longer insulated from.

The water was cool as it slid around me. I had everything I needed to survive. I had five bags of survival supplies. They weren't big bags, but that was still a lot, relatively speaking. One of them had a bottle of iodine. Another had little protein gels that were super concentrated. I didn't have to worry about starving or dehydrating. All I had to worry about was other Tributes. So I kept moving. I wanted to get to the very outskirts of the Arena. A lot of Tributes were probably too scared to move. Let me be alone on the fringes, away from my biggest predator.

The water was clearer near the edge of the Arena- or at least I thought I was near the edge. I still wouldn't drink it, but I could faintly see a few feet down into the chin-deep water, which was nice. Billows of silt and shifting waves flashed in the corner of my eyes as I slowly moved.

Something reflected in the water. That was nothing to be afraid of- sunlight glinted off it all the time. The water stirred, as though I'd caused a tiny current by walking. I looked down at the gently moving section. It had scales.

I was standing a foot away from a snake that was two feet wide. It was sliding through the water beside me like a ghost. Both ends disappeared into the murkiness without evidence of a head or tail. Just a middle, going past me, on and on and on.

I was weighed to the mud around my feet. I had a motionless sense of being entirely helpless, like a mouse already in a hawk's claws. I was a prey animal with nothing to do but die. Morals, dreams, higher thought, it was all gone. I was a being of flesh that other beings consumed. I stood still in the water, only my mouth up breaking the surface, my hair fanning around me. This was the middle of the snake. At some point I had reached its end and started to pass without even realizing it.

The snake continued to glide past, giving no indication that it realized me. It hadn't, I finally understood. I was caked in mud head-to-toe. Snakes sensed heat. I was nothing to it. Just like me a few minutes ago, it had no idea I was there.

My breath sent ripples across the surface of the water with each breath. My eyes were riveted on the swaying movement of the snake. I couldn't move a muscle, even though I knew rationally it wasn't movement that would attract the snake. Its length arced toward me as it moved. It brushed my leg, a textured, gentle stroke. I clenched my legs as I felt myself about to release a cloud of warmth I was terrified would alert it.

At least fifteen feet of snake had gone by. I didn't know how much more was at the head end. All at once, the scaled length grew thinner. It tapered off until I finally saw the tip of a tail slip by. Not ten feet after it passed me, it was invisible. It left me still frozen, crying quietly into the water. Ten feet. At any time in the water, I was ten feet away.


Tony Gear- District Six male

This couldn't last. It had been four days in the Arena, and we looked rough. We'd done everything we could for Arthur's leg, but we were wallowing in mud and constantly damp. All things considered it looked pretty good, but pretty good was pretty bad.

"How you feeling?" I asked Arthur.

"It doesn't hurt that bad," he shrugged. He shifted his weight and stretched out his leg. The slash was red and raised around the edges. It was scabbed over, but in a thin liquidy scab that was more of a translucent cover of the visible puddle of pus inside. He didn't have the streaks up his leg that meant blood poisoning, but I didn't think he needed blood poisoning to die. His whole leg was poisoned.

"How about you?" he asked.

"Oh, you know. It's going," I said. My legs were crossed and I had one bare foot up on my lap as I poked at the skin. The whole underside of my foot was white and soggy. It was like on huge blister. It didn't hurt, exactly, but it felt wrong the way the skin pulled and slid whenever I walked. Little sheets of it kept pulling away like I was pulling a spiderweb off my foot.

The electric sound of a microphone snapping into life cracked across the Arena.

"Attention, Tributes. There will be a feast in one hour at the stand of trees. All of you are in desperate need of something. It might be worthwhile to take the risk."

Arthur saw it in my eyes.

"No," he said. "You shouldn't go. You'll get killed."

"I can do it!" I said. "I'll be careful, and I'll leave if it looks bad, but I can make it."

"Everyone will be there," Arthur said.

"It'll be medicine. You'll die if you don't get it. You can't even walk. You can't walk, I won't be able to walk much longer, and we're both pooping faster than we can drink. It's not 'worth the risk'. It's our only chance," I said. We were in good shape- at least I was. I was still fast. Everyone else would be just as beat-down. Most of them more, if they couldn't even filter water as much as we did. It was just the Careers I'd have to watch out for. If I got there quick and left before they showed up I could save us both.

Arthur looked out after me as I stood. He couldn't walk, so there was nothing to do but watch.

"You're going to get killed," he said, in the resigned voice of someone who had seen it before.

"Just wait," I said. It was dangerous. I knew it. But sometimes the only option is one do-or-die risk. "You'll see."


The title had nothing to do with the content. I couldn't think of anything so I did what I always do when I can't think of anything: Labyrinth.

Oh yeah someone asked this forever ago. You're allowed to sponsor stuff. It kind of gets approved based on however the heck I feel when I get the request.