Lanolin Gossamer, District Eight (17)

"Did you hear the one about the cheese?" I asked Alice as the cannons came. She looked away from them and at me at how ludicrous and incongruous what I'd just said was.

"Never mind, it's rotten."

Alice was twelve years old. She'd lost her only ally when Anise was dragged underground by a spider the size of a cow. She'd seen more in her short stolen life than most people saw in decades and the least I could do was give her back some shreds of her childhood.

Later people said I didn't understand what was going on. That wasn't it at all. I didn't escape what the Games brought to Victors. Just because I joked around and tried to bring some bits of normalcy to Alice's life didn't mean I didn't experience every second of the Games. I wasn't joking because I didn't know what was going on. I was joking because the only way to preserve the last shreds of my sanity was to find something funny in the hellscape of my life and try to look at nothing but that.

"Don't worry about that," I said about the cannons. "This one time I heard a joke about a duck who went to the library…"

I didn't know how we'd survived the Bloodbath. Okay, I guess I knew how Alice lived. She was the cute one, one that probably popped up every year. All the Careers knew they had to kill her eventually but none of them wanted to be the one who took that step. People like Alice survived the Bloodbath just because of that. Really I didn't know why I'd survived so long. I wasn't skilled. I didn't have strong allies. I was just a normal kid from an overlooked District that hadn't won in decades. Eight didn't have the strength of the Career Districts and didn't even have the physical prowess of the outer Districts. We just sat around and spun fabric all day. It was no wonder we hadn't won the Games more than twice.

Later people said I had one of the funniest performances in the Games. It just seemed ghoulish to me. I didn't see anything funny in trying to make a child's last days bearable. I tried to cheer Alice up because I knew at any moment she and I would be brutally murdered. Real funny. You know what it's like to tell a joke because you want a little girl to smile one more time before someone sticks a sword through her heart?

There's so much luck in the Games. I guess that's the ultimate joke to the Career Districts. All these children who trained almost from birth to win the Games and it was a nobody from District Eight. None of the Careers even cracked the top four. Half of them died at the hands- hooves, really- of beasts the size of houses who didn't even realize they'd trampled them. The others died in a fire started by God knows who. Every last Career was dead before the final four started to converge on the center of the Arena looking for that last fight before one hollowed-out and empty-eyed husk went home.

I never knew who it was that killed Alice. I only saw a little girl wide-eyed as a spear went through her. I never paused to look at who'd thrown it. Later I never watched the tapes. It was another child who was just doing what they had to do to stay alive, I told myself. I didn't ever want to watch the tape because I didn't ever want to know what dead child I was supposed to hate. So I just knelt by her and tried to hold the life in her tiny body and then watched it leak out of her and fly away. A lot of people commented later that I didn't have a joke in those final minute. No shit I didn't have a joke. I wasn't a humor dispenser handing out levity for the benefit of others. I was a child watching a little girl die. Somehow I didn't see anything jovial in that. Alice Silvin convulsed in her last minutes on Earth, her life torn out by another child holding a spear and trying to stay alive. Do you see something funny in that?

People always think I have some hilarious story of how I won. They assume the last competitor slipped on a banana peel or fell into a manhole. Lanie Mather died of starvation thirteen days into the Games. In her last moments in this world she stuffed dirt into her mouth thinking it was food. Real funny, right? Who would think dirt was food? That was how I won the Games. Go ahead and laugh. Have a good long laugh at a child's death.

Got drunk and came through on a promise to drunk write a one shot at victory. So anyway drunk me is really dark.