11 - SILVER
Indigo presses her face against the cool glass of the train window with a heavy sigh, her warm breath clouding the surface and momentarily obscuring the world blurring together outside the train car. They're gliding through the outer reaches of Six now, the lifeless expanses where the pollutants are dumped and almost nothing can live. Dark, soupy gray marshes cover the ground, and skinny silver-barked trees reach up towards the smoggy sky like skeletons clawing their way out of a mass grave. Thin arms reaching up helplessly, grasping at the flinty white air only to find there's nothing to hold onto but the lowest whispers of smog.
Indigo imagines leaping from the train and letting every one of her bones break against the soft, rotted ground outside, letting her body join this barely living cemetery of a place. It would be a better fate than what awaits her in the Capitol, she knows, and it would be over sooner, too. At least if she had to bleed to death alone, half-buried in marshy gunk, she wouldn't have to pretend as if she actually had a chance to survive this whole thing. She could lay there, slowly being submerged in the watery mud-soup, and maybe even smile as the dirty swamp hurried to fill her mouth. She would be going her own way, doing to herself what some brute from the Career Districts would probably end up doing to her anyway in the end.
So if she could jump out she would, but she knows the Capitol is too smart for there to be any simple way out of the train. She's never heard of a tribute killing themselves before the Games before, so she knows she probably can't do it. She knows she has to sit down, let her awful thoughts drain away, and try to think of a way to survive. But she can't. All she can do is keep her face up against the cold window, watching the dead silver trees begging the sky for help as the train shoots like one long pewter bullet down the tracks.
She should have known it would happen to her. She was taking sixty tesserae just to keep from starving to death this year. She just thought everyone took lots of tesserae in Six, so it wouldn't matter. Everytime she would bring home the bag of grain and the bottle of corn oil, her father would be satisified. He would never thank her as he began to make oatmeal on their ancient stove. Not even a smile. But he usually wouldn't hit her that night or the night after that, and that was enough for her to consider each tesserae slip well worth their weight in silver denarii. Now, if she could, she'd take every extra slap and kick if it meant she wouldn't have to be on this train.
Indigo shifts her position in the window seat, letting her legs slip from underneath her. She's in new clothes now, socks with tight elastic on her cold feet, loose satin pants with a shapeless cotton shift stitched over on the edges with metallic thread. She traces the hard seamless coils of wire spiraled in each seam of the top as she looks down the empty hallway of the train. She looks at the closed steel doors into the adjacent bedrooms, at the chrome sconces emanating a harsh white light on the birch-bark wallpaper, at the exposed iron arches along the ceiling that look like rising monstrous ribs. She rests in the alcove with her feet in the shag carpet like she's in the plush belly of some slithering metal beast. She imagines the marsh flooding her lungs again; she imagines her father stirring oats methodically in a grimy iron saucepan.
She then gets to thinking about big boys with broadswords the length of their entire arms flashing like liquid mercury in the horrid light of some grim arena, and she can't take it anymore. She gets up, she paces back and forth down the long hallway, the belly of the beast, both of her cold hands grasping her limp, dark hair. She tries to think of something; an escape hatch in the ceiling, breaking a window, begging an Avox for help, but everything always comes back to drowning. She stops pacing, she just breathes, really feeling it this time, the slippery sinking. The rush of lumpy fluid over cheekbones, lip corners, up into flared, scenting nostrils. She imagines peat bogs the color of the old, dull screws she used to twist into the stark skeletons of Peacekeeper jalopies on the assembly line. She is imagining many things. She thinks she is swaying; she thinks she is falling. Her face is against the white carpet, she is seeing the silver birch-bark wallpaper, the scabbed-over black gashes, like so many scars, so many wounds, like once-bleeding eyes with the lids sewn shut.
When the Avox finds her, she's somewhere between unconscious and asleep, splayed on the white shag hallway runner scarcely breathing. She simply summons one of her compatriots, and together they carry the exhausted scrap of a girl to her bed, burying her in the sheaves of heavy raw silk. Indigo doesn't struggle, she just slips further into her cloudy dreams of swamp water and screaming stick-trees, forgetting the bullet train, forgetting the Career boys, forgetting her father's wide swing. Her whole life in Six has been a drowning, and while she is willing to give into it for a while, in those compressing sheets, looking anywhere but ahead, she finds purchase eventually, her head breaks the surface, the loose ground does not suck her all the way down.
Drowning, gulping, searching with slow hands under muck; it is here she realizes, looking at a slate sky sewn up by rows of twisted pewter clouds, that she wants color; she needs it. Submerged, breathless, wire-boned, she is bending onto herself, onto other things; nothing much makes sense. But to keep her mouth from filling with the lukewarm milky water, she starts remembering the colors, naming them, loving them. She was always looking for scraps of vibrant things on the dulled streets of Six: a flutter of a rich girl's minty dress hem, an old puckered magenta barrette in somebody's hair, the rind of a half-rotted green melon. She starts thinking of these colors, and when they are coming onto her, when she is finally coming awake- the train is already near enough to the most colorful place in Panem, a place with more colors than she has ever seen.
However, outside the sleeping girl's window, in the fallen pewter light of dusk, she cannot see the serrated chrome skyline of the Capitol, like an open mouth of some robotic beast, mouth agape, waiting to gulp down some slow-moving prey. A venus fly-trap built of steel beams, iron rivets, and gleaming plate glass. Inside the jagged silver city a thousand colors await, sinister, glistering, sharp-eyed. Just like the syrupy bog, pouring cloudy over her loose body in her drowning daydreams, it hides a vividness she cannot describe, cannot begin to imagine.
The train continues to skim over its parallel steel tracks, the propulsion mechanisms firing, the meandering landscape quickly flitting by on the dull chrome body of the racing snake, about to make its lunging bite. In sleep, Indigo's lips part, she draws in a ragged breath. She lets it go. The marsh water rises. Her roots in that decomposing, cushiony earth begin to rot. The one-way mirror sky covers all.
She finds herself on the other side of the one-way mirror the first time she takes morphling soon after her Games. The memory is fractured, like a broken watch-face, the little silver hands counting minutes and seconds frozen in time, arrows pointing uncertainly between the lit-up chrome numbers like paths untaken, like doors barred and locked. She remembers sweaty sheets, she remembers an empty water glass on the table. The doctor had left that morning. He had left her a box of things in the sitting room. Things to "steady her nerves", the way an old man talks about a nip of whiskey. She has already drank whiskey the night before. It did not work like Mercedes said it would. She remembers bare feet on the wooden steps, clammy hands squeaking down the slick bannister. Among the ceramic statuettes and vases of false fabric flowers, the black cloth bag on the sitting room table, mahogany seamed with opal. Inconspicuous, but like a black shroud of death, of blindness, the fabric holding milky, mercury-quick cataracts drawn out into long plastic vials.
Then, each component in her unskilled hands, shaky fingers conjuring. A summoning in the darkness of her living room, witnessed only by the wicker-backed chairs, the porcelain cherubs, the metallic spyhole cameras bugged into invisible slots in the walls. The performance begins: the slender syringe like a polished wand, the plunger the incantation, the morphling the body-consuming spell. The needle is the offering knife; her body, her mind, her memory; they are the ingredients. They are the blood sacrifice. She is more than ready to give them up.
When the needle point slots into the crook of her arm, glinting and cold against the soft skin that gives too easily, her veins fill and shudder like water balloons over-filled. The syringe drops to the ground, empty, no longer a magic wand, only a tube of plastic, spattered with a few droplets of clumsy blood. Her body swims. She is trying to swim. She gets to one of the wicker-backed chairs; it creaks under her sudden weight as her head falls back, as she opens her mouth, long breath, one full of fog. Fogging up her insides, the curves of her skull, a cavern of mist thick and heavy, curtains of it, theater curtains of mist she shoulders through, searching for the opening, the center stage, where her weight doesn't wait around, but where the colors do, where she is a pewter jug wholly emptied out, ready to be filled with, what else? The only thing she cares about anymore. Some condensation on the rim. She is welling. Dew droplets skidding on a window, crossing each other's paths, overlapping, coming together as one, the race suspended and then begun again with renewed haste.
Everything is suspended; she is sediment suspended in water, drifting down, lazily, towards the bottom of whatever body of water she is in now. She feels waves lapping her, she feels silver fish darting by in the low warm dark, spiny backs against the bottoms of bare feet, against bowed knees. She is grinning ear to ear. Usually, when she gets high, she will rush past the suspension. She will shoulder her way to the colors without pause. This time, however, she is slow. She stops fighting for it for once. She floats. She bobs. She can see everything, but nothing can see her. She is invisible. She is- the thoughts fall out, the body falls out, there is no memory but the cold marsh water rising, the soupy ground, a young body breaking, split by roots, roots holding up trees split by sky, sky a silver scudding fender, chassis cover, broken headlights, never reflecting, always refracting. Broken themometer, mirror shards, memory spokes; she likes nonsense when she is high. She likes to be more whole than everything that surrounds her.
Not even a mile from her house, where she lays sprawled, the morphling pumping through her immobile veins, a rusted iron train lumbers to life in the railyard. As its old wheels begin to skid against the tracks, slowly picking up speed, Indigo tosses slightly in the chair, mouth opening and closing, gumming some unknown words, unspeakable things, of flooding, of drowning, of underwater weightlessness, of clotting night wetness. In one thought, she is nearly dead; she is not in the gullet, she is not being swallowed. There is an escape, at least for a little while. She sighs. The old train is already halfway gone. It whistles into the night to announce its going, a high, whinnying thing. Indigo's loosened lips form a little o. Her breath is quiet but it almost whistles, too. She's going. She hopes she never comes back down at all.
A/N: I'm almost done with this story, so I've decided to come back and wrap it up to get me back into the writing spirit. Chapters 12 and 13 are already written, so expect them soon. Hopefully I can close out Indigo's story soon once and for all!
Until Next Time,
Tracee