A Capitol Citizen Who Is Out of a Job
District Twelve was - that was going to take some getting used to - never anybody's idea of what a perfect place to live would look like. It was really never anybody's idea of what a nice place to visit would look like. Still, it was odd to think that there were no longer any sentences that could accurately use the grammar "District Twelve is" unless they were of the "District Twelve is gone" variety.
It was strange how that shift in verbs left one feeling nostalgic for things that it had never occurred to you that you would miss. People spent years attempting to get on the roster for covering a different District. No one wanted to be the one who had to spend days setting up and taking down for Reaping Day or the Victory Tour in the furthest out of the options. It was the one benefit of being assigned to District Twelve that you had not needed to go back to interview families of the final eight since their Tributes never made it that far (or had not for many, many years in a row). There was little love for District Twelve among those who were responsible for providing the others in the Capitol their little glimpses of it before and during and after the Games. There was little love for most Districts among those that were assigned to them by those in charge, but other places tended to have redeeming qualities of one sort or another - there was the ocean to see in Four, etc. He wouldn't know. He had never been to any of the other Districts, but there was a certain degree of one-upmanship amongst the workers, and those assigned to District Twelve had always fallen toward the bottom of the scale.
He had been a part of the District Twelve crew for enough decades to remember before the last time they had had a Victor. He, somehow, had always been competent enough to keep his job, but he had never been good enough or noticed enough to move on to bigger and better things. So, he had returned to District Twelve with its dirt and the dust that stuck to everything it touched (or happened to touch it) year after year after year. He never looked forward to going, but something about knowing that he would never see it again made him think of the little things that he had managed to enjoy over the years when he did.
There had been a candy shop (in District Twelve it had simply been called a candy shop as opposed to the insistence upon being referred to as confectioners that similar places adhered to in the Capitol) quite some time ago that had made these simple little concoctions of chocolate and caramel with nuts sticking out of them like little arms or legs that had tasted amazing. He had always brought a box back with him when it was time to go back home (they were too simple to be carried by the fashionable confectioners in the Capitol who only sold trendy items that were being touted as the "in" thing to buy at any particular moment).
He missed those candies. He had always told himself that he would make the box that he took home last, but he had always caved and gobbled them up within a few days of his return to his apartment (it took longer to get the coal dust off his clothes than it did to finish off that addictive bit of sugar). He had always taken a walk by the place where the shop used to be just to see if anyone had ever reopened it. They never had. Now, they never would. He had always been sorry to see that it was still gone. Now, he would never again have even that off chance to look forward to - it was a shame.
There were other little pleasures to be found in the place - the piano music you might chance upon when in the mayor's home, the pretty woman from the District Official's Office that was in charge of the keys for the storage room where the pieces for the Reaping Day platform were kept, and the strangely soothing, left to go wild picturesqueness of that place the locals called the Meadow that he always found himself making time to take in for a while. He never would have noticed that he did actually enjoy bits and pieces of his visits as much as he did if they had not been taken away from him. It was funny to think of it working out that way.
He wondered what they would do with the ruins. It was not the same as District Thirteen with the impossibility of anyone unshielded going back. According to the newsfeeds, they had bombed the place with the regular kind of bombs and let the coal dust burn everything to the ground. When the burning was over, he supposed that people could go back. Would they send some? Would they move people out of some of the more crowded Districts? Or would they leave the District as an ash ridden wasteland forever?
He knew he was not a man who bothered with much in the way of thinking (he had never really needed to be that kind of a man), but it seemed to him that there would come a point in time when they were going to need some more coal. He might not understand a lot of things, but he did know that coal did not pull itself out of the ground. Someone had to do the pulling or picking or whatever it was that they did to get at it.
He found himself hoping that they would send new people to rebuild District Twelve. He found he wanted to keep going back to what the others (and he himself if he were being honest) often referred to as the forsaken District. They should send people there when everything calmed back down (not that anyone would ever ask him his opinion on the subject). Maybe, if he was very lucky, someone that got sent there would have an old recipe for candy that they were willing to make and sell.