Chapter Text
“‘Flying has nothing to do with straining to rise,’ he said. ‘Make friends with the wind, wrap your arms around it. It will lift you if you let it.’”
Jabari Asim
The First Annual Hunger Games have begun and nobody is moving.
My eyes find Grace. There she is, like a bird, posture ready for flight. Wilted flower in her thick black hair. I think she’s humming.
The people in the stands are jeering. An empty can bounces down and lands at my feet. In the centre of the ring of tributes, a pile of weapons glistens untouched.
Maybe if we all stay like this, motionless, the Capitol people will let us go home. They can’t make us fight each other, can they?
The crowds are shouting for us to do something. Over the din, I pretend I can hear Grace’s song. It’s a harvest song, familiar from long days in the orchards. Grace and her siblings, all of them so little, tossing peaches down to us big kids.
A shot rings out. My heart catches in my throat. The crowd gasps, but it was a warning shot. No time to think about what they’re warning. Two more shots.
Grace falls.
I lunge forward. Her unfinished song dangles in the air. Around me, tributes surge for weapons, terrified they could be the next with a bullet in their skull. I have lost sight of her. Dust clouds crest in the air, starved and sweaty bodies crash into each other. In the stands, the cries turn to cheers. Where did she go?
I remember when she was born. My parents took me and Pippin next door to see the new baby. We gathered around her crib and stared at her. Everybody held their breath, as if the slightest sound, the slightest movement would wake her from her blissful sleep. Only the sunbeams dared to shift.
Even for a newborn, she was small, wrapped tidily in a strip of white cloth. Finally, her mother spoke, voice barely a coo.
“We named her Grace. Like herb-of-grace, the little yellow flowers that grow in the orchards.” Her dark gaze was fixed fondly on the wrinkled baby.
Pippin, only seven, made a face. “I’ve always heard that flower’s called rue.”
“Well, I think Grace is mighty prettier.” The baby stirred, and her mother reached into the crib. Grace whimpered, then calmed against her mother’s breast.
I was too young, then, to recall my little brother’s birth. Grace was the first life I had seen fresh and frail and precious, so tiny it was hard to believe she was a live thing. I was transfixed by her; I insisted on staying by her side so she could see me when she woke up. Her eyes were river pebbles, deep and bright. When she wailed, it sounded like a song.
I saw her fall, but I can’t see her now. It’s all dust and bodies. I’m pushing towards her when a blade misses my side. I don’t see who it is. I only know that they are trying to kill me before I can get to Grace. I grab at them and hear a snap. In a blind haze, I fumble for their sword and pull it from limp hands.
Dust and bodies. I cannot see or breathe or taste anything other than blood. Like a broken song, the thought beats through me: I need to get to her. Nothing else matters. Nothing else is real. They are people, I will later realize, that I am killing, children with families who will mourn them and dreams they will never see realized. But I saw Grace fall and I can’t find her, and they are in my way.
Then it must be over, because I am holding Grace in a sea of mutilated bodies. The gunshot knocked the flower from her hair. I shakily pick it up and put it back into place. I think the crowd is cheering, and a voice is booming out from the loudspeakers, but I can’t hear them. I can only hear Grace’s unfinished melody, coming to an end on my lips.
Mockingbird up on the branch
Nesting in this apple tree
Picking time so fly away
Fly away
Fly away
Picking time so fly away
Fly away with me.
In District 11, they say that we’re descended from people who can fly. Sometimes, in the old stories, wings sprout from those fieldworkers’ backs, like seedlings from soil. In other tales their arms do the job just fine.
“Imagine that,” Grace would say, perched in a tree picking fruit. “People like birds, soaring through the sky. You could go just about anywhere.”
“And where would you go?” I would ask her.
A puzzled sort of look would cross her face. “I’d go somewhere better,” she’d say, staring at the endlessly unfolding blue sky. “And I’d take that somewhere and bring it right back here.”
They put me on a train to District 11. Grace comes home with me, in a box, and I just want to open it and let her free. It’s not right to cover up someone who should’ve had wings. There’s not supposed to be a layer of dirt in between us and the sky.
I am barely awake and barely lucid when my siblings pull me off the train. They’re saying “damned Capitol bastards” and “how’re we supposed to find an amputator” and “blood poisoning”, and Pippin is holding my sweat-soaked head.
“You came back to us,” she’s sobbing. I hate to see my older sister cry, but all I can say before the fever claims me is you have to get Grace out of there, she can’t stand it.
When I wake up, I am told that my right calf had to be amputated. I can’t think of anyone in District 11 who can afford a medic, but apparently a bunch of the town people pitched in for me. Grace’s siblings most of all. I don’t understand. I didn’t save her.
My dreams are vivid and horrifying. Trees made of blood thrash in a violent tempest, fields of mangled body parts claw at me. I watch the firing squad tie my parents’ hands behind their backs. I am an animal, tearing apart everything I touch, watching helplessly as my siblings are shredded in my claws. Guns fire. Birds die. Babies scream and cry a cacophonous tune.
Grace’s funeral. I lean on a wooden stick and stare at the ground where they put her. It must be so dark down there. So suffocating. In my long days of sleep, Pippin woke me up several times, hoping to silence my calls for Grace. Selfishly, I avoid her family, until her little sister brings me a plate of cornbread and stewed peaches. Good food, comfort food, that the community must have rallied to prepare. After a moment of hesitation, she hugs my good leg, too. I just stare at her.
“But I didn’t save her,” I croak. “I didn’t.”
The girl looks pensively up at the clouds. “That’s alright. She just flew away.”
After this, my dreams are softer. I watch birds for hours in my sleep. Sometimes they turn to the people I love, gliding past clouds and over orchards. I see my parents, my mother’s long, dark braids streaming out behind her like branches. They soar towards the sun and disappear. Grace sits nestled against the bough of a tree, singing. I can’t reach her, but I don’t try. She takes flight the way I always knew she could.
Bring it back for us, I think to her on bad days, when my nightmares return, on July 4th when the Capitol train comes to take two more children to the slaughter. Bring us that somewhere better, Grace.
Every year, the orchards bloom to abundance in the autumn, and shrivel in the winter. The cardinals and chickadees pipe their calls from sparse branches that extend like bony fingers. Every year, the people of District 11 spend the cold months working in the greenhouses, and return to the fields in the spring, to plant and prune. The sun brings the songs of the whip-poor-wills and warblers. In the summer, the orchards are bathed in green, and the days of maintenance are long. Every year, the people of District 11 die in swaths, from starvation, illness, work injuries, Peacekeeper rifles, and the reaping. And every year, the mockingjays sing back to us from the treetops.
Oh, Grace. I think of her always. Sometimes, I even dream that I can fly.