#primerose

It was time.

I staggered in a haze, falling in and out of lucidity as I made my way to the outer rim of the square. I was to stand and watch, to be complacent to this grotesque display of power. My hand clenched at my throat, the sun beating down across my face as rings of sweat pooled and dripped from my face, my arms and my shaking back. 

I could hear them all. The hearts of every mother screaming out to their children pinned within the square. Each one of their voices raw as they reached out to the children they birthed, they raised, they loved. The screaming was drowned out by the rush of blood in my ears and the pounding of my heart, as Effie Trinket took to the stage. My tongue felt as if it was expanding, cutting off my air and choking me. I could feel everyone behind me press against me as they leaned forward, closer to the square. It was their desperate attempt to catch a glimpse of their children as mothers clung to fathers whose fingers twitched and pulled at their collars.

Effie’s mouth moved against the microphone but I couldn’t hear her. The fog that clung to my mind now so thick and consuming, it felt like it was swallowing me up. Like that day so many years ago. When the mine exploded into flames and rubble and left embers in my heart.  

Suddenly Effie began to walk across the stage, to the large bowl that housed a thousand scraps of paper. Each now a home to the names of every girl within the square. Some more than once, some a dozen times and some more than twenty, more than forty. A slim, pale hand reached into the bowl and rifled around the scraps of paper, before it settled on a single slip and pulled it forth, like a tick leaving flesh. 

That was what the Capitol was, leaching off the backs of the Districts, sucking their lives and children from them. 

My eyes could only trace Effie’s movements back towards the center of the stage, back to the microphone that she would use to usher someone to their death and she would do it with a smile like she always had. She tapped on the microphone, the loud thudding finally breaking through my clogged years, the blood draining from my face, my heart stopping in my chest when she smiled brightly and said my daughter’s name. 

“Primrose Everdeen.”

My world shifted around me.

I was gone, tuned out in mere seconds, to a time that was easier. To when Jacob would grip my face and tell me everything was okay, while he ran his thick fingers through my blonde hair. How his voice would sing the girls and me to sleep, how he would wake me in the middle of the night with heated kisses, his fingers slipping between my thighs.

The black layer of dust coating the living room floor was coal. The same coal that I found behind Katniss' ears and in the creases of Prim's knobby knees. It was coal that lined the seams of Jacob's eyes, crows feet splitting from the corners of his grey eyes as he sang and laughed. 

Prim wobbling around the front room, Katniss sitting on the porch delicately emptying the little brown sack at her hip, beaming as she recounted each plant and recited what her father had told her. Life was different here, in the Seam, but it was the life that I had chosen. The day I had seen him, three squirrels tied with a bit of string and slung over his shoulder, his coveralls lose around his waist. I had heard him before I had actually ever laid eyes on him.

I was out in the yard, collecting herbs from my father's garden, listening to the birds sing their lovely tunes when they had stopped. His voice was haunting, the low baritone sending vibrations through my spine as I spied him walking through the streets of merchant row. He had glanced in my direction and pressed on, never looking back. 

The next day he had come to the apothecary with a handful of medicinal herbs, rare ones, my father had said. He came back the next day and the next and every day he sang a sweet tune as he passed.  

The day my father told me that when I came of age I was to marry the baker’s son, I ran away with Jacob Everdeen, a rat from the Seam.  

Lily’s thoughts dissolved as another memory tore through her.

“Just like your mother you are,” Jacob picked Prim from the floor, dusting off her soot-stained knees. “Pretty blonde hair, my little blue-eyed girl,” Jacob cleaned the tears from Prim’s eyes has he righted her. 

Lily smiled at the seen in front of her. 

“You’ve even got your mother’s delicate hands,” Jacob’s laughter boomed across the room. 

“She is only a year old, what do you expect? Her to be working in the mines or combing the forest floor with you and Katniss.” My blue eyes focused on Jacob, hard as ice. 

“I’ll wait until she is ten. I won’t start her as young as Katniss. I promise.” Jacob sighed from the floor and cast a loving glance at Prim. “I don’t think she has the heart for it anyways. She is like her mother, I see it in her eyes. Calm, like the lake just past the Meadow”

“And Katniss?” My voice clung with curiosity. 

“Katniss,” Jacob hummed as he turned to look into my calm blue eyes. His grey ones burning into mine and marking me. He didn’t need to tell me who Katniss was like. I already knew. 

She was him, all heat and emotion burning beneath the surface. If Prim was calm like a lake with unflinching waters than Katniss was chaotic like the mines. She was strong and brave, not afraid to fall and pick herself back up, or protect. 

Katniss was everything that I loved in her father, bundled up in a daughter. Which was why my heart only smoldered, embers cracking when I heard her voice ring out across the square, breaking me from my trance. 

“I volunteer! I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE!”

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