Chapter Text
Prologue
My reality was once not so drab. Red wool mittens, sparkling blue ponds, our sheep dyed green from freshly cut grass. The sun kissed my face a little more deeply; my mother’s hugs were warmer, squeezing me for one extra second that I still find myself counting for. Now I am shrouded in charcoal, shadow, iron, ash. The closest thing we have to red is wood, rotting and moldy. Even the mold isn’t green, just a creeping lacework of black that threatens to crawl into my throat while I sleep.
My mother always says “Change is just one scary letter away from chance.” She believes that we are lucky we always know where our bread is buttered, both literally and figuratively. Change means a chance for things to go wrong. Each day feels the same as it did the first day we moved into the inner District, when I was nine years old. I wake, go to school, go to work, go home. To a soot-gray home. On a soot-gray street. In a soot-gray District.
***
I was raised in a farmhouse, learning to hem and embroider by firelight, one of my mother’s quilts protecting me from the cold, stone floor. During any time away from school, I worked, but it didn’t feel like work. There was no clocking in or out, no minder or Peacekeeper snapping about reaching quotas. While the product we produced on the farm, the wool that we sheared each year, went to the Capitol, my work felt important to my house and family. I saw the lambs grow from the food we harvested. I could see the quality of the wool improve as I cleaned and bundled it, side by side with my father, my mother in the kitchen making dinner. Now, I never see the fruits of my labor. At the end of a shift at the factory, I hand over a pile of hemmed sheets, and still have to do my own chores and responsibilities at home. My mother now works long hours hunched over her hand-projects, too busy to cook more than porridge most nights. My father cleans one of the factories now, which means he has to work through the night, sleeping a fitful few hours during the day; of all of us that remember our little life on the farm, it is my father who suffers most.