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“A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass.”
Richard Adams
Before Cinder Sutherland’s grandmother died, she made her promise that when wartime came - Nana Iris always spoke like that, never convinced that peace in Panem would last - Cinder would never let them make her less than what she was. If you have to die, Nana said, before they make you turn on your fellow man, before they rape you and piss on you and force you to eat the rotting bodies in the street, then you die. What else can you sat to a crazy old woman, especially one who loves you? Cinder promised she would, and held her grandmother’s wrinkled hand until she slipped peacefully out of the world.
Nana left Cinder with this promise and a silver pendant from before the war. It was her prized possession; a fitting gift for her favourite grandchild. To the rest of the family, however, she had nothing to leave but need. Cinder’s father and brothers would have to pick up additional shifts at the quarry to earn back the money and scrip they had spent on little tinctures from the apothecary and, once, a visit from a medic. Nana Iris’s sickness had been long and hard. Cinder tentatively offered to sell the pendant, but her parents wouldn’t let her.
A week after the funeral, Cinder found her grandmother’s last present. The letter was left on the doorstep, written in a lazy scrawl, and addressed to Iris Sutherland’s granddaughter. Work for you in Prize town if you’ll have it. Ask for Flint Marsh. Good pay. A favour for the old woman. I put a train token in the envelope.
No sender, and of course no return address, the post offices being shut down before Cinder was born. The Sutherlands were all suspicious, but good pay was at least worth checking out.
You could theoretically travel District 2 by train, from the quarry towns to the District Square. The problem was you needed a token, and those weren’t given without Capitol approval. Who was this person? What job did they have for her, important enough to require a token? Cinder stood on the platform, rubbing the cool surface of her Nana’s pendant. She had never left her quarry town before.
The train was sparsely furnished, the ride to Prize town short. Whatever this job was, if her employer provided her with tokens, Cinder could easily travel to and from her hometown every day. She had always thought the mining towns of 2 were more isolated. If it weren’t for the fences, it wouldn’t be impossible to hike the distance.
Cinder stepped off the train. Prize looked more or less the same as Cinder’s hometown of Creed, if a bit more rundown: houses shackled together from flimsy wooden planks, paint peeling off roofs, piles of quarry debris clustered around buildings. She pulled the letter out of her pocket and read it again. Ask for Flint Marsh. The name sounded almost familiar, but if she’d ever know she had forgotten now.
Mustering her nerves, Cinder found a dusty general store and approached the clerk.
“Hello,” she said, unsure of how to approach a stranger. “Do you know where I can find a Flint Marsh?”
The man eyed her curiously, probably trying to figure out if he knew her.
“I’m from out-of-town,” she offered. He nodded.
“Marsh lives just by the fence to the south,” he told her, voice gruff. “Don’t know why you’d want to see him, though. Miserable old drunkard.”
Cinder winced at this news. “I work for him now. I think.”
The clerk shook his head. “Couldn’t pay me anything to work for that man. Well, good luck, then.”
Cinder thanked him and bought a small loaf of bread with the money her mother had given her in case she needed it. Probably best to make a good first impression on this Marsh, if he really was a miserable old drunkard.
It was midday, and the streets of Prize were quiet, the noise reserved for the quarry. Cinder walked south until she saw the barbed wire fence stretching out against the stark blue sky. On a slight hill, dark in the nest of trees that surrounded it, was a small house. Cinder’s chest fluttered with anxiety as she approached the cabin and knocked on the door.
No response. Not a sound from inside the house. Cinder inspected her boots, then carefully noted the details of the surrounding environment, then tried to peek through the window. The moth-eaten curtains were drawn.
She must’ve waited for ten minutes before she knocked again, more insistently. Another couple minutes passed, then a resounding thud. A gravelly voice from inside cursed loudly.
The door swung open.
“What do you want?” A foul-smelling old man shoved his snarling face in front of Cinder’s. She blinked and took a step back, nearly tripping off the porch.
“I’m here for a job,” she stammered. “You- or, somebody sent me a letter. I’m Iris Sutherland’s granddaughter. This is Flint Marsh’s house, right?”
The man looked at her wildly, like an animal unsure whether to fight or flee. He was ragged; pale and jaundiced with overgrown, uncombed gray hair, his frame meagre and shaking. Cinder wasn’t sure whether she wanted to recoil in disgust, or help him get to bed.
Before she had time to decide, however, he bent over and vomited on her boots.
…
Flint Marsh was dying of liver disease. He was also the Victor of the 6th Hunger Games. He was also, as Cinder quickly found out, a belligerent asshole.
“Why would you hire me if you’re just going to yell at me all day?” Cinder grumbled, wrinkling her nose. All of Flint’s shirts reeked of stale vomit, and his bedsheets were even worse. Cinder guessed they hadn’t been washed in years. When she’d arrived, they had been infested with bedbugs, and now her job was to deal with that and all the other things Flint was too drunk and senile to deal with himself. He hadn’t lied in his letter, though - the pay was very good.
Flint scoffed as Cinder aggressively shoved another shirt into the washtub. “I didn’t want to hire you. Happy dying on my own, thank you very much.”
“Why’d Nana even write you?” Cinder stopped scrubbing at the washboard and looked up at Flint, who was lying on his couch, drinking. “She never told me she knew a Victor.”
He sighed and sat himself up. “Well, winning wasn’t always such a spectacle. We didn’t used to be Capitol bootlickers here in 2. Not all of us.” He scowled and spat on the ground.
Cinder frowned at the glob of spit. “Thanks, I didn’t have enough to do yet.”
“You’ve gotta earn your keep somehow.” He tipped back the bottle of moonshine. When the liquor trickled into his thick beard, he didn’t wipe it away, just muttered something and laid back down. Cinder refrained from gagging.
“You’re killing yourself with that, you know,” she said pointlessly. Of course he knew that, but it annoyed her to see him throw his life away. He wasn’t much older than 70 - a whole ten years younger than Nana Iris - but he had the health of an ancient man. His gaunt form had become prone to bouts of swelling, the whites of his eyes were dandelion-yellow, and holding down food seemed to be a constant struggle.
“What do I have to stick around for, anyway?” Flint muttered into the bottle. Cinder thought he was going to say something else, but instead he closed his eyes and fell silent.
“Brutus is only paying me as long as you’re alive,” Cinder said, mostly to see if he was asleep or not. “So how about you hold out for a few more months?”
He guffawed, a harsh and strangled sound. A bit of moonshine sloshed over the edge of the bottle. “Funny. I can see why Iris liked you best.”
Cinder gathered the wet laundry in a bundle and carried it to Flint’s yard. She had set up the clothesline; apparently he hadn’t much use for one, as he never did laundry. Had Nana really told some old friend or acquaintance of hers about Cinder? The thought made her chest ache as she hung up Flint’s clothes.
Walking back inside, she helped Flint sit up properly on the couch. “Tell me how you knew my Nana.”
He was quiet as she went to his little kitchen and made him lunch. Not much, just a sandwich with cured elk from the general store. She hoped he would keep it down. She poured him a glass of milk, too, since it was supposed to be good for the stomach.
Halfway through his meal, Flint said, “I was born in Creed. Knew Iris from town. She was older than me, so we weren’t friends, but I knew her and she looked after me a bit when my parents were executed.”
He chewed the sandwich. Every sound drained out of the room. His parents had been executed? And he had been sent to the Hunger Games? “When I got back from the Capitol, everyone was so happy, y’know, that I made it out. Some of them said I was brave. Some of them acted like I was a patriot even though they knew what my folks were shot for. A lot of them didn’t even have a television set, so they didn’t see what went down. But Iris did. She saw what I did. She said I was repulsive. Just like that, all the world’s hatred in her voice.”
Flint swallowed the last bite of bread and elk meat. “I used to hunt these past the fence when I was young. With my pop.” Leaving half a glass of milk, he stood up, went to his bedroom, and closed the door.
Cinder had never seen any of the old Games. The re-runs they played on the television were rarely older than the 25th Games, and Cinder didn’t have time to watch television anyway. That night, after getting the train home to Creed, she stopped at half the houses in town and asked if they had a tape of the 6th Hunger Games. Nobody did, so she wrote to Brutus Roybal . He was the Victor of the 43rd Games, and, out of some kindness or belief that every winner deserved to reap the benefits, he insisted on providing financial support to the Victors of the early years. Every two weeks he sent a Peacekeeper to Flint’s house with enough money for food and drink (usually more drink than food), and Cinder’s salary. The next time that day came, Cinder handed the Peacekeeper the letter to Brutus and hoped he’d pass it along.
Watching Flint die was different than watching her Nana die. Nana Iris hung onto life, dwindling in her bed with memories festering on her lips. Even so, when it was her time, she let her body slacken, her hand still in Cinder’s. Flint, on the other hand, was constantly starting fights with life just to lose on purpose. When Cinder watched him rinse the taste of vomit out of his mouth with more liquor, it felt like she was watching him spit in life’s face.
When the tape came, Cinder, watching the video flicker to life on her family’s old television set, wondered how anyone could change so much in one lifetime. The younger Flint was strong, tall, and suntanned. His hair was dark and thick as Cinder’s own, and when they pulled his name from the bowl, he steeled himself and walked forward silently. Refusing to cry or fight, refusing to let the Capitol win.
There was no chariot parade, no interviews, no costumes. The tape cut from the reaping to the start of the Games, which took place in an actual sporting stadium. When Cinder looked for the Cornucopia, she found only a pile of weapons in the middle of the stadium. It was all so… primitive. Cinder shuddered.
When the countdown finished, she saw Flint sprint towards the pile of weapons. He grabbed the closest thing he could reach, a mace. The footage was blurry and taken from far away, but Cinder could still make out the expression on his face. Feral, animalistic. She watched for hours in the dim light as Flint Marsh, son of executed rebels, bludgeoned five children to death to win the Capitol’s Games.
The trumpets went off when the last one was dead. On screen, Flint shook his head, desperately refusing his victory as Peacekeepers dragged him out of the stadium.
…
“Flint? Where are - oh, fuck!”
He was lying face-down in a puddle of vomit. When Cinder sat him up to check if he was still breathing, she found blood streaming from his nose.
Alive as he was, the only thing Cinder could think to do was clean him up and put him to bed. She wiped the gunk away from his face, and did her best to soak his hair. His clothes had to come off, but it was nothing she hadn’t seen before. The past few months had given her an unwanted education in the bodies of sickly old men.
She prepared a jug of water for him and sat by his bedside reading until he woke up. Most people in District 2 didn’t own books, and Cinder had been glad to find out that Flint had a couple. They must have been pretty old, because the inside cover of the one she was reading, about rabbits who could talk, had a message written in faded ink. For Flint, love Mommy.
Flint muttered something unintelligible as he stirred. Cinder put down the book and poured him a glass of water. “You’re awake? Here, drink this.”
She it to his lips. His eyes were barely open, but he drank it slowly. When the cup was drained, Cinder waited for him to gain his bearings so she could get mad at him.
“You scared me half to death!” She snapped. “Don’t I tell you all the time to be careful? If you’re going to drink yourself into a daze, at least do it when I’m around to look after you!”
He waved a hand at her dismissively, voice slurring when he spoke. “‘S going to happen anyway. It just-” He hiccuped. “It just kills you.”
Cinder groaned loudly. She was so sick of his fatalism! “You aren’t dying, Flint.”
“You’re right about that,” he chuckled weakly. “I’ll bet you this, kid - when my time really comes, I’ll go out screaming and fighting and begging. It doesn’t matter what I want. If I want to die. There’s something - something inside a person that’ll hold on for as long as it can.”
Cinder scoffed, then realized she was holding his gnarled, bony hand. She had done this all before, hadn’t she? Except he wasn’t dying. She saw it on that tape. He wouldn’t let go easily.
Flint sighed, and leaned back against his pillow. He gave a small nod towards Cinder. “That necklace. Did you get it from Iris?”
Her free hand went to the silver pendant, warm from her body heat. She nodded. “She left it to me in her will. You know - on her deathbed, I had to promise her that I’d die before… what did she say? Before I let anyone make me into an animal.” Cinder gave a small, remembering smile, blinking tears off her lashes. She went kind of crazy.”
Flint tightened his grip on her hand. Suddenly his honey-coloured eyes were wide. “Promise her all you want. But don’t tell yourself you’ll always keep that vow, or it’ll kill you. Are you listening, Cinder? Not to yourself. Other people can forgive you, but you can’t forgive yourself. Not ever.”