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i. diamond teeth
WHEN APHRODITE KRASNOVA was a kid, there was this song that her older brother used to sing all the time.
It talked about a road that was long and a brother that had to be carried on it. Whoever wrote it said that the brother wasn't heavy. That he was just that. His brother. Just his brother. And the line repeated again and again ━━ He ain't heavy. He's my brother. There was something about the way her older brother's voice hugged each syllable, proclaimed them to the world, catching in the back of his throat, that made her own throat tight. Making it hard to move. Hard to swallow.
There was another time when her older brother played with his lighter. They stood under a lamppost. In the following week, he'd be reaped for the 63rd Hunger Games. He'd be running as fast as his legs could take him in an endless maze. But right then and there, the summer was too young to have a name, so they stood there.
June was oozing into July like blood. They didn't know that they stood at childhood's edge. Aphrodite wanted her mom to like her. She wanted her mom to like her the same way her mom liked her brother. Another summer drowned at the bottom of the river, another summer spent with red stained lips and the smell of tart sleep and of burning wires. Aphrodite sort of wanted to bite her teeth into life and suck on the marrow, but she swallowed cherry pits instead.
She would make her mom like her tomorrow. She would be a good daughter tomorrow. She would get it right.
"Doesn't it bother you?" Aphrodite asked that golden afternoon, every breath from the hills so full of life that it seemed whoever respired it, though dying, might revive. "The way mom is?"
He put his back against the wet lamppost and played with his lighter. "Does anybody feel good about their parents?"
Dragonflies shimmered in the afterglow. There was clover and jasmine and aster in the grass. Bird-song drifting, willows hushing, and the smell of the damp earth. The wind murmured a secret and her older brother murmured his back.
He sang that song again: He ain't heavy. He's my brother.
That was 5 years ago.
Her brother doesn't sing anymore. Not since he came back from his own games.
Now a canon fires in the distance. Splintering the sticky darkness. Shattering childhood's stained-glass house. The arena is her coffin, the apocalypse-scorched ground her bones. The girl who volunteered is never coming home.
No, Aphrodite's childhood is at an end. This is where cataclysm begins. With eyes full of ghosts and teeth stained with blood. That moment when a tribute becomes a Victor.
