Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
OF THISTLES & THORNS Prologue / Seven Minutes in Heaven
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
WHAT IS IT, the world has never seldom wondered, that finds the definition of finality in that fatal dividend between tribute and victor? What is the answer to that age-old question, the makeup of that seemingly untouchable mystery? What are the materials, the pivotal moments welded from precious metals, that melt together to formulate the very fornication of a winner? What is that ubitiquous, unanimously sought-after key to unraveling the shiny silver ribbon wrapped pristinely around Panem's best kept secret? The difference between tribute and victor is nothing but a toe-dip versus a tidal wave. Sinking your toes into the dampened sand and being sucked into a detrimental shark attack. Expecting a swim but encountering a struggle. Round and round and round, a deadly sort of dizziness rising up from a riptide and ravenously swallowing you whole. Lion versus lamb. Intolerance and innocence. Teeth in the neck, tongue in cheek. A taxidermied metaphor for the fine line between love and loss. A delicate sigh, a dying light. At least it makes for a pretty picture. Drizzle versus downpour, paper cut versus paralyzation, everything relates back to something that means nothing in the end. Nothing to all except those who've been so fortunate as to have felt the prick of a poison thorn against porcelain skin. Plucking a name from the bauble, presenting a performance that proceeded to shred away the dermal curtains and reveal a daunting scarlet stage. A rose is still a rose if it kills you. Vulgarity can still be found stowed away in the valves of even the softest heart. So what is it, that separates a tribute from a victor? What are the secrets that textbooks and television sets have always neglected to tell? Does it all come down to talent? Triumph? Feigned tenacity, shrouded in tangled strands of pure terror? Perhaps it is merely timing. The way that the tributes lay dormant in the dirt like fossils, spending year after year forming and finalizing their fine-tuned tactics and techniques before being dug up by a set of hands that will only serve to hurt them. Existing, persisting, as the pick of the litter. Languishing in the luxury of having the luck of the draw.
