87th Games

Sitting Ducks

“So can I tell you a secret?” Arrow suggested.

He’d been bugging me all morning. We were down in the gully playing with Trouble when curiosity finally got the better of me.

“Fine. What is it?”

 “Remember the time all the chickens couldn’t stop pooing?”

“I had to clean out the chickens coop every hour” I answered.

“Yeah well” he shrugged before simply saying “laxatives”.

“You’re a bad person” I groaned, kicking his shin. I was already in a bad mood due to my injuries sustained from yesterday but at least I was able to release some of my anger. It actually felt quite liberating.

“Wow, I didn’t deserve that” he rubbed his shin in defence.

I tried to distract myself by watching Trouble galloping elegantly in the breeze. She was well aware she had an audience and every now and then she would do some sort of trick I’ve never seen before. Her hair flowed perfectly in the wind and when she whinnied it sounded like pure happiness.

“You wanna know another secret?” He started laughing again.

“What now, Arrow?”

“Remember back in the summer when all the piglets on your farm went missing?”

I just looked at him. My siblings and I were supposed to look after the pigs, but every night one would go missing and soon enough there were none left. We couldn’t figure out what happened to the three pigs so we blamed it on the wolves. Besides, it was too expensive to have adult pigs on our farm if they couldn’t provide us with piglets.

“You didn’t” I warned.

“Yup. I had bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner”

“I hope my family is watching this” I said casually before sending another hard kick to his shin.

 “Okay” he sat down in order to rub both his already bruised chins. “I deserved that one”

“Did you ever actually, you know, work or help on any of the farms?” I chastised him. I always hated him for that. I did a lot of work I didn’t have to do and it was mainly because of district 10 people like him who never once seemed to pull their weight.

He shrugged, “nah, I use to spend time in the fields with the cows. I had a favourite one of course, her name was Daisy. I use to tell her everything and spend time with her every morning and then one day she bit my finger.”

 He stopped telling me his story to show me the scars on his fingers. They looked impressive.  

“That’s when she went from the name Daisy to She-Devil. So then when I didn’t want to work on the field or clean I’d spend my days riling her up and making her angry, then I taught her to chase the horses and then-”

“Tomboy” I gasped.

“I was riding on Tomboy one day and Daisy literally chased us down the whole field mooing and carrying on. She blocked the gate and I was stuck in the sun all day with a crazy cow and a whining horse”.

He absolutely lost it. I had never heard him laugh so hard, he was clutching his stomach.

I walked off in a huff. I was still mad at him for the events of yesterday. We still haven’t talked about it yet and every time I thought about the possibility of him in an alliance with Bloom only made me trust him less and less.

~

“Do you want to know a secret?” I heard him snicker.

We were cleaning the cornucopia so that Trouble could sleep inside with us rather than hiding outside in the cold gully. So far though, we hadn’t gotten anywhere because our barn was full of dirt, dust and a multitude of heavy and useless weapons.