Count to Five

My father liked to tell us, whenever he was deep in a drunken stupor about his grandmother. It was always dangerous talk, and thankfully normally took place at home or a local meeting spot where peacekeepers rarely appeared.

He would always start in the same way, not that the story ever changed. My great-grandmother had taken place in the rebellion against the Capitol. She had been executed seventy-five years ago at the age of nineteen. The rebellion had failed, of course, and with that failure had come the Districts, which in turn led to the Hunger Games that had so shaped my own life five years ago.

I had made it, the Victor of the seventy-first Hunger Games. The lone survivor of twenty-four tributes.

Now, much in the same way as my great-grandmother, I would die at the age of nineteen. Not in any heroic act, but for the entertainment of the Capitol citizens. I will enter another arena, I will face twenty-three more people and I will not survive.

I will not be coming back to District Ten.