I keep an eye out for places in texts where the author has not told the
reader everything I want to know and when we found, these places deserve a pencil and fill in the missing link.
I started reading Suzanne
Collins' The Hunger Games. I liked it and there were times I couldn't put it
down the basic plot was reminiscent of Stephen King's The
Running Man. As I was approaching the end of the novel I came across this
opportunity to add to the story.
".....the needle
jabs me from behind.”
When I wake, I’m afraid to move at first......"
On page 348, in between
the third and forth paragraphs, immediately after Peeta and Katniss win the
games and are picked up by the hovercraft and Katniss is put under…….
This is what happens to
Katniss while she is unconscious in surgery following the games:
(P. 348) “...........When
the needle jabs me from behind.”
I’m pounding on the glass,
raving mad, angry. Anger and fear control my thoughts and body. I’m a wounded,
cornered beast protecting its cub and its fragile hold on the status quo and
life itself. Pounding and shrieking till my fists go right through the glass
without shatter or sound and then I’m falling.
Slowly at first but
quicker and quicker I fall right through the floor of the hovercraft. No, not
through it, with it, down a tunnel colored hovercraft grey then blurred with
speed. Falling and falling and falling. I’ve been drifting down for so long
that the absence of time and rushing wind or any feeling of momentum is lost
and I can no longer tell if I’m even moving or in which if any direction.
Weightless. I can’t feel my body. Lifting my arms up and kicking my legs around
and shaking all over assures me everything is there and still working. As I
float and dance limbs just to make sense of basic functions, the color and
substance of my body starts to fall off with every movement I make. Like undone
yarn in a knit sweater I watch in terror as the color, the appearance of my
body, my me, comes unraveled and falls away and I think one last thought, “the
games have finally taken away everything that Katniss was, is, could ever be.”
And then it’s silence and nothing and I am gone.
My eyes open and I’m back
in the arena, back in the games. The forest ruffles and flutters all around. It’s
alive with life, alive with dinner I think and smile. I can hear the movement
of various game, large and small, everywhere. Its loud, too loud, nothing but
Peeta moves that loud through the woods. Feeling a tremble build in the ground,
I wonder if the Gamemakers are creating an earthquake, and looking down I see
cup size pockets of the earth open up all around me, hundreds of them, and ants
pour out of the earth like black lava and run an ever shrinking circle around
me as they get bigger and bigger until the ants are the size of cats and are
running up my legs and chest and bore into my eyeballs. I can feel them
crawling through my head and in the groves of my brain and then I can see
inside of my self and the ants are all small again but have images like
pinpoint televisions on their midnight black backs. Yet I can clearly make out
every detail, and every detail is manifest terror and fear. I watch Prim and my
father die a thousand times in a thousand different ways on a thousand
different screens and then the ants pop like cooked corn into orange bubbles
and my entire body fills with orange bubbles squiggling and scrunching and bumping
and rolling smoothly turning over on each other. Congealing and opening up
turning inside out and expanding and absorbing until I realize the orange
bubbles are just fireflies, no nats and I swat at them. With an invisible brush
of the hand they are gone and I’m on my side in the fetal position shaking with
violent convulsions until I pass out and come to 50 ft up in the air in a tree
and I move and fall but my belt catches and breaks and then I fall again and
pass out just before I hit.
My eyes open and I’m still
in the wooded arena but everywhere around me, save this patch of trees, is in
flux. The sky is revolving, spinning a fast motion blur of color, like a
million designer candles melting inside one of the capitol’s brass and nickel
laundry dryers. Only it’s not just colors spreading like spun mercury. Clear as
point blank range in the sky above, the nightly death-tell images of the
tributes, everyone of them bear down on me, point at me, and stare with distant
eyes ripe with unmistakable sad, angry malevolence. Then even they begin to
shift and transition with the colors into and out of beastly-mutated wolves and
then back to human apparitions pointing and flailing their arms and growing fur
and then back to skin and hands, paws, nails, and claws emerging and tearing
away at the space between us when suddenly the tribute wolves begin falling to
the forest floor one by one. They land with a crash and in a heartbeat’s flit
and blip they encircle me. Instinctively, I reach for arrows and fire off ten or
so before I watch the arrows hit the wolves in the face and turn into flowers,
the violet-yellow-white wildflowers I put on Rue’s face. Rue, I think for the
first time and without realization I scream her name. “RUEEEEE….,” My voice
pierces the air and suddenly she materializes lunging straight at me, all wolf
save for Rue’s fearless eyes. As the compact mass of fur arcs at me the head
seamlessly shifts to a deceptively docile Rue face. She pounces on me tearing
away at my body with razor claws and whistling her end of work song while tears
fall out of my eyes and drift straight up landing on her face and run along her
cheek bones and seep into the cracks of her eyes just as a spear flies out of
nothing piercing her chest cavity. She screams and a dark crescent shaped loaf
of bread explodes and falls from her mouth as she is blown backwards by the
impact and disappears. In a instant it begins to rain. The wolves fade away
with each drop until nothing is left. It rains harder and harder and the beads
grow more thick and massive and constant, and soon, so much water falls, that I’m
completely underwater and suffocating, and I realize I want to live. I want to
live, but I can’t move. “I want to live,” I shout but only silent bubbles break
forth. As I look around I see the floor of this ocean and then I see the roots,
my roots, Katniss, and I pull them out of the mud and clench the Katniss
tightly in my hand and push off the floor of the ocean and with my right hand
upward holding the Katniss I explode out of the water and then I am on a bed.
“When I wake, I’m afraid
to move at first.................” (P. 348)
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