【饥饿游戏】08
时间：2017-03-15 05:46:29
搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。
（单词翻译）
“Peeta Mellark.”
Peeta Mellark!
Oh, no, I think. Not him. Because I recognize this name, although
I have never spoken directly to its owner. Peeta Mellark.
No, the
odds1 are not in my favor today. I watch him as he
makes his way toward the stage. Medium height, stocky build,
ashy blond hair that falls in waves over his forehead.
The shock of the moment is registering on his
face, you can see his struggle to remain emotionless, but his
blue eyes show the alarm I’ve seen so often in
prey2. Yet he
climbs
steadily3 onto the stage and takes his place.
Effie Trinket asks for volunteers, but no one steps forward.
He has two older brothers, I know, I’ve seen them in the bakery,
but one is probably too old now to volunteer and the other
won’t. This is standard. Family devotion only goes so far
for most people on reaping day. What I did was the
radical4thing.
The mayor begins to read the long, dull Treaty of Treason
as he does every year at this point — it’s required — but I’m
not listening to a word.
Why him? I think. Then I try to convince myself it doesn’t
matter. Peeta Mellark and I are not friends. Not even neighbors.
We don’t speak. Our only real interaction happened
years ago. He’s probably forgotten it. But I haven’t and I know
I never will. . . .
It was during the worst time. My father had been killed in
the mine accident three months earlier in the bitterest January
anyone could remember. The
numbness5 of his loss had
passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling
me over, racking my body with
sobs6. Where are you? I would
cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there
was never any answer.
The district had given us a small amount of money as
compensation for his death, enough to cover one month
of grieving at which time my mother would be expected to get
a job. Only she didn’t. She didn’t do anything but sit
propped7up in a chair or, more often,
huddled8 under the blankets on her
bed, eyes
fixed9 on some point in the distance. Once in a while,
she’d stir, get up as if moved by some urgent purpose, only to
then
collapse10 back into stillness. No amount of pleading from
I was terrified. I suppose now that my mother was locked
in some dark world of sadness, but at the time, all I knew was
that I had lost not only a father, but a mother as well. At eleven
years old, with Prim just seven, I took over as head of the
family. There was no choice. I bought our food at the market
and cooked it as best I could and tried to keep Prim and myself
looking presentable. Because if it had become known that
my mother could no longer care for us, the district would have
taken us away from her and placed us in the community
home. I’d grown up seeing those home kids at school. The
sadness, the marks of angry hands on their faces, the
hopelessness that curled their shoulders forward. I could never
let that happen to Prim. Sweet, tiny Prim who cried when I
cried before she even knew the reason, who brushed and plaited
my mother’s hair before we left for school, who still polished
my father’s shaving mirror each night because he’d hated the
layer of coal dust that settled on everything in the Seam. The
community home would crush her like a
bug12. So I kept our
predicament a secret.
But the money ran out and we were slowly starving to
death. There’s no other way to put it. I kept telling myself if
I could only hold out until May, just May 8th, I would turn
twelve and be able to sign up for the tesserae and get that
precious grain and oil to feed us. Only there were still several
weeks to go. We could well be dead by then.
Starvation’s not an
uncommon13 fate in District 12. Who
hasn’t seen the victims? Older people who can’t work. Children
from a family with too many to feed. Those injured in the
mines. Straggling through the streets. And one day, you come
upon them sitting motionless against a wall or lying in the
Meadow, you hear the
wails14 from a house, and the
Peacekeepers are called in to
retrieve15 the body. Starvation is
never the cause of death officially. It’s always the flu, or
On the afternoon of my encounter with Peeta Mellark, the
rain was falling in
relentless17 icy sheets. I had been in town,
trying to trade some threadbare old baby clothes of Prim’s in
the public market, but there were no takers. Although I had
been to the Hob on several occasions with my father, I was too
frightened to venture into that rough, gritty place alone.
分享到：
收听单词发音 
