【饥饿游戏】09
时间：2017-03-15 05:47:36
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（单词翻译）
The rain had soaked through my father’s hunting jacket, leaving
me chilled to the bone. For three days, we’d had nothing but
boiled water with some old dried mint leaves I’d found in the
back of a cupboard. By the time the market closed, I was shaking
so hard I dropped my bundle of baby clothes in a mud
puddle1. I didn’t pick it up for fear I would keel over and be unable
to
regain2 my feet. Besides, no one wanted those clothes.
I couldn’t go home. Because at home was my mother with
her dead eyes and my little sister, with her hollow cheeks and
cracked lips. I couldn’t walk into that room with the smoky
fire from the damp branches I had scavenged at the edge of
the woods after the coal had run out, my bands empty of any
hope.
I found myself stumbling along a muddy lane behind the
shops that serve the wealthiest townspeople. The merchants
backyards. I remember the outlines of garden beds not yet
planted for the spring, a goat or two in a pen, one sodden
dog tied to a post,
hunched4 defeated in the muck.
All forms of stealing are forbidden in District 12. Punishable
by death. But it crossed my mind that there might be
something in the trash
bins6, and those were fair game. Perhaps
a bone at the butcher’s or rotted vegetables at the grocer’s,
something no one but my family was desperate enough to
eat. Unfortunately, the bins had just been emptied.
When I passed the baker’s, the smell of fresh bread was so
overwhelming I felt dizzy. The ovens were in the back, and a
golden glow spilled out the open kitchen door. I stood
interfered10, running its icy fingers down my back, forcing me
back to life. I lifted the lid to the baker’s trash
bin5 and found
it spotlessly, heartlessly bare.
Suddenly a voice was screaming at me and I looked up to
see the baker’s wife, telling me to move on and did I want her
to call the Peacekeepers and how sick she was of having those
brats11 from the Seam pawing through her trash. The words
were ugly and I had no
defense12. As I carefully replaced the lid
and backed away, I noticed him, a boy with blond hair peering
out from behind his mother’s back. I’d seen him at school. He
was in my year, but I didn’t know his name. He stuck with the
town kids, so how would I? His mother went back into the
bakery,
grumbling13, but he must have been watching me as I
made my way behind the pen that held their pig and leaned
against the far side of an old apple tree. The
realization14 that
I’d have nothing to take home had finally sunk in. My knees
buckled15 and I slid down the tree trunk to its roots. It was too
much. I was too sick and weak and tired, oh, so tired. Let
them call the Peacekeepers and take us to the community
home, I thought. Or better yet, let me die right here in the rain.
There was a
clatter16 in the bakery and I heard the woman
screaming again and the sound of a blow, and I vaguely
wondered what was going on. Feet sloshed toward me through
the mud and I thought, It’s her. She’s coming to drive me away
with a stick. But it wasn’t her. It was the boy. In his arms, he
carried two large loaves of bread that must have fallen into the
His mother was yelling, “Feed it to the pig, you stupid
creature! Why not? No one decent will buy burned bread!”
He began to tear off
chunks18 from the burned parts and toss
them into the trough, and the front bakery bell rung and the
mother disappeared to help a customer.
The boy never even glanced my way, but I was watching
him. Because of the bread, because of the red weal that
stood out on his cheekbone. What had she hit him with?
My parents never hit us. I couldn’t even imagine it. The boy
took one look back to the bakery as if checking that the coast
was clear, then, his attention back on the pig, he threw a loaf
of bread in my direction. The second quickly followed, and he
sloshed back to the bakery, closing the kitchen door tightly
behind him.
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