I'm a kid.
A baby.
A little cutie patootie of a baby, a meter tall, barely, I think, two years of age, little short legs, little short arms, little short head, little short everything, small baby lungs, small baby heart, I am a weak fleshy baby.
So it's normal. Heck, it's EXPECTED for me to be weak, it's normal for me to be waved away and considered as weak. Even a two years old with a knife isn't really dangerous.
Not really, throw a kick at the little fucker and he'll go flying.
That's how it works. That's how life works. Little dumb babies are weak for a damn good while until they grow up and get independent.
That's how it works.
So that's why, I expected my shoulder to explode. To be sent backward, to take a ridiculous amount of recoil and fucking die.
That's an exaggeration.
What's not an exaggeration though is that the poor little tree in front of me has been impaled and is now crying it's sap.
Can't see it with the rain around, but I guess it's crying sap.
My eyes land on the crossbow. I look at it well, very well, even try to pull it up with only one hand but that's a bit hard, still, I manage, and find myself in a one to one rendezvous with this magnificent little crossbow.
My right shoulder. The one used to take the recoil feels like....nothing.
It rises up. It goes forward. It goes down. It goes back. And do another roll, then again, the other way around, and it feels...fine. My shoulder doesn't creak, it doesn't pop, or it doesn't crackle.
It's....fine.
Looking under me, there's proof that something happened. The grass that was under my right foot has been dragged backward, that's a groove, slowly filling with water, doing it's best to clean the mud and rocks in it.
But...but....but...
Slowly, my head comes up, to look at the bolt embedded in the tree.
Without any hesitation, I'm in front of it. The crossbow on the ground behind me. My small little hand, weak, my weak little hand grabs the bolt and I pull.
It doesn't come out.
This.
This is what I expected.
The struggle of a two years old. The struggle to put up any kind of strength in my body.
I tighten my hands harder, plural now, and pull, again. Then again, then again, then again, clenching my baby teeth, I pull, harder, my right foot comes up to push against the tre-!
And it's out.
Getting back to my crossbow, I turn the bolt in my hand. It's fine, doesn't look damaged. Understandable though, it looks like an arrow, and usually, on arrows, there's this weird feather thingy that's here to make the arrows fly true or something, well, on this bolt there's no feather.
But there's leather instead.
And you know who's good with leather?
Anything made by hatomo is quality stuff I'm sure of it.
Putting the bolt back in the crossbow and taking my position again, I focus on aiming, yes, but this time. I focus on my body a bit more.
I aim.
Close a single eye.
And shoot.
And again, I am standing.
For a second or two, my gaze goes from the crossbow in my hands, to the bolt in the tree.
Okay. That's weird. Really weird.
I'm a kid. a baby. A genuine fucking baby. I don't know how much I need to tell you this, but crossbows have recoils. Not a lot. But there is some recoil, I can feel it, and there's another groove under me. So there has been recoil, my body got thrown backward, somewhat, still.
I didn't feel it.
How much do I need to insist on the fact that when I left my house this morning, when I left and decided to train how to shoot. I expected this to take hours, I expected that I'll need to train my upperbody specifically, or figure out a weird way to shoot by bracing the handle against my torso or something, or that I would fall after every shot but at least I would have managed to get a shot in and as long as I get a shot in that's all that matters because I'm not planning on sparing anyone that deserves my bolts.
I'm back on my shooting spot again. The same bolt in my hand, took it out a second ago.
I sit down. Crank the crossbow again. This takes twenty seconds. Get up, put the bolt in. And get in position again.
This time. I focus EXTRA hard on my body.
My left foot is forward. Heel grounding against the unsteady ground, my right foot is behind me, in a sumo position. Pointed away from my body, my weight is focused on this leg, the right one, it's loose, my knee isn't locked, there's slack, it's as if my entire lower body took the form of an arch.
The same arch you would find under a bridge.
The crossbow is up. Handle against my right shoulder, nested just beside my chest. My right hand under the trigger, and my left hand supporting the upper part of the crossbow to line up the shot.
I close my left eye.
Take a deep breath. Get ready to shoot.
But this time.
I don't.
I am in the exact position I would shoot from.
I focus on my body.
Push the trigger up.
The recoil isn't much.
It's not much, but it's too much for a baby. The handle pushes against my shoulde-!
The handle pushes against my shoulder and follows the flow inside my body, it travels through the arch of my leg, the heel of my left foot comes up and pushes me backward, I go with the recoil, use the slick rain under my foot to slide with my right foot. Stop.
I open my eyes.
It's in the tree.
It's not the only tree around. There's more, on my right for example. But I'm looking at my left right now. I can see the village from there.
I can see the village.
And I can see the path I took to reach this place.
The plain and farming land I crossed with my invisibility. Then, there's the mess. The grooves, the potholes, the hills, the slopes and groovy paths that would put any hiker in trouble, the annoying rain covering the ground and meddling with the dirt to create a slippy surface you only get in your worse nightmares at 2 am when you come down to take a piss and there's water everywhere in your bathroom.
The kind of ground I just slid on. The kind of ground I traversed with a bit of trouble yes, but, the kind of ground I still traveled.
As a two years old.
My hand closes against the bolt, pull it out, get back in position
After a small crank. I get tense.
Really tense.
I don't move my feet, I don't move my body, I aim, I restrain EVERYTHING, hold steady, keep yourself grounded, dig those fucking heels in the mountain and don't fucking mov-!
I fall on my back.
The crossbow is on the ground too.
The bolt is...somewhere.
And it will stay somewhere for a while, too busy looking at my hands right now. At those little hands.
At the pain inside. At the flow inside.
I know those movements.
This is the flow. The magic stuff.
You know it. The flow. When I'm in the flow, I get invisible and all this stuff.
I move weirdly and do weird stuff in the flow, the sliding on the ground, this weird noise....I do a lot of weird stuff.
I'm not weird right now though, I'm not doing anything weird. So when my foot comes up, to lead me behind the tree, it's not sliding on the ground, it's normal footsteps, that's all, one after the other.
When I find it. I breath, and make sure there's another thought in my mind.
Nothing interesting. Just more ruminating about how much I hate the rain.
When I'm back in position to shoot.
I don't try to be tense. But I make sure I'm not in the flow, I make sure I'm not invisible.
Only after that do I shoot.
The recoil enters my shoulder, flow in my leg, I slide back like water, like the flow in a river, dispersing any energy that came through my little body. It just flows, with an ease I never felt with my previous body, it's as if all of my joints play together in a perfect symphony to disperse the energy as if nothing had happened.
Nothing but another hole in the tree.
And I'm sure of it.
I wasn't in the flow.