At Ten, I Killed My Sister

Well, almost

I was ten when it happened.

Over two creative and exciting days I had fashioned a very good bow from a long, thin juniper trunk — strong, flexible, almost alive, and almost as long as I was tall — and a thin, strong, slightly tarred string. I had also whittled an arrow from I’m not sure what kind of wood, but it was long and straight, and to make the arrow fly relatively true I had added a small lead weight very close to the awl-sharp tip. Of course, not being a fletcher, I had not added stabilizing feathers (no idea how, to be honest), but I had shot plenty of featherless arrows in the past, and they had flown well, especially if weighted like this one, so that did not bother me much.

Bow and arrow done, I now thirsted for a little admiration and for that I needed an audience. Well, it turned out the only audience available — Mom’s busy, Dad’s at work —was my little sister. Okay, beggars can’t be choosers, so out we trod, Lili-Ann and I, out into a nearby field where we now stand. I am ready and about to demonstrate my brilliant creation to her.

My first shot flew the arrow nearly a hundred meters away from us and toward (though not quite reaching — luckily) the little river at the western end of the field. And I hadn’t even pulled the string all the way back. This is a great bow. Oh, man.

I trotted off to collect the arrow while my sister, five at the time and more curious than impressed, waited for me to return.

The second shot — since I didn’t want to run another hundred or whatever meters to retrieve it — was straight up into the air. This time, I pulled the string back as far as I could, with the tip of the arrow (with its lead weight) very close to the puffed chest of the bow itself. And then I let it fly.

Up it shot and the arrow rose to, I swear, well over a hundred meters. It rose and rose and rose forever — almost to out of sight (no pun intended) — before it finally ran out of juice. Then, thanks to the lead weight I think, it now turned and made its vertical way back to Mother Earth at an ever-accelerating pace, awl-sharp tip first.

After a few breath-held seconds, and with a murky thud, it struck the ground at an almost sickening pace about two feet from where my by-now-entirely-uninterested sister stood looking at her shoes or something crawling in the grass. The thud had a strange finality to it for the arrow had struck the ground at such a pace that I actually had to work and work to pull it out — the tip had burrowed close to half a foot into the soil.

At that point, an image flashed, two images actually.

The first was of a baby’s head and that soft skin on top of the skull where the bone has yet to shut its doors. Mom had once let me feel the top of Lili-Ann’s head, “Feel this, but be careful.” I touched it and it felt just like skin over a small emptiness, which, of course, is exactly what it was. I learned much later that this is called a fontanelle.

The second image that flashed, much harder and deeper than the first, was of my arrow reaching Earth two feet to the north and sinking about as deeply into my sister’s uninterested head as it had into the earth.

And I realized, beyond a molecule of doubt, that at that sharpness and at that speed the arrow would have killed her on the spot. Dead. Dead. Dead sister.

My arrow missed her by two feet, the significance of which did not seem to hit anywhere home with her, for she looked up at me from her survey with a so-now-what? look that knew neither danger nor fear (nor admiration).

I did not make a third shot.

That evening the second image, the one of killing my sister, returned with sickening clarity, intensity, and insistence. Two feet. Just two feet was all that had separated the archer from the sister-killer.

This was an event that has come a-calling at least once every month or so all this life, and each time it does I draw a sigh of relief and thank whatever angel had guided that arrow back to Earth so safely that day.

Or my life would have been very different.

© Wolfstuff

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