One Shot

Chapter 3

Twirling around the charring stick planted through its middle, the bird's wings slowly crust up, an avalanche, and pours just like the snow that smothers mountain's grounds, onto a wild heap on the floor. All that's left is the burning meat. Not wanting to get burnt, I kick the edge of the stick facing my way (another one in hand) and with that catch it back before it falls to the sandy ground. It is cool enough by then to touch the meat, so I rip it into three large chunks, and one half the size of theirs to me. They're weak, so they need more food to get more energy.
I have enough of that already.
Working my way through the meat, I let it sink slowly down into my stomach as the taste of food engulfs me. Suddenly I am in a world of peace and normality, in my old home, sitting in the garden. Just sitting. I never needed much to please me.
Within a finger's click it is all gone. Just a single memory floating in the air like a speck of dust, lost in time like the present. Every second counts, they say, so why does every second feel so slow like a rotation of the Earth? Or sometimes so untruthfully quick you know it just has to be filled with lies?
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know anything.
I don't know why we're here, I don't know why they picked us.
All I know is that I have to do something about it. No! I have to stay on track. Food. Water. That's all I need to get right now. Grabbing my three arrows from the bag slung across my shoulder, light as a feather and made from countless entwining weeds and vines in hundreds of plaits, I feel them in my hand, a smooth, matted metal feel caresses my fingers.
I'll have to go. I have to in order to find food and water and everything we need to survive. Because we have nothing. Just a tender bite of deliciously perfect yet disgustingly small meat when our stomachs are about to roll over in its feeling of neglect. I'll have to go soon. Or we'll starve, if we don't die of thirst before that. Yes. Today, as the sun sets gradually and sinks under the ground in its boiling mess of dripping ink about the horizon. A masterpiece will be painted on the sky with merging splats like a paintball's handprint against a hard stone wall.
I can't sleep too often in the forest, I don't know what will happen. Anything could. What about the rumours? Of the people "waiting"? Just a day after reaching the ground on this island, we had to trek through the forest in order to find a base to survive. Expectedly, the others' first instinct was to try and get noticed, but I knew otherwise. They wouldn't have put us somewhere we could be found. We had to find a place we could make a camp and serve as our home.
Before we found here, me met another land's edge, but with a huddle of crouching people, their eyes pits of the traumas of life. They whispered hoarsely, so only I could hear, "watch out for those who inhabit the forests. They wait for people like you, to start something only God knows will happen. They want people like you to join them." I couldn't retrieve any more information, because I just ran, pounding my feet on the floor, regardless of those people watching me. I felt their gaze burning into the back of my torso like a tattoo being pushed slowly and painfully into my skin.
Finally Dem, South, and Lea - just about - caught up. And we were a family again, away from those strangers. Well, as much of a family as we could get.
Heavily dreading, for once, the journey that I was slowly writing, my story being unravelled in hundreds of pages each written with darkly stained blood, probably that I'd loose, within the next few days from the thorns that lay deep within a world that was truly foreign to me, I let out a wavering breath as my weight left my body to be planted onto the log beneath me. Roughly I bought my hands around my face, rubbing it quickly as I stifled an impressive yawn. I can't be tired before I set off on my journey. I wouldn't make it a day.
"I'm just going to have a little sleep over there," I explain pointing vaguely behind me while wagging my arm around like an excited dog's tail. "I'm just a bit tired." I continue even though they know this doesn't happen often. With one look at their faces, I assure them by sighing, "You can wake me up if something happens." After turning around, I roll my eyes. Why can't they look after themselves? I'm constantly the one looking out for them, even at the age of twelve! I'm not a carer. That's the worst thing about this journey. Would they be able to cope on their own? I might be able to trust South to collect some berries or bark on the edge of the trees peering in, the only observers of our lives, but there hasn't been any of them around recently. Would she be willing to kill something with her own hands? I don't know. Again.
I know what I'll do. As they sleep, I'll leave two of my arrows by the fire, awaiting them as they wake up.
Walking some of my last footsteps I ever will on this side of the island before something radical happens, I lay down for a nap about two metres away, widening my body to its limit on the soft sand that serves as my bed every night as I tuck myself in under my invisible blanket. I close my eyes.
Dislodging my mind from all thoughts of me leaving in a few hours like a plug exiting its socket, one last realisation enters my mind.
If I only have one arrow, then I've only got one shot at this...

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