Empty Arms: A Novel by Erika Liodice Read Free Book Online Page B

precision of an arrow. I turned to James whose mouth was hanging open.
    “You just …” he pointed at the knife with a bewildered expression. “You know how to …”
    “My dad taught me when I was eight,” I said with a satisfied grin. “Your turn.”
    He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. He stepped in front of the tree and positioned the knife between his fingers, taking aim. He whipped his arm faster than even Daddy and his knife stuck in the centerline too, just below mine. “Tie,” he called and passed me another knife.
    I steadied it in my hand and hurled it at the tree trunk, sticking the centerline again. James’s smile widened as he watched me set the pace, round after round.
    “You ready to forfeit yet?” I called after I hit the centerline a dozen times in a row.
    He aimed and fired the knife into the tree directly above mine. “Dream on.” He nudged me with his elbow as we walked toward the tree to retrieve the protruding knives.
    “All right, but we might be here all day.”
    “Fine by me,” he said.
    Fine by me too, I thought as we pulled the knives from the thick bark. “Hey, why don’t you teach me that game you were telling me about? Splits.”
    He shook his head. “That’s a bad idea.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I don’t want you to get hurt.”
    “I’ll be fine.”
    “I’m serious, Cate. It’s a dangerous game.”
    “Well, then I definitely want to play.”
    He rubbed his chin and looked at the oak that had been our target for the past hour. He grabbed my hand and led me over a fallen tree to a clearing about twenty yards away. He put his hands on my shoulders and positioned me on a patch of soft earth and kicked away a few stray rocks. “You stand here.” He paced ten feet and turned to face me.
    I looked around, wondering which tree we were going to aim at from our new positions, but they all seemed too far away.
    “Not a tree,” he said. “Each other’s feet.”
    My face must’ve given away my fear because he doubled over in laughter.
    “Do you trust me?” he asked positioning the knife between his fingers and eyeing my flip flops and perfectly painted toenails.
    “No,” I cried, jumping away from him.
    He chuckled and lowered his knife-bearing hand. “See, I told you it’s too dangerous.”
    “You and your friends really play this?”
    He shrugged. “Back in elementary school.”
    “What kind of school lets children throw knives at each other’s feet?”
    “Well, you don’t actually throw them
at
your opponents’ feet, you throw them twelve inches away from their feet.”
    Twelve inches wasn’t a lot of space when it came to razor sharp blades and little piggies, but we’d both just stuck the centerline of the oak tree a dozen times. “All right,” I nodded. “Let’s play.”
    “Really?”
    I let out a deep breath and returned to the spot where he told me to stand, praying that we wouldn’t end up in the emergency room.
    “We’ll do a practice round so you can see how it works. I’ll go first.”
    My heart pounded in my ears as he aimed the knife at the ground by my feet. I closed my eyes and a second later I heard a thud as it speared the earth beside me. I looked down and the leather handle protruded from the ground about seven inches from my left foot. I looked at him and we giggled anxiously.
    “Now you have to move your left foot until it’s touching the edge of the blade.”
    I widened my stance until my foot was flush with the knife in the ground.
    “Now, pull the knife out of the ground and throw it at me. Just remember, it has to stick up in the ground within twelve inches of either foot.”
    As I pulled the knife from the soft patch of earth next to my foot, I realized that he had moved us away from the hard, dry dirt near the oak tree to softer ground so the knives wouldn’t bounce up at our shins. I steadied the knife in my hand. I hadn’t noticed that he’d left his shoes behind until now. “You