The trigger is so light that I dare not breathe.

The man in gray clothes in the quasi-star walked seven times on the sentry tower. My finger is on the mouse, and it’s already numb. The game only gives me one bullet. It’s not to save ammunition, it’s the rule: one shot must kill all the people in the picture.

I shot.

The voice is very muffled. Then the world suddenly slowed down, as slow as syrup. The bullet turned into a glowing Venus and flew forward slowly. I saw it drill into the chest of the first person, and the man fell back, like a slow-motion movie. The bullet didn’t stop, and it continued to fly with blood. Only then did I remember that I could control it.

I moved the mouse, and the Venus hanging in the air obediently turned a corner. The golden arc it draws is still in the air, like a woolen thread woven with light. The second person’s head blossomed. The golden arc folded again and drilled into the neck of the third person.

My palms began to sweat. The golden line was getting longer and longer, circling in the air, through the window, bypassing the steel beam, and kissing the eyebrows of the fourth and fifth person. The order in which they fell was like a cruel nursery rhyme, and I was the one who wrote in the air. The pen is a bullet, the paper is the sky, and every word written is called death.

The sixth one hid behind the oil barrel. My golden arc has become very thin and is about to break. I let the bullet float up, floating so high that it almost touched the clouds (if there were clouds in the game), and then fell vertically, like a golden raindrop, dripping into the shadow behind the oil barrel. The man didn’t even look up.

The seventh is running. The bullet chased him, and the golden thread became impatient and trembling. When I caught up with him, the line came to an end. The bullet stopped at the back of his head, spinning and gleaming, then dropped to the ground like a dying ember.

The screen went dark and bright again. The camp was quiet, and seven people were lying down in a strange pattern. My bullet was lying in the mud, just at the feet of the last person, and it didn’t glow.

I let go of the mouse and my hand was shaking. It’s not that I’m afraid, but that I’m too hard. In the twelve seconds just now, I held my breath and sewed a dead dress with a bullet. The needle is the bullet, and the thread is the golden trajectory it left.

In the next level, I failed. After hitting the fifth person, the bullet hit an iron pipe that I didn’t see and fell into the water with a thud. I didn’t restart the animation, just started over. The same seven people, the same position, but I know that the golden road last time has been broken. I have to find a new one.

After playing the game, the target was no longer a soldier, but turned into a red glass ball, suspended in pure white space. The background music disappeared, leaving only the buzzing of bullets flying. I’m no longer a sniper. I’m the one who draws in the air. If I draw it wrongly, wipe the canvas clean and let me redraw it.

There is a level, the target is surrounded by a circle, and there is a deep pit in the middle. I have tried more than 20 times. The bullets are always a little short and fall into the darkness before drawing the last circle. Later, I got angry. I let the bullet shoot straight into the sky, so high that it was almost invisible, and then let it fall freely, like a golden needle, stabbed down from directly above, and stringed the seven red balls into a string.

I was not happy when the word “customs clearance” popped up. I just leaned on the chair and looked at the golden dotted line that was dissipating. It was like smoke after fireworks were released, slowly fading away.

I quit the game and walked to the window. The afternoon sun made the shadow of the building very long. I raised my hand, narrowed one eye, and aimed my thumb at the water tower in the distance. Imagine that a bullet starts from here, passes through the clothesline, bypasses the external unit of the air conditioner, gently hits the ear of the cat dozing on the window sill, and finally chisels a small hole in the iron board of the water tower.

Of course, I didn’t shoot. But just now, in another world, I wrote a poem with a bullet. The first line of the poem is death, and the last line is also death, but the curves of twisting, climbing and diving in the middle are the diaries I wrote with the mouse trembling, about precision and paranoia.

Our life may be like this: only one bullet called “at this moment” has been released. We can’t control the starting point, nor can we predict the end point. The only thing we can do is to concentrate all our energy in this short flight, move the mouse gently, and try to make the golden trajectory more or less close to the beautiful and useless shape in our hearts.