the Feral Prodigy script: a thousand serves and the scooped keys
Here is the set of keys a stride’s length before you in the court as you serve dead balls to no one. After each serve you must almost fall forward into the court and in one smooth motion bend and scoop up the keys with your left hand. This is how to train yourself to follow through into the court after the serve.
Context
The purest image of E.T.A. conditioning-by-repetition: a thousand dawn serves to an empty court, and a set of keys placed a stride inside the baseline so that scooping them after each serve drills the forward follow-through into the body. The motion is installed below thought by sheer iteration — so deep that "years after the man's death" the narrator still can't keep his keys anywhere but the floor. The regimen writes its mechanics into the nervous system as a permanent habit the self never consented to and can't undo.