#yeaaaahh!!!!

[asleepinawell]

I will not be reasoned back into my place.

[alulars]

it’s my life, i’ll do what i want. Mack Johnson

i know what you did last summer sentence meme.

Mackenzie leaves Elfgar’s place. Johnson had intended to approach Elfgar upon her departure. But she leaves—walking—without a raincoat or umbrella. He shakes his head, one fluid sway to the left then center, and sighs; the cold air hisses through his teeth and stings a back molar. He runs his tongue over the tooth. The enamel on it is thin, the nerve is exposed and sensitive. Weak. He considers ripping the tooth out—later: Mackenzie is walking. Johnson tilts his head back and regards the sky. Large clots of clouds push-pulse in the same direction like one great, gray vein close to rupturing. In exactly two minutes, it will rain. The walk to her apartment, from here, is twenty-six minutes.

Previously by a window, Johnson appears beside Mackenzie. The displacement of space—dry atmosphere, then suddenly solid body—generates a gentle gust. Obvious and indulgently lambasting: “Did the man not offer you an umbrella?” “I don't need one.” “Your body will grow ill.” “It’s my life, I’ll do what I want.”

Rain falls.

Drops that fall near them flare away like a lit sparkler. Johnson's jaw clenches. He attempts to distract himself: there are thousands of tiny, wet particle parabolas—he approximates to the millionth degree the numeric expression of each one before the drop reaches the ground. One droplet, he calculates, will bounce and hit Mackenzie's open eye. He flicks it (bursting it) with his middle finger before it can.

He is not distracted. The math is simple.

He can redirect the electromagnetic fields of Earth to deflect rain but he cannot ever seem to redirect her.

Johnson stops.

Mackenzie continues for a few steps before she notices. He does not shift the Earth's fields to cover her. She must stay in this small, now-stationary dome with him if she wants to remain dry.

Plainly, clinically, as though the list is grocery items and not invasively, wholly about her: “You cry in your apartment's south-facing bathroom because you have no private room of your own. You think of your father. You think of him dead. You want to kill him. You prayed for it. When you unload the dishwasher, you count the knives. Your favorite color—” He clarifies, he simplifies, he elongates the word: “Green.” It is said less like a magician revealing her chosen playing card and more like a cooing parent enunciating the applied names of things to their infant. “Is five billionths of a meter. The same size of simple bacteria. Yet only one of the two appears commonly in your home.” His gaze slides to hers, fastens to it. “All of it is your life, Mackenzie Knight. Little of it is what you want.”