snuff.

Johnny danced with his pale blue eyes in the milky moonlight, and the kids from downtown watched in awe as his body moved with such a liquid grace, the likes they had never seen. Puzzlement wrenched their brows into tight lines as their jaws clenched and eyes brimmed with tears, either forged from crippling happiness or fear. They could not figure out if his silent dances were beautiful or horrific, his body gleaming with an alien iridescence, even though Johnny captivated them with his spiralling movements that echoed of loneliness and solitude. There was real soul in the beck and call of his hips, they all said, and a hurt in his rigid blue eyes that carved daggers into their hearts.

The kids from downtown watched Johnny in their thick jackets that encased their souls, preventing a more permanent chill from growing into them, with the awe in their eyes and the hatred burning in the pits of their stomachs. Even the starlight illuminated Johnny and his perfected motions, gliding through the crackling winter air with such finality and resoluteness that it shook their cores. The kids from downtown had sifted through the weeks, days, and hours of their lives, and still they had not found such freedom as Johnny's. So they grew with envy and pride as quiet companions, perched upon arrogant shoulders and digging into sneering minds.

One evening, a pasty black night that didn't even tug the mosquitoes into life, Johnny snuffed out like the final whisper of a candle's flame, and that was the end of their happy speculation. Life chiseled its way out like the first trickle of water carving itself a river into the deadly slope of a mountain.

They missed the freedom they had never had, so the kids from downtown cried for the first time in their cruel, pathetic lives, and they wept for years to come - terrible, dark decades that inched by interminably. They waited for a storm to come and wipe them away from existence, just like the one that had stolen Johnny away from their greedy fingertips.

One day they pushed their lips to the sky and tasted electricity, and realized that Johnny had slowly engulfed them all in his molten metal eyes.

(so they lived.)

up for interpretation, of course.