Unknown by Christopher Smith

needed to be enough of a show that he wouldn’t come near me again.
    “You know,” he said.   “I’ve got a problem with what you said to Roberts.   You got me into trouble for nothing.   I think you should pay for that.   I think you and I need to have a little understanding of how it works around here because apparently you forgot.”  
    He took another step toward me.   And another.   His mouth was pressed into a tight line of hate.   I could see him balling up his right fist.   Again, he looked around us.   Just a few birds flying above, the wind in the trees.   Satisfied, he saw his moment and took it.  
    In a flash, he came toward me, pulled his right arm back and swung it down hard toward my face.   As it came, I quickly held up my pinky finger and pushed all of my hatred of him into it.   My finger either was going to break, or it was going to break him.
    You work it with your heart and with your head.
    It broke him.   His fist collided with it and you’d think by the agonized look on his face that he had punched his hand straight through a concrete wall.   He yelped and staggered back, toward the center of the path.   My pinky was still raised.   It was untouched.   He stared openly at it and then looked down at his hand, which was smashed.   “What the fuck!” he yelled.
    I got off the rock.  
    “I told you to stay away from me,” I said.   “You don’t know who you’re dealing with anymore.   I will protect myself against you and all of your friends.   I’ve had enough.   And here’s a warning—I will win every time.”
    “The hell you will.”
    He was doubled over, massaging his hand.   His head was crooked to the side and he was staring up at me.   Now it was my turn to look around—nobody.   And so, with my heart still rocking in my chest and my hatred of him still fueling every cell in my body, I decided to give him a show he’d never forget.  
    I held out my arms at my sides and rose in the air above him.  
    Frozen, he watched me ascend twenty feet in the air.   I turned my eyes into bright spheres of red light and glared down at him like a beast from a nightmare.   I made the wind pick up and whip around me.   Leaves and pine needles lifted off the ground and funneled around me like a tornado, turning me into some kind of hornet’s nest while he just stood there, paralyzed by what he saw.
    And then I saw it.   For the first time since we’d known each other, back in first grade when he decided that I’d be his punching bag for life, I saw it.   He was afraid of me.   He   was terrified of me.   He backed away from me.
    “What the hell are you?”
    I looked up at one of the large tree limbs just behind him, waved my arm in its direction and cracked my wrist down.   The limb snapped off and fell hard, crashing just feet away from him.  
    He let out a little squeak and then I lowered my hand down toward him.   It was easy—too easy.   I lifted him off the ground and let him linger in the air.   I waved a finger across his mouth to silence him.   His tried to speak, but there was no sound.   I drew him near me so we were face-to-face.   My ruby-red eyes burned into his.   Beneath him, his legs were scissoring.   His arms were flailing.   And so I paralyzed him and he went still.  
    I leached myself into his mind.
    “This is how it’s going to work,” I said to him.   “You’re going to back off me.   You’re going to ignore me.   You’re going to remember everything that just happened, but you’re going to tell no one about it.   I’m forbidding you.   Each time you try to tell someone, the words won’t come.   They’ll never come, not even if you try to write them down.   You’ll never be able to explain what’s happening between us now.”  
    The leaves and needles were spinning around us, swiping across our faces, knocking against our bodies before joining the storm of wind that was kicking up our hair.   I looked