30-Day Writing Challenge: Day 7

Here is the picture for Day 7, brought to you from Negative Space.  This site provides photos that are wonderfully organized, and high-quality.  I will definitely be going back to them for more photos in the future.

I haven't a clue what I'll do with this picture yet, but that is the point of this exercise, to stretch the creative muscles, and make sure to write regularly!  Fulfilling writing to you!
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"#1447441 Turner, Mark."

The fourteen-year-old boy wipes his sweaty palms on his torn, grass-stained jeans.  Nothing more he can do about the butterflies or the jeans now.  He steps out slowly into the glaring light of the white room.

"And the skill you will be demonstrating for us today?" Mark can't help but think the reflecting windows on one side of the room look like leering eyes, hiding the faces of the judges that are scrutinizing him unseen from the other side.  Don't think about them, they don't exist, he repeats to himself.  But his father's words sound hollow, powerless in this fateful white room.

"Drawing."  He lays out his pencils on the cold, metal table.  There is nothing else in the room, just him, the table, the pencils, and the overbearing whiteness of the walls.  Just him, and what he will make.  No eyes of evaluation, determining the continued existence or vaporization of this scrawny boy.  They don't exist.  They don't.

Mark closes his eyes for a brief moment, and then picks up the blue pencil.  See the lines, see them in your mind, he repeats in his mind.  That is the only way he can see them, anyhow- the ink, hanging in the air around him, is only visible to the eyes behind the glass.  The green, the yellow, the brown, the other blue, the green again, and finally the red, swish through the space, spend moments in one spot detailing, then arc to another point, dancing through the air like some crazy conductor's baton.  

"Time."  The voice is exactly the same as before, but this time Mark isn't afraid.  Not because there is no longer a reason to fear his fate.  No, if anything, he should be terrified.  But he can't but feel as if he's simply floating, as if motionless in water, unable to do anything about his destination, and completely unperturbed by his lack of control.  He closes his eyes, floating in his mind as he waits.  Is this really what it feels like to die?

"Results for #1447441."  Mark breathes again.  Funny, he'd never thought that air could actually taste sweet like that, normal and unremarkable one moment, and precious the next.  They weren't going to like his visual representation of their system.  

Incredible how a picture could bite harder than a million words, he heard his father remarking in his head.

"Subject has displayed extraordinary talent for visualization.  Will require close examination for rebellious, critical tendencies."

Mark exhales.  His life isn't over- yet.  The struggle has instead just begun.