Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

That was around the time we thought it was cool to contract flesh-eating diseases and watch them make their porous way across our bodies. If they reached your heart, you were fucked, and we lost one or two to simple incompetence, falling asleep with the red itch lingering at the shoulder. We had the antidote, and that was what hurt, pain radiating outward from our hearts like a physical representation of grief, us thrashing in our beds for days, while our skin rebuilt itself mostly with scar tissue. Our fingernails never grew again after that, so we’re protective of them.