Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

12/Sep/2013

What You Left Behind

You have left something behind, quite carelessly. I locked it in your old abandoned room, because that room smells of you (pine trees, heather), and I would think that this thing you left behind would be calmed by that. It just thrashes around, emitting a high-pitched screech at the edge of my hearing, like something blurring in and out of focus. Why did you leave this behind, so carelessly? It even looks like you. You should have taken it with you. I’m sleeping in the treehouse tonight. You have a key. I expect this thing to be gone by morning.

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11/Sep/2013

Patchwork

The ship was welded together the same way their culture was. It was made up of bits and pieces of old things: patchwork hulls, and still functioning machinery from old u-boats, steamer chimneys, maglevs, and oil rigs, and everything else that still floated 500 years after the last civilisation lead-piped their aqueducts and drowned in them.

In the rear of the ship stood a hulking crane with a diving bell in the hook’s stead. The crew, clad in wet-suits and helmets, would climb out to it and dive down to collect more leftovers for their ships or for their culture.

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10/Sep/2013

The Compound Eye

Step into riot gear and turn on the compound eye. Advance. Look down at your feet to know where you are, look forward to see what the rest of them see. Move like one being through the crowd, strike precisely. Advance. But it was someone else, you were looking at someone else’s feed when the boot crushed that larynx. Act on instinct, spray capsicum like a frightened skunk. Advance. Feel good. Advance. Have a secret betting pool with the others. Every night, you trade serial numbers, making identification useless. Everyone vouches for everyone. This is anonymity, not those Catholic masks.

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9/Sep/2013

The Tooth Fairy Plots

“Just listen,” she said, sounding like the bottle of whiskey she cradled. “When my grampy was young he got a penny for a tooth under his pillow. My nephew today gets a fiver.”

“So?”

“That’s a hell of an inflation rate. I think the Tooth Fairies know something we don’t know.”

“Ignoring the fact that they don’t exist–”

“Can’t prove that.”

“…it probably points to a change in social norms and a rise in consumerism, or something.”

“No. The Fairies are competing fiercer. Human teeth are about to become a scarce resource. I can feel it in my bones.”

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8/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #7 – Group Hugs and the Sudden Feeling of Being Safe Again

His bite is worse, no matter what you think you know. You have only seen his tongue hanging out of his mouth, felt the room quiver when he puts his rumbling stomach to the floor. You haven’t felt his teeth in you, and maybe that’s why I hone my teeth. I hit him once and he just smiled an escalating smile at me. Psychologists can cure everything. And I have honed my teeth and picked up a hammer. Today’s the day I get him fixed. I make an appointment with a psychologist. Then I finally bash that dog’s brains in.

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7/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #6 – The Mutt, the Mouse, and the Mule

The hobby psychologist enters. She takes his coat.

The dog has a grimace that I think is supposed to be a smile, all teeth and dribble glistening from the sides of his Winston Churchill cheeks.

She has painted a clownface over her features; there is a frown inside a smile. She tries to make the frown unseeable.

Teeth sharp now, I practice smiling in front of the mirror. Is this a mouse smile?

He takes one look at the dog, then, after all this. “Looks fine to me,” he says, pats him on the head, and leaves without his coat.

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6/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #5 – Who’s the Coward Now?

He fell asleep with his face on a pillow in the middle of the room, white down feathers are everywhere. I’m at the bottom of the stairs with his bowl of water and my perpetual white flag. I brought a pair of shears.

I could grab hold of his teeth. I could fix him, and he would feel a surge of testosterone, the last his body could muster, and he would punish me with his last furious bites.

In the end I bite my tongue until I can taste the rust of those shears, and I go back to bed.

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5/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #4 – Taurobolium

Bull’s meat is consumed at the top of the stairs

The butcher has been told to leave the blood in

Juices run, in familiar grooves, down these steps

Trauma bonds us, it binds us, I have never felt closer

than when she picks me up to shield me from the blood and

her camel back breaks, I am in her arms, I feel the spine snap

Every vertebrae clicks out of place, and her screams scale the stairs

where they are met with growling and finely honed teeth and drooling

I want my teeth honed

I am already angrily drooling

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4/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #3 – The Cellar Door is an Open Throat

My friends will always say, if they say anything at all, There are ways of gentrifying them without getting them fixed, you know. They cite studies. Psychologists, and psychiatrists, can do amazing things. He just needs to talk to someone. I lower my voice and I lean in and I tell them that I don’t care. I just want it to be over. The house is stained with testosterone, bull’s blood and saliva. No. I take their hands and I smile and I thank them, I let go of their hands and I say: Tomorrow we will get him fixed.

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3/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #2 – Shepard Tone

She lies.

He bites me and draws blood. She becomes furious. She says this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Though she feels more like a mule.

She says the fixer-men will come tomorrow, all hazmat suits and goggles, and they will restrain him. It will be a quick procedure, painless, she says.

She has this way of always taking it to the next level, without moving at all. It’s this ever-escalating false pitch that always sounds like it goes up however many times you hear it.

Yes, for serious, for real: tomorrow we will get him fixed.

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