Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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26/Jun/2013

We All Died

A few weeks ago, every citizen died. Lungs caved in, brains spilled out. Office hours remained unchanged. Stiff corpses kept moving through crowded streets, dry mouths kept talking in raspy voices. Their rotten bodies are making the city putrid; the aftershaves and perfumes have long since become ineffective, now simply an overtone of bergamot and pine. Muscles are starting to fall off, eyes are melting from faces. I’m staying in my bed, not daring to breathe but with a gas mask on my face, hoping that the electricity inside my cracked skull will go away if I keep completely still.

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25/Jun/2013

Thunder across Deck

Rain! Thunder across deck, woman the harpoons! The night this is, this is. This is the night, the night. Toss and turn all you want, vengeful sea, but you will never sink this ship. There he is, the whale, the whale! Take aim, breathe out, draw tight, release. Wrap the lace around the bait, sink the net into the ocean. Dip it in, pull it out, dip it in, scream. The rope won’t hold, won’t hold. Do you think he’ll take us back, us back? We don’t want his meat, his meat, we just want to sink him, sink him.

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24/Jun/2013

Fairies’ Feet

You have fairies’ feet but you hide them in hideous white sneakers. The concrete seeps into our souls, dulling the red, and every now and then you try to cheer me up with a barefoot little jig. The circles grow green and pink and you get a smile from me, before we hurry away. There is nothing more depressing than watching the grey concrete eat a living thing.

I have to take you to the heart of the city. You must get rid of your shoes, and dance inside the concrete ribcage, where the grey is still soft, wet, vulnerable.

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23/Jun/2013

The Big Crunch

As the universe shrinks, the sky lights up, and night is erased by the cold light from dead stars far away. All our probes and lonely radio transmissions start bouncing back on us, faster and faster in accordance with the speed of the shrinking. Everybody wears a wide-brimmed hat and dark shades. Our crops die, our insects too, and then there is too much death to enumerate properly. Our own sun seems unaware of it all, shining on like ever before. Our cities are blanched out, we flee underground, and we’re just waiting for the crumbling sound of everything dying.

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22/Jun/2013

Ventriloquism

“How do you define an out-of-body experience? I think I’m having one.”

“Most people who who claim to have them don’t speak or move, or aren’t able to speak or move, during the experience. It is when you are outside your own body.”

“I was catatonic until I was four, when suddenly I spoke like there was never anything wrong with me. I think I was never inside my own body, I just learned to puppet it.”

The doctor held his hands behind his back. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

The patient got it right every time.

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22/Jun/2013

Amanita Terra Nemo

The rain punched holes in my trenchcoat, and that’s where it got in. The war raged on for weeks, until red sores opened up in the land. We sat like gargoyles, scouting for movement or the flash of a muzzle. The only sound was that of the rain, as our guns were perfectly silent. We found out who had fallen at the end of the day and that was that. The battle was ended not because any side won, but because no man’s land sprouted hellishly red toadstools over the corpses, and we started finding it on our skin too.

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22/Jun/2013

Mitosis

The sky stirred. The full moon wobbled, its contours shivering like the air above asphalt on a hot day. But the moon was impossibly colder. It pulled away from itself, like there were really two moons superimposed on one another. They tugged, and the stars around them wavered like airbubbles on the surface of a pond after you had dipped your toes in. The pale circles pulled further away, their overlapping surfaces shrinking smaller and smaller until they completed the process, and the petri dish that is the sky settled down again around two fresh moons, unmarred and pure white.

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22/Jun/2013

It’s Like a Party in My Pants

It’s like a party in my pants and, like, all the cool kids will be there, but you’ll mostly be hanging around in the kitchen awkwardly drinking from the same one glass of champagne all evening by the fridge, whilst everybody else will be having fun. It’s not your fault, but still. People will try to talk to you from time to time but you won’t have any of that, your face goes red as if to warn other people to stay the heck away. And they will. What I’m saying is, like, kiss me or something. You fucking dork.

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22/Jun/2013

They Strike Root in You

They strike root in you. They reach for you from dead leaves on lonely trees and a brave few jump, if they think they can make it. You become more sociable, immediately. More reckless. You might feel as though you’ve had an epiphany, or three. You will start eating dirt, as the tendrilous roots nest in your bloodstream. Soon you will eat nothing but dirt, you will become a recluse. You will speak to no-one. You will find specific dirt from specific places and it will replace food for you. You will act like this until you burst with saplings.

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22/Jun/2013

Provided I Keep Myself to the Script

“Provided I keep myself to the script, Mr. Kolss, the script I’m holding in my very hands, which you are not allowed to see, you will react exactly according to it.” The woman smiled at me. Before I could settle on a strategy, she continued: “the script has been carefully modelled by our superpsychologists to keep you docile and harmless. You will not, for labouringly selected example, slit my throat with that bottle.” I looked where she indicated– “nor your own, might I add. Now,” she unbuttoned her blouse like I wasn’t even there, “would you like to touch me?”

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