Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Democracy

After decades of warfare, the parasites in Your gut develop a democracy. A fierce election campaign is held to the loss of one of Your kidneys; eventually the pink party loses to the brown party. The pink party says there’s only one of You and they mustn’t deplete its resources. There’s a good twenty years more of living in here. The brown party, however, favours the paraforming of other bodies in the system – bodies which You have a certain influence over. Your libido shoots through the roof and You feel young once more, and You do what young things do.

No Doors

She would never sleep again. There was another bedroom inside her bedroom, and she saw it when she closed her eyes. Things worked differently over there, for example there were no doors but she could go places there which she couldn’t in her own bedroom. Sometimes, if she went very far, she felt a sense of dread before opening her eyes and then she was on the highway fifteen countries away. She closed her eyes before the car hit her, at least. Sometimes she would blink out when talking to people in her original world. She wondered if people noticed.

Heartbeat Frozen in Time

In the dead of night, the skyline was a heartbeat frozen in time. We had come to the city with no name on a small boat that barely held us all. We were looking for a very specific person. I argued that “the city with no name” was in fact a name.

His heartbeat was frozen in time. The machines kept him as he was, in stasis. They almost sank the boat. We got Looks when we rolled him into the hotel. Allegedly, one of the floors had gone missing, and that was where we could find her, this surgeon.

Autosabotage

There were two Martins, by his best count. They had whittled down in numbers until only two remained. Good Day Martin planned on leaving Bad Day Martin alone, and hoped he would go away. Bad Day Martin planned on murdering the other one. He was the whittler.

He woke up on a Good Day. His chest ached. There were two new voicemails on his phone. The first one was from himself on a Bad Day; the second from Martin’s estranged wife. Now there were only Bad Days left.

He had thought he would feel victorious. Or regretful. He felt nothing.

Touchdown Gently

You come from the sky in a shining ball of gold; you touchdown gently in my corn fields and draw strange crop circles and my eyes roll back in ecstasy. I try to contact you but you speak in maths and I don’t understand, and I tell all my friends and none of them believe me and all of them laugh, but it’s true, I remember you cloudlessly. I stay out late in other people’s fields just waiting, and the other people can tell I’m not really there, my eyes are fixed to the sky. Most of them don’t care.

Unlikely Places

In the bathroom mirror when it’s fogged up, so that I’ll see it only when I’m naked and cold and vulnerable.

In the bottom of the cereal box.

In the blood.

On the balloons I used for our daughter’s birthday, I got a letter from you every time I inflated one. Some of the taller parents had to crouch when they entered our home.

In the sky, with the clouds.

In the pattern of the blooming cherry tree you planted thirty years ago. How long have you been planning this?

You write little eloquent apologies in the most unlikely places.

Coke’s New Ad Campaign is Making Me Feel Weird in the Soul

I’ve got this irrational fear that someone with the name on the bottle will demand a sip. Unless I can explain exactly who I intend to share the bottle with, of course.

At first I would try to pick bottles with the names of dead friends on them, so I’d be too sad to enjoy my addiction. Any time’s a good time to quit.

Somehow I kept buying bottles. At some point I switched categories from ‘dead friends’ to ‘past lovers’ and hoped that the bottled name would start blinking on my phone screen.

But that’s not going to happen.

Fragments of a Work in Progress

Thoughts stretched like shadows elongating; like you’re on a painstakingly slow-revolving ship made of glass heading outwards from your sun, awaywards, deepspacewards. Your thoughts (the shadows) are then everywhere because the sun is underneath you – and you ascend, unless your mammal mind has already adapted to the rotation.

Grahm found that difficult. Everything he believed in space was new; the cogging went in spirals inward. For a few amorphous months Grahm had gone through every holy book he had ever been taught about, and delved into the library for more. He used them up, quicker than he shed his skin and replaced himself (which for regular humans was the luxurious length of 7½ years).

When he had first been shot out into space there had been food with him, to trick him into thinking he had a supply. In fact, all those paperbags were one and the same bag, and when he opened the first one he collapsed them. Grahm, though advanced enough to eat the starlight shining in through all the windows, had requested this specific food to carry with them into the cold of space and now the bag had gone stale and the smell of Americana was faint enough that it could have been anything.

On a similar trajectory as he was his Chanceone, his choice one, Decarulin, who he was told was beautiful. He did not really care; they were going to fuck. That was the one thought that came back, though it too in different shapes. It was on the list. Some parts of him liked her, others hated her, but his whole being wanted her. That was sensor-proof.

Grahm started making up his own gods, but they lacked in weight and symbolism compared to the old gods and he used them up too quickly. He could spend a month in the intermediary state spoke of in the Bardo Thödol, or six weeks digesting [the footnotes of [the footnotes of [the footnotes of a typo]]] in the Torah scrolls but when worshipping the Eternal Lobster all he could do was shed and empty, all his skin cells aligning to attention. Days flew by, Grahm felt motion sickness from it – or was it the rotation? – and his pantheon thinned to just him, the devil, and the Alien.

“I am chock full of clockwork chemicals,” he said to space which did not reply, but rather looked scornfully back at him, malice in its million eyes. Looked back at them. He tried for a moment to repeat the declaration but started rhyming and embarrassed himself.

See the Sun

It’s the end of the world; it feels like a practical joke. People are standing still, slack jaws gaping, gazing at the sun as if they are tricking me into doing the same. Did you know that ‘apocalypse’ is not in the dictionary? I refuse to look it up. I refuse to look up, but the contours of my shadow begin to contort and everything glows blazing red, as if it is only ever going to get redder. Experimentally, I closed someone’s eyes and he crumbled into red sand. Experimentally, I close my own eyes and I see the sun.

Mycofreudianism

The collective unconscious is a real place and we should go there. We cannot be individuals like this, just different faces of the same skull. We must sever the ties. I have scoured satellite data and come to the conclusion that the place must be underground, or I would have seen it by now. I can feel it, though, I could always sense it. It tugs at me with its cords, if you put your hands to my neck like this you can feel it, can’t you? It pulsates like a second heartbeat. I have a handsaw. Are you coming?