Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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19/Apr/2013

Little Egg

Little Myfanwy was born and her soul was wrapped around an owl’s egg. The chick didn’t make it. The surface was crisp and white, cracked from the subtle force of magic. This was how ornithologist Dr. Gibbard found it.

He punctured it thrice with a needle used for taking eggs’ temperatures. He sealed the egg in a small safe container. Whenever he came to a new town, he pretended to be on the lookout for an avian disease called devilprong which manifested in humans as three wounds in a line like Orion’s belt.

If he found her he owned her.

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18/Apr/2013

Corset

Corsets from a young age; if you can breathe you are doing it wrong. Deformed. Knowing what’s to come at age eighteen. Reforming. Your stomach cut up and filled with other people’s organs. Dead street kids’. Rich old men’s. You will wobble. Four lungs. If you can breathe, you’re doing it wrong. How many mule runs do you think you can handle? Four? Five? On the way back you’re thin again, but you can’t show that. So you smuggle down and booze back, side jobs. Flirt just enough with customs. Thinking you can buy yourself out of the corset’s grip.

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17/Apr/2013

Heartbreak

The loudest sound ever recorded in human history was accompanied by the pitiful whimper of broken china and the soft, carressing hush of a slammed door; Philip Raeburn’s heart had been broken. There was one sharp pang that travelled with the wind until it was finally shouted down by the roaring ocean. An aeroplane or two were lost in the struggle. From the various reports of windows crashing in and the timestamps on broken recording devices we can calculate the precise moment, down to the microsecond, if so needed. Hearing never returned to normal after that, nothing else did either.

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16/Apr/2013

Slugs

He clambered onto the bed and the fine oak bedposts rotted immediately. The bed shifted. There was the slurping sound of suckers attaching and detaching themselves, like an octopus on dry land shuffling nervously. He dared a smile; he had no teeth. The stench was unmentionable. He screeched, he jerked this way and that. When he undressed, he was like a man struggling to get out of a straightjacket. The linen sheets had turned to soot by then, the wallpaper was peeling. I breathed. I wriggled out of my dress like a moulting cicada, and we fucked like mating slugs.

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15/Apr/2013

Overture

Orwell and Julia’s relationship had an overture at a Christmas party two years before they actually, truly, met.

Orwell and Julia’s relationship was a classical opera in three parts. Their marriage was a slow movement, their wedding and divorce both lightning fast.

Orwell and Julia did not know they had met before the night they met again, something Orwell was embarrassed over and Julia was traumatized by. They had both been too intoxicated to remember exactly.

It was obvious, how it would go. The friend who introduced them to one another said they had chemistry. What they had was music.

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14/Apr/2013

An Old French Joke

(Sometimes death is funny, no matter what you do.) A teacher has to inform her young student about his parents’ deaths, but she just cannot compose herself. She keeps giggling and refusing to say why.

After class she pulls the student aside. And she’s trying not to laugh. Trying really hard. She composes herself, exhales, and says, “I have to tell you something.”

The kid gives her a quizzical look.

“Your parents are dead,” she says, and when she says ‘dead’ she also bursts into laughter. The child starts crying:

“How? How did they die?”

“A pig fell on them.”

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13/Apr/2013

Sympathy

You are connected by magic to a certain object; everyone is. Something round. Most of the time it’s a rock at the bottom of the sea, sometimes it’s a jewel or a doorknob. In rare cases it’s a fossilized egg or the shell of a snail. Nobody can know, without experiment, which object is theirs. With age you get worn down from the waves rocking you back and forth. Sometimes objects just burst from pressure, and people have heart attacks. Sometimes I step on snails and feel someone die. It feels like walking into a freezer, or through a ghost.

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12/Apr/2013

Clockwork Smile

I’m a smile that smiles too wide, a frown that frowns too deep. Do you ever feel like you are made out of nothing but broken parts? Little veins that are too quick to burst, skin cells oversensitive to allergens, a pathetic mind that just takes on the characteristic of the weather you can see out through the window. And you try so much to be more than the sum of your parts, but you’re a little clockwork robot which, if wound up, falls apart. A heart that never really comes unstuck, a clenching fist that never really lets go.

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11/Apr/2013

Libido

We are starting to regret having him fixed. Sure, it’s a lot calmer round here, and it’s easier to sleep. And I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to have him calm like this, he doesn’t break anything anymore. We can use the fine china. But he hasn’t got a raise in three years. He always carries the same harried look after work, and sometimes at night I find him staring at the wall, as if projecting an image onto it. I don’t disturb him then, but I bet if I did he wouldn’t even notice me.

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10/Apr/2013

Elephant?

There is a new installation in the tallest building in the city. It releases gas that kills artists.

There is an interactive piece of fiction encircling us – they cannot escape.

Not much has changed, except Lilah coughs now, and the graffiti does not catch my eyes anymore.

Any act of rebellion is either formulaic and easily thwarted, or creative, which kills the rebels.

I saw a black mask with huge eyes and a trunk like an elephant’s. I didn’t know what it was for. It looked like art. It was in a locked room in the Building where I work.

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