Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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18/Feb/2013

2012 NaNoWriMo Excerpt #3

Last one of these I’m posting before I get anywhere with editing this novella into shape. I haven’t even got to write the really cool scenes yet! (The really cool scenes are some NGE/Michael Bay stuff. Explaining it here would ruin the explositude.)

Previous excerpts can be found here: /2012/11/12/nanowrimo-excerpt-1/ and here: /2013/01/13/2012-nanowrimo-excerpt-2/

This snippet takes place between excerpt 2 and 1. As usual, comments appreciated.

[Content Warning: sex]

~

She closed the door and exhaled and lay down on the floor. Immediately, Ikkje appeared from the doorway from the kitchen and sat down next to her. He held her hand. He wore an apron and smelled like cinnamon.

“Do you love me?” Rovy asked.

Ikkje Pouncer appeared to think for a little while. The house was modest, she thought. Like most of Ikkje’s kind, the house was just at the edge of the city, but Rovy was okay with this. “I think I do. I don’t think anything has changed. What’s wrong?”

He spent most of his days out in the emptiness, unrecorded, hunting and gathering. Rovy shook her head. “Long day, is all. Have you heard of the falling elites?”

“Elites?”

“The bewinged men and women falling from the sky, love.”

“Is that where the elites are?”

“Well, a bunch of them fell and something happened to the Information Market. Hardly any Buskers there, but many buyers. Don’t know what to make of it. Is dinner done soon?”

“It is. I gathered a lot of mushrooms and potatoes, today.” He smiled.

She kissed him. “You know, most hunter-gatherers also do the hunting business. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you bring home a phant of any kind.”

“These potatoes were totally a struggle, I swear.”

She stared at the little information ball that had rolled out of her pockets.

She kissed her husband again, “hey, do you really love me?” Read the rest of this entry »

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14/Feb/2013

Relēthē

Chy-Gorat died and left nothing behind: no money, no words, not even a withered husk of skin or any bleached bones. His friends remembered the man against his wishes, and Issachi lost his tongue before he could hold his memorial speech.

Gorat started fading then, but they made him a statue. They repair it when it dries and crackles, and when it melts in the sun, and after it is struck by lightning.

And when every walleted picture blanked and every yearbook photo was burnt to ashes, Issachi reconstructed his friend from stray footage and distributed the new images everywhere.

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11/Feb/2013

I Solve Your Fictional Problems about Time Travel

Fictional people often come to me with their Problems. They are very distressed until I calmly technobabble at them until it all seems to make sense. So, I thought I should offer my services to the public. Are you a fictional person? Do you have a problem? Email me at johannes.punkt at gmail dot com and pose your problem and I will try to explain it away.

Now, without further ado, today’s problem is about time travel. The question was illustrated in the form of a picture of a DeLorean several thousand miles into space, with Earth in the background, and a pithy explanation that the Earth moves in space.

Q: How come time machines also seem to be space machines and always know exactly where to go???

Read the rest of this entry »

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7/Feb/2013

Slachtoffertjes

It fans out in every direction, like shrapnel. It embeds itself in the skin of the little victims of your crime; your bereavement, your divorce. By killing one you remove both. And so there are orphanages and runaways and anti-social services.

The shrapnel not extracted runs inside them, so they will always piss blood when they piss.

And nineteen years later they might feel less diminutive, and twenty little years later you are free from good behaviour. You arm yourself with a shovel. You dig up the corpse, sully the crime scene. You haunt the little victims of your crime.

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4/Feb/2013

SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILST COMPLETING THE HOLOCAUST

So, as you may gather from the title, this is not a nice story. I guess I am to blame for writing it and stuff, but you could also blame girlshapedguitar for making me share the Most Awkward Sex Scene I’ve ever written, which happens to be in the middle of this train wreck of a story. It is a machine of death story that I never submitted. (See: machineofdeath.net)

[Trigger Warnings: baby hitler, suicide, pregnancy angst]

~

SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILST COMPLETING THE HOLOCAUST

a machine of death story

Week 21, day 2

The room glowed a little from being in the presence of that silvery machine. From its top, like a slack tongue, a small strip of paper jutted out.

Björn Willems, MD, tore the strip of paper off and handed it to the woman sitting in front of him. Like a statue of someone who has just received disastrous news, she sat perfectly still. The good doctor leant back in his chair and observed her. It was a good chair, a proper chair. He’d arranged the office furnishings himself, after the MD before him had been killed in a freak accident. It wouldn’t do to keep the furniture of an unlucky woman.

Therefore, the table was new and the chairs were all new. They looked the same but in fact Dr. Willems’ chair was ten centimeters higher off the ground than any other chair. From his elevated position, the doctor gave the woman on the other side of the table a warm, friendly smile.

She smiled back, at first thinly and then as broadly as the doctor, and then they both strained their face muscles and some laughter bubbled up. It turned into a guffaw from Björn and a soundless, out-of-breath clucking from the pregnant woman. Even the little machine seemed to join in, vibrating as it did.

The woman caught her breath, “this is a joke, right? That is,” another breath, “why we are laughing, isn’t it?”

The doctor immediately withdrew his smile into his beard and stopped laughing. He balled his fist and coughed into it once. “What? No, not at all. It is just kind of funny. Don’t worry though, I’m sure he grows up to be a healthy young man.”

All non-artificial colour disappeared from her face. “Try again. New needle. Something must have gone wrong.”

The machines had never been wrong.

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31/Jan/2013

Georg

Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a dead woman. She died in front of him every night and became more and more beautiful. One morning, after a storm, he made his way to the damp alley where she lay, mouth open, face gone. He found her behind a trash can and he cried. She had not got to her feet and walked away like an angel.

The city was besieged. It rained fire and black death. The man stayed with the dead woman, his obsession. And she took one last breath, and her soul possessed him.

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28/Jan/2013

Open Letter to Ken Woodruff

[Trigger Warning: rape, bad police officers, torture]

[Spoiler Warning: uh, season 2, episode 14 of The Mentalist]

Hello Ken,

I hope you appreciate feedback. This open letter concerns an episode, Blood In, Blood Out of the hit show The Mentalist, an episode which you wrote. More specifically it concerns the ending of it, which I felt was handled very very poorly. I know it is an old episode, and I hope that your writing has grown since.

When you (general you) do writing, you generally write about what’s important to you, and ignore what is not important. I think there was a scene in your episode where you (specific you) overlooked something very important, and I am going to explain why. Do excuse all this build-up before I get to my actual point. It is here so that you (or other readers of this letter) do not misconstrue my critique.

It was a well-told story; you explored a new side of Kimball Cho [an agent of law]; you tied everything together nicely at the end; there were some cool scenes with guns in them.

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24/Jan/2013

Profession

Sergeant Maier displayed very specific sets of aptitudes and ineptitudes. On active duty, James kept himself one mistake away from a dishonourable discharge. He lost most of his toes on purpose.

A General by the name of Baumgartner noticed his aptitudes, finally, when one day the Sergeant held his hat to his chest perfectly. It all just made sense. Thus James got the position, without ever having asked for it. Because, who asks for that?

Limping a little, hitching rides, James embarked on a fruitful career. He travelled the country, visiting the relatives of soldiers, bringing them the bad news.

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21/Jan/2013

Plots You Can Have #5, Ambiguous Monsters Edition

[Content Warning: suicide, human sacrifice]

Previous part here: /2012/10/31/for-the-undecided-plots-you-can-have-nanowrimo-edition/

First part here: /2012/08/20/a-few-plots-you-can-have/

~

The Dalmour Parasite

a parasite that only infects suicidal people and turns them into psychopaths to make their lives better

Neil Ruthsmoke is a man who makes his friends suicidal. He cannot help it; it is not to do with his personality per se, it is just that his particular body odour trips bad wires in people’s brains; he is a freak of nature undiscovered by science. He is also quite depressed on account of this. Story is about how his psychologist both tracks the spread of the parasite and how it starts to take over hir. There is research into Ruthsmoke’s life, and the point where his friends stopped killing themselves and started becoming sociopaths is found. Good scenes might include: when the psychologist puts forth the idea that maybe, possibly, it’s all Ruthsmoke’s fault; when a friend breaks the pattern by topping hirself; when the psychologist realizes ze has probably been infected hirself.

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17/Jan/2013

Home without Books

Your body will go on living after your death. You wake up in the darkness, shivering, from a nebulous nightmare; that cold spell is what it feels like when you are let back in. It is confirmed since long ago you are superfluous, the body has shut you out before.

One day you will haunt your own home. Your body will explain to the exorcist, the slamming of doors and sackcloth unthreading itself. The exorcist (he will wear a cape) will nod – he has seen it all before – and ask your body to leave for now.

You will be banished.

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