Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: atlantis

31/Jan/2014

Interest

The men from the bank are here at the door, I let them in, it is freezing outside. There is so much snow that my view of their car must have been obscured for the entire street seemed empty.

They have been observing you, insomniac, they say. You’ve been racking up quite the sleep debt, they say. I don’t understand them.

I try to shake their hands, but they refuse politely.

You come down the stairs a bit like a zombie, Atlantis eyes sunk deep into your skull. They present you the figures; you understand, you say, you fall asleep.

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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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31/Aug/2013

An Atlantis World (#2)

Wavering. The way the adults played it, stonemasons held their breath diving down, letting their metallic tools’ weights drag them to the right depth. They worked in shifts, dragging the tools back up with fishing lines to let the next one descend with them. Underwater, they would carefully remove the stones that held their city up, and bring them to the surface one by one. Others would wash the stones clean of algae, coat them with mortar, and place them on top of the city.

Was it a misstep that collapsed them, just one wrong hammerstrike? We will never know.

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31/Aug/2013

An Atlantis World (#1)

Rickety. The way the children played it, they would build a solid tower out of uniform, wooden blocks. The point was to remove the least important blocks and place them on top, adding to the height of the tower. The game was over when the tower fell, and the collapsor was not under any circumstances allowed to play the game again that day. It must have been a memento mori for their world, with the constant barrage of ice from the sky, filling up the sea. You cannot do this forever; they could have been saying: We don’t intend to.

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