Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabble

9/May/2018

Hostile Mythologies

When somebody dies a star appears in the night sky. Brilliant flash of commemoration. Makes no sense. Consider how the stars are so far away that it might have taken them tens of thousands of years to traverse thickets and clear-felled expanses of light and darkness to plant themselves on our un-sky-coloured marble. (Sky is black; we are pale blue.) Of course: the causality is wrong. When a star appears, somebody dies. The entire galaxy is instead a sort of gun pointed at our world; each star has a prophecy of death in it, like bullets with names on them.

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23/Jul/2017

Nettle

Found a nettle growing under a bridge. Start of summer, I was out looking for shards of your heart between the cobblestones.

A single nettle. Tall, even gangly. Like someone had dropped a needle there and walked away. Sat on my haunches by it, feet pointing at Chimère St. and Byson across the canal. Reached out a hand as if picking a flower for a lover, gloveless. Held it between thumb and forefinger and anticipated the sting, brushing it up and down my underarms over the area where your tattoo goes. Expecting, in vain, the skin to react at all.

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10/Mar/2016

Mayfly

The whole, “you’re beautiful,” thing. You are. The only beautiful person I know and I don’t know why. Others can be pretty, hot, cute, sexy, gorgeous, jaw-dropping (you are all those things) but none of them can be beautiful, like you are. Some define beauty as perfection and some define it as perfectly flawed, and I don’t know, it’s not about that. There’s just something about the way you laugh and the way you kiss and the way you think. You’re a mayfly, bewinged and ephemeral, aren’t you? I would like to admire you, but, it’s okay if I can’t.

~

Another from the archives. I’m still fond of this declaration of love from a very stumbling mouth. (I’ve used that word and really meant it maybe three or four times after I wrote this. Sometimes it slips out of my mouth like a moth from an old abandoned wardrobe. Sometimes I write beauty in stories to mark lies.)

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3/Mar/2016

Before the Light Turns Red

Reposting this old drabble from 2012 because I deleted the old blog it was on in a fit of entropy. Might post more of these if there’s anything salvage-worthy. Anyway. This piece is based on a gorgeous song by Unwoman, called The Heroine: unwoman.bandcamp.com/track/the-heroine

I urge you to go listen to that. And when you’ve read my piece, to read this excellent post by @earlgreyhot, also inspired by that song: earlgreyhot.com/blog/the-heroines-demons/

~

Cross the street before the light turns red, arrive out of breath at your theatre. You’re playing someone who’s losing her love tonight again. Five hundred sirens blare to dampen the sound of the bombs. The play is in the basement, no-one’s here to take my ticket. Everything goes crimson and I hide in the dark behind a pillar. Fifty thousand pairs of hands grab me when I catch a bombflash in a shard of glass. I get thrown out. Remember me as more than the shadow I will glue to the wall. I hope you believed I would show.

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