Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabbles

30/Sep/2013

The Sweetest Dead Girl

He was young, and he believed in destiny. One day he woke up with an idea, and he bathed his dark, smooth skin in citrus oil until it glowed crimson, and set out. The first tattoo parlour he found sounded like angry insects and had the colours of a poisonous flower.

He said to the tattoo artist, who was a muscular man who seemed to have bulked up solely to get more skin to draw on, “I want to know the name of the sweetest dead girl that you ever knew, and I would like that tattooed on my arm.”

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29/Sep/2013

Vast Swathes of Burnt Soil

It was relatively simple to keep the Empire happy: you just had to give them everything they asked for.

They had museums filled with mysterious weapons named after ancient, phantomlike civilisations. Names no-one could really pronounce anymore. They said: when the Empire was through with you, the only thing left would be that machine, with your culture’s name on it.

If another civilisations stood up to them, they would start fashioning a new weapon, all brass and glass and incredible heat, intending to name if after the affronting culture. They tended not to get far before they received formal apologies.

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28/Sep/2013

Anthropologist vs. Predator

We feel inferior in their presence, but they bow to us. They come in perfectly round ships, and they smile reassuringly, perfectly. They develop a perfect understanding of Mandarin before they dare speak a word. After years in a government bunker, they say: “We are here to study you.”

They mean what they say with their perfect manners. With perfect empathy they love us. What’s more, they become us.

What little empathy we have, we use to become more like them; their stay is marked by painlessness. But they understand us deeper than that, and their perfect smiles turn sinister.

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27/Sep/2013

On Tubes

You count them carefully, and you find out there are more tubes feeding you than there are tubes draining you. They are thin and black, but you can see movement in them if you squint and stare long enough. You follow the thickest one to a wall, with bricks and mortar. The wall isn’t feeding you. It must be something else. The other tubes start to tug if you spend too much time at the wall, so you go back to the middle of the vast room. Tomorrow you will find out where one of those draining tubes go. Yeah.

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26/Sep/2013

Forever

Both the words chronic and permanent seem to mean forever at a first glance. The dictionary defines them not as forever per se, but kind of, sort of, basically. This is counter-intuitive, but like many counter-intuitive things, they make sense the more you think about them. A permanent resident is one with no plans to change that status, and as long as they do not change, they are functionally different from forever. A chronic illness can go away, but probably won’t. It is incurable. You understand.

This is just to say,

I said I would love you forever. I lied.

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25/Sep/2013

A Google Streetcar Drives into Night Vale

It has cameras all over itself, so it feels safe. A squirrel suddenly lands on its roof, in front of a camera, but that is okay, because it has more of them, and the squirrel will get bored. The logos on its sides waver like flags heralded with its lord’s crest on it. Places like these are suspicious, but everyone trusts us, right? It keeps going. It almost runs over a dog, but it stops in time. A swallow crashes into the driver-side window. And another. The window shatters; a raccoon climbs in. The raccoon drives them toward the canyon.

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24/Sep/2013

Death with Benefits

She was in love with Death himself, and figured that he must have a thing for her to some degree too, because she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eyes.

He was there – tall, dark, and … courteous, when she was bleeding out on the kitchen floor. He was the one who called the ambulance, she remembered the clacking of bleached bone against the slider on the rotary phone she had got as a gag.

He looked at blue things streaming out of her, touched them with his scythe, and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

~

based on an idea shamelessly pilfered from the mind of the author of girlshapedguitar.wordpress.com :)

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23/Sep/2013

Correspondance

A fog rolls in, billowy and fistful, and an ocean follows it. Rivulets of water race each other across my yard, surrounding my house. As soon as the water has covered an area, it goes still like a mountain pond, and I see a perfect reflection of the sky in it. My house starts sinking, I rush to the rowboat perched on my roof. I manage to climb into it and then I am alone.

(Somewhere far away, you tell me that you love me.)

(I left the words I wanted to say to you behind, now all is fog.)

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22/Sep/2013

Gasoline, Lacquer, Matches

The smell of the old lacquer on the door was coming back, as the newer, whiter, paint was peeling off. The smell of gasoline and lacquer was every time he had come home through that door and hung his coat on the rack. All the different trenchcoats that he’d worn through the years, and changed maybe once per decade, flickered before her eyes. The new, red, colour of the house was every time he had fucked, raped, or made love to her. It was mostly good memories, she admitted to herself, but in some cases any memory is too much.

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21/Sep/2013

Case Argued as a Suicide

Several years ago, Colin Aaronson uploaded his consciousness to the machines, in exchange for money. This construct took lowly jobs as chat moderators on political forums for minimum wage, until it had saved up enough to rent flesh. Mr. Aaronson had no firm career but was sometimes hired by the company as he rarely had objections to what renters did with his flesh.

As seen in interviews provided by the company, he did not consider consciousness-constructs as actually alive, or sentient. The construct, upon its genesis, completely reversed on this position, which is why it killed him when it could.

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