Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabbles

20/Sep/2013

Fleeting, Incandescent Joy

Michelle experienced five weeks of bliss in her life. It was the kind of fleeting, incandescent joy which diminishes from too much thought or appreciation.

She was aware of the passing of time the same way she was aware of flies gathering and buzzing round the bin bags. She hung up strips of flypaper; she turned up the volume on the radio.

She remembered one day in particular, when radio voices happened to be talking about her heinous crime. She had listened, nodded along to their opinionated accents, and then her cooking show had started, and she had become engrossed.

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19/Sep/2013

Authentic Italian Suits

The suit was authentic Italian, with the muscle memory and body hair commonly associated with stereotypically Italian males. There was a vague personality embedded in it, so the skull felt a bit crowded, but the being wearing the suit had been promised it was simply very good semblance. It had been standing in the train station for half an hour when the other suit showed up; same grey eyes, same height. They had picked the same model. The beings inside the suits smiled, and it must have looked like two brothers reuiniting. They embraced, exchanged suitcases, and were then extracted.

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18/Sep/2013

Mermaid

She made friends, friends who knew things, until one of them told her that she required salt water. She spent most of her time in bathtubs, feeling herself turn into a mermaid, yet every time she stood up she would look down at her body, all wet glistening skin and no rainbow-shimmering scales. By the time she found out about the big sea, she already had too many landlubber friends to leave them all so abruptly, so she stayed. One day in her old age, she knew, she would have shedded them all, and she would walk into the ocean.

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17/Sep/2013

Doppelgänger, Austin, Texas

You run into your doppelgänger at a café in Austin, Texas. She tells you she has just come back from Rome. You have been in this town all your life, if we exclude the 3-month excursion your pregnant mother took to New York while she still could.

But you want to impress this person, whose hair has highlights of blonde and whose crooked teeth were not corrected in youth, so you tell her you work as a professional art forger, specializing in Vincent van Gogh.

It leads to nothing. You never see her again; you never lie like that again.

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16/Sep/2013

Enabling Nostalgia

You took a photograph of her when she was weak. You said that photographs enable nostalgia too much if we exclude moments like these. There was a kind of glee to your voice, a cheesy, plastic grin on your face as if you were the one in front of the camera. She, in turn, wore no expression, just a hospital blanket spattered with irregular polkadots, like someone had meticulously painted each one. The camera spat out the photograph like a bitter pill, but I looked in your albums today and there are only pictures of white teeth and deep dimples.

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15/Sep/2013

Mexico City

He looked himself in the mirror, intently. Behind him, on the other side of the street, was the entrance to the bank. The mirror was not really a mirror, just a storefront window, but someone had draped something dark on the inside, and the effect was almost the same. It was an art project; behind the dark satin lay a little camera capturing people’s expressions. His expression was a volatile one without any twitching muscles, like the stillness of a lake in a volcanic caldera. He got out his stockings, rolled it over his head, and ran across the street.

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14/Sep/2013

Claiming and Unclaiming

And the worst thing about this virus, this gruesome, terrifying, insidious, awesome – in the non-colloquial sense – ungodly virus, is that we have no way to detect it. Not only are its symptoms deadly, not only are they so frustratingly vague as to avoid arousing suspicion in its host; not only does it – according to prominent experts and authors on the virus – disguise the deaths it claims, unclaiming them. It also fails to show up on tests, refuses to be limited by any vector. You could have it already and not know, not even have an inkling. Then it takes you.

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13/Sep/2013

a short list of things which are currently swaying in the wind:

a short list of things which are currently swaying in the wind:

The charred body of your yapping dog,

the rope it hangs with,

the branch of the tree it hangs from, though some of that swaying is indirect, and

the leaves on it, like little hands with three thick fingers each, waving.

~

The grass around the circle where your yapping dog burned, but not the crisp, brown grass inside the circle

~

The flagpole I erected overnight,

the ropes that run up its body sounding like lashes of a whip every time they hit the pole,

the victory flag itself.
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12/Sep/2013

What You Left Behind

You have left something behind, quite carelessly. I locked it in your old abandoned room, because that room smells of you (pine trees, heather), and I would think that this thing you left behind would be calmed by that. It just thrashes around, emitting a high-pitched screech at the edge of my hearing, like something blurring in and out of focus. Why did you leave this behind, so carelessly? It even looks like you. You should have taken it with you. I’m sleeping in the treehouse tonight. You have a key. I expect this thing to be gone by morning.

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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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