drabbles | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

12/Aug/2013

Tears of St. Lawrence

Grey, fibrous strings of light fall from the sky, and lead the way. The fireflies dance around them. The little girl spends all her time with her neck craned. She went out into the woods because she always knows her way home.

She looks down for just a second; there is a pinecone all dark and prickly like a hand grenade. When she looks up, a cloud has rolled in far too fast. She cries big tears that roll down her cheek like shooting stars.

The fireflies dance up in the sky above her, assuming the patterns of the constellations.

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11/Aug/2013

Ecto-urbanisation

Places with no jobs, no life, aclash with bureaucracies that have acquired such inertia that, like with rushing trains, stopping them or even halting them takes as much energy as sending them hurtling into space. So there are these ghost towns like the skeletons of urban sprawl, built in the shadow of fallen regimes, and not a living soul living there. All the houses’ fronts are sloppily painted white, their sides and backs uncoloured. All the grass has died. And at the edge of town, there is a lonely construction crew setting up new houses, trying to avoid the ghosts.

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10/Aug/2013

Career Mobility

You’ve had this itching all day, like it’s time to move. You want to get to a higher place, you want to move up in the world. You want them to see you for who you really are. You want a flat on the thirtieth floor. One where you can see the city, open the windows, and let birds fly through. A place made of glass. You want it to stop itching. Maybe if you find such a place, they will know you for who you really are. Apply some salve. Start wearing more pungent cologne. Make them see you.

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9/Aug/2013

Jam

I turn on the radio, and clear some space for you. This is that song you like, which goes thump-thump-thump. The lyrics are immaterial. You’ve never heard the song in full, never all the way through the fadeout, where everything slows down. You’ve danced like mad to this song, you’ve danced your brains out on the floor to this. This is your jam. I can see you dancing to it now, if I imagine really hard. I clear some space in my room for you, roll up the carpet so your light steps can be heard against the wooden floor.

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8/Aug/2013

Windowsill

There is a human sitting on a windowsill, staring out over Brisbane. Cars zoom past each other, visible only as small foursomes of eyes, two yellow and two red. She is sat in a structure that is just a shape, filled with colourful wallpaper and stale air. There are moving boxes and pizza cartons full of crusts. They are stacked neatly, so she can barely see the wallpaper. Maybe the open window will let some real air in, maybe tonight she will open one of the boxes and hang her clothes in the wardrobe. This structure could become a home.

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7/Aug/2013

Too Many Knives

This family has too many kitchen knives. They are all subtly varied, but that does not change the fact that there are too many of them. They are all branded knives, from three different companies. I think Mother had a set, and that Father brought a set when he moved in, and I think some relative gave us another full set for some anniversary or other. There is actually not enough space in the drawer for all the knives, so some of them are always in the sink. But the good news? No-one will notice if one knife goes missing.

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6/Aug/2013

Bed Time Story

There’s a forest, dark and deep, lit only by the fluorescent fungi covering dead tree trunks. And there are mud creatures; bubbly, oozey beings, who make a special kind of tea. Sometimes, rarely, a human finds the forest. Even rarer, a human might be invited in for tea.

Ze will be instructed to take off hir clothes, and come into the mudbaths. The creatures, many-limbed and shapeless, will then start the rituals, and if the human stays throughout the whole night – the time it takes for their tea to brew – ze will drink a cuppa unlike anything ze’s ever tasted.

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5/Aug/2013

Dignity

We die together and it is romantic. We don’t stay dead for long because you made a jarring post to your blog, and someone cared, and someone else called the emergency services. The last thing I hear before I die is a siren’s wail, which I find poetic. Elephants climb the stairs. The door is kicked in, we are rescued. I blame you. This is me blaming you, still. They tell me you puked up your insides and that there was no romance in sight, that you convulsed. It was all very undignified. There is no real dignity in love.

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4/Aug/2013

Relentless

“I’m really not the kind of person to run away,” you claim, tightening the laces of your new white runner’s shoes. “Like, if you know me, you know that is so not me.”

I do not know you.

“I never ever go away, and I always come back.” You unfurl your fins from your torso like a set of wings. It’s a short pier and a long way down. The sea attacks the cliffs with a relentless kind of romance, the kind that’s not problematic in works of fiction. You sigh. “But I have to do this.”

You disappear.

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3/Aug/2013

Sculptures

A giant boulder on its edge, barely touching the sand. A rickety pole made of smaller stones like vertebrae, with a behemoth skull on top. Cacti wearing hats of lightning-shaped fulgurite, gently spinning. These wastelands are filled with improbably balancing or hovering things. I have been studying a pendulum made from broken hourglasses, and the way it swings. It is unbothered by the wind, but I know that if I touch it, like with all the other sculptures, it will fall down. So I draw lines in the sand under its course, and I make observations. I need to know.

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