Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabbles

13/Jul/2013

Zombie Alien Invasion Impact

Three doomsday scenarios happened all at once, as if old adages were true after all. But something happened. Malevolent aliens picked up human shamblers infected with the turtlevirus. They couldn’t see the difference between zombies and people. Some of the aliens were bitten, and so the zombie virus spread to the mothership. As the strange ship hung in space, desperately trying to shed its infected parts like a snake sheds skin, a rock the size of Mars hit them and bounced off, giving us a new moon. All the zombies turned toward the moon, walked out into sea, and drowned.

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12/Jul/2013

Rot

He says, “Did you know the stench of fish is a sign of decay? Things from the sea are not supposed to smell. Any meat you get from dead animals has to be rotten. The process of rot starts immediately after death, and it is incremental. There are eggs in the blood that start gestating as soon as the blood stops pumping. The bacteria inside don’t wait for anything, do they?”

I say, “I guess not.”

“There comes a point where the rot is too much, and the meat is considered bad to eat. But it’s always rotten, always rotting.”

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11/Jul/2013

Conversations with the Recently Deceased

“Hi, Mum.”

“She says hello.”

I start crying, as practiced. “How can I be sure it’s her?”

The medium opens one eye for half a second. “Ask her questions only she could answer.”

“Mum,” I said, “what was the name of your favourite high school teacher?”

“She says … Mr. Ruthwick. She looks flustered.”

“The whole world thinks you ran away, Mum. Who killed you?”

“She doesn’t know … she just faded.”

Okay, good. “What was the name of your first pet?”

“She says Mr. Stickly … then she regrets it. She asks, are you trying to get into her bank account?”

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10/Jul/2013

Big Black Wall of Soldiers Lost

You find your name on the big black wall of soldiers lost, not because you really died, but because there was none among the ranks who could recognize you anymore, and you refused to talk to anyone about anything. You find your name on the bark of that tree, but impossibly high up because that moment when he wrote it there, with his rusty pocketknife and his love, was so long ago that you cannot remember his face. You find your name inscribed on someone else’s skin, your face stretched across someone else’s skull, your air filling someone else’s lungs.

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9/Jul/2013

Emil the Despot

Emil the Despot from apartment 11b started a war when he wrote his name on every timeslot for the laundry room in the basement of the apartment complex. Chaos erupted, people took sides, and a commodity became a scarce resource when a precision strike from Julia Evans, 8c, took out two of the dryers. Previous allies turned enemies, until eventually the super repaired the machines and moreover instituted a new rule about slot-hogging. And so the unrest turned into quiet remorse. It took them all a week more to notice that flat 11b had been empty for a long time.

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8/Jul/2013

The Watchmakers

At the age of 15, each child shall be fitted with precisely one watch. It shall have a certain number of hands from one to five, and numbers from nine to fifteen, and the hands shall move at certain speeds. The variables shall not be released into the public. The reasons why shall never be told. Great anxiety shall come forth from the watches. If a watch breaks, we shall do nothing about it but observe. Watch forgery shall flourish, and it shall be battled with more complex watchmaking, but never with legislation. We shall make them care about this.

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7/Jul/2013

Curtains, but No Windows

This room has curtains, but no windows. They hang in such a way as to suggest that they are blocking the sunlight. If you were to look behind them, you feel, sunlight would flow into the room like water from a burst dam. This is an illusion you keep with you. You know not if gravity still affects you. Your legs are touching the floor, you cannot lift your arms; but you got like this long ago. Your heavy heart. Maybe now you’ve moved somewhere where the sun is nothing but a distant star, where nothing pulls you home anymore.

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6/Jul/2013

Scream Enough

Scream enough, and they will start to sound like you. They will actually lose the ability to sound like they did before, and their insides will readjust to seem more human. Their genetic codes seem far too unpredictable to be engineered, which suggests that these things have evolved naturally. If you stop screaming, and talk to them instead, they will parrot you. If you sing, they will learn to sing. There is no advantage to hunting like this, they only reveal this after the capture. For all intents and purposes, it is psychological. They are justifying the hunt to themselves.

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5/Jul/2013

All the Arteries You can Cut

I visited the man in the cave today, but he didn’t want to paint for me. I killed the man in the cave with a sharp rock. I didn’t mean to, but I did. I remembered all the doorways he had painted for me before. All the light seeping through thick canopy, all the arteries you can cut on a deer’s body to kill it in an instant. I killed the man in the cave and I tried to paint with his blood, but I could only paint closed doors, dark featureless skies, and animal hides hung up to dry.

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4/Jul/2013

The Middle of the Maze

In the middle of the maze there sits a monster for which words have not yet been invented. It is not in chains but in exasperation it is stuck, sitting on its haunches, staring at the ants that march across the maze. He cannot follow where the ants go, in the cracks between the walls.

When someone comes to kill him, he usually lets them. If the murderer does not find his way out before sunset, they trade places and the murderer dies, and the monster resurrects. He hopes that one day, a knight will know what the ants know.

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