Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabbles

23/Apr/2013

Sky Factories

Plumes of tar hanging in the sky, so thick you could probably scoop some of it out if you got close enough. It is always night under Nemuttemachi, the trail from the sky factories. Shantytowns are constructed anew every time the wind changes direction and relocates the sky. Inside the smoke, ever-shifting patterns of light move like dancing constellations, pale blue and yellow. It is said to emulate a night under the open sky in the times before light pollution. It is as if the heavy cover of black clouds cuts through the blue paste and reveals the real sky.

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22/Apr/2013

Whale

A shadow moved across the land, shaped like the shadow of a whale. There were no whales present who could cast that shadow, there were no clouds in the sky. The crops shivered when it passed them through, but they were unscathed. Tree stumps couldn’t move when it touched them, but their roots shook.

A little boy was playing with sticks in the mud, he shivered too. The shadow circled him widely, with aquatic quickness. He thought he should scream, but the air above the shadow didn’t move like it should, and he sounded like he was underwater.

He disappeared.

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21/Apr/2013

Call It Fate

Somewhere in a ditch the rainwater is separating a dog skeleton from its collar.

In a hospital a baby is born. They cut off one of its two genitals and it screams.

The earthquake cuts the land apart right between your feet and mine.

And the pilot doesn’t get to see his home country from above one last time, when the billowing black cloud obscures his view.

A doctor sells his soul for medical knowledge; he could have made a better deal.

A wall is being built. Yellow signs with black text are hung up. The message cannot be clearer.

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20/Apr/2013

Anything She Opens

This morning, her umbrella tried to eat her. Umbrellas are hungry and they have long thin teeth like needles.

Anything she opens becomes a mouth, and it often sees her as food. It is why she appreciates the chivalry so much, why the rain soaks her so often outside of pubs.

She found out her new bank account had eaten all her money. Just as good, she could never live anywhere that had doors anyway.

She tried to end it the day before she got evicted, but the deeper she cut the more it could open. She didn’t even bleed.

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19/Apr/2013

Little Egg

Little Myfanwy was born and her soul was wrapped around an owl’s egg. The chick didn’t make it. The surface was crisp and white, cracked from the subtle force of magic. This was how ornithologist Dr. Gibbard found it.

He punctured it thrice with a needle used for taking eggs’ temperatures. He sealed the egg in a small safe container. Whenever he came to a new town, he pretended to be on the lookout for an avian disease called devilprong which manifested in humans as three wounds in a line like Orion’s belt.

If he found her he owned her.

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18/Apr/2013

Corset

Corsets from a young age; if you can breathe you are doing it wrong. Deformed. Knowing what’s to come at age eighteen. Reforming. Your stomach cut up and filled with other people’s organs. Dead street kids’. Rich old men’s. You will wobble. Four lungs. If you can breathe, you’re doing it wrong. How many mule runs do you think you can handle? Four? Five? On the way back you’re thin again, but you can’t show that. So you smuggle down and booze back, side jobs. Flirt just enough with customs. Thinking you can buy yourself out of the corset’s grip.

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17/Apr/2013

Heartbreak

The loudest sound ever recorded in human history was accompanied by the pitiful whimper of broken china and the soft, carressing hush of a slammed door; Philip Raeburn’s heart had been broken. There was one sharp pang that travelled with the wind until it was finally shouted down by the roaring ocean. An aeroplane or two were lost in the struggle. From the various reports of windows crashing in and the timestamps on broken recording devices we can calculate the precise moment, down to the microsecond, if so needed. Hearing never returned to normal after that, nothing else did either.

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16/Apr/2013

Slugs

He clambered onto the bed and the fine oak bedposts rotted immediately. The bed shifted. There was the slurping sound of suckers attaching and detaching themselves, like an octopus on dry land shuffling nervously. He dared a smile; he had no teeth. The stench was unmentionable. He screeched, he jerked this way and that. When he undressed, he was like a man struggling to get out of a straightjacket. The linen sheets had turned to soot by then, the wallpaper was peeling. I breathed. I wriggled out of my dress like a moulting cicada, and we fucked like mating slugs.

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15/Apr/2013

Overture

Orwell and Julia’s relationship had an overture at a Christmas party two years before they actually, truly, met.

Orwell and Julia’s relationship was a classical opera in three parts. Their marriage was a slow movement, their wedding and divorce both lightning fast.

Orwell and Julia did not know they had met before the night they met again, something Orwell was embarrassed over and Julia was traumatized by. They had both been too intoxicated to remember exactly.

It was obvious, how it would go. The friend who introduced them to one another said they had chemistry. What they had was music.

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14/Apr/2013

An Old French Joke

(Sometimes death is funny, no matter what you do.) A teacher has to inform her young student about his parents’ deaths, but she just cannot compose herself. She keeps giggling and refusing to say why.

After class she pulls the student aside. And she’s trying not to laugh. Trying really hard. She composes herself, exhales, and says, “I have to tell you something.”

The kid gives her a quizzical look.

“Your parents are dead,” she says, and when she says ‘dead’ she also bursts into laughter. The child starts crying:

“How? How did they die?”

“A pig fell on them.”

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