Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabbles

24/Mar/2013

Erin

The little hedgehog had sharp spines everywhere on her, and unretractable claws, and a helpless, pathetic personality that stayed endearing for a while but not forever. Tears came easily. She saw through her tears how all her friends left her, even other hedgehogs; anyone who ever felt warmth for her eventually cooled off, until she was wary of making new connections. She would keep to corners and to dark spaces; so she was perceived as standoffish, aloof, except for when she cried.

The little hedgehog started filing off her spines one by one until she was a hedgehog no more.

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23/Mar/2013

Watersnake

A small incision shall be made with a knife in the skin, and the skin shall be held open, with instruments if necessary. Use plastic or sterile, stainless, steel. The watersnake shall be given a taste of your blood from when you fasted, and if it likes it, it shall be ushered in through the incision. Panic sets in after five minutes at most, it is important to remove yourself from sharp objects. Remember that if you push against it, it burrows deeper. The benefits shall start after five or six days have passed, and you shall feel good then.

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22/Mar/2013

Just the Best Party

The moon hangs low, brushing against the tops of the evergreens outside of town. There is a constant high-pitched whine that can be heard over the music, and it’s coming from my dog. Every bedroom in a mile-wide radius is occupied. Some people are shagging half-heartedly on couches. We are running out of food, but somehow not booze. Most of us are dancing; it hurts if we stop. This is the forty-third time someone plays this song. Every time we send someone out for supplies or for help, we end up spreading the party. Coordinates attached. Consider this an invitation.

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21/Mar/2013

First Kiss

Our pets always died. We ran out of room in our own garden so I sneaked into the neighbours’. I dug carefully and put the grass back the way it was; I became adept at handling shovels. Extremely adept. So when Mariot – who never called me – called me, I knew what it was about. She told me where to meet her.

Someone got a gravelly grave. I hadn’t recognized his face. I saved the place on my phone, as an X in a geotagged tweet in the drafts folder, and told Mariot she owed me. She gave me a kiss.

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21/Mar/2013

Announcement and Advisories

Short version: daily flash fiction! Trigger Policy updated! Read things what aren’t my writings also!

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Hello! I’m Johannes Punkt and you may know me from such PR stunts as travelling into your dreams and releasing spiders all over the place! Haha, who am I kidding, that’s a thing that starts tonight. Starting today, I will resume a thing I hiatused almost a year ago with the Day of a Whole Lot of Drabbles (2012/06/28/the-day-of-a-whole-lot-of-drabbles/). That is right, I will post drabbles (self-contained 100-word flash stories), once a day, for at least a few months. The first of these will go up in about six hours if my calculations are correct.

I have updated the Trigger Policy page. It is now different from before, in light of the change of pace and content of this blog. You can read the whole thing at /triggers/

I have made the decision to not put any warnings, trigger or otherwise, to the daily drabbles that appear on this blog. Please be aware that anything that shows up might be upsetting and proceed with caution. It is impossible for me to warn adequately as triggers are often too specific for a generalized warning to be useful.

The bigger posts like the conlanging and technobabbling will be less common now, perhaps one every three or four weeks, or when inspiration strikes. I will try to review a book again and maybe make that a thing; that was fun.

Lastly, I will mention some serials I am enjoying at the moment. In order of the installations’ length.

The Ritual is like a treasure hunt that is currently most likely to turn you into a dead wooden statue that always stares and never blinks. mercerbox.wordpress.com/tag/the-ritual/

The First 500 is like a few details of a huge painting being filled in slot by slot like a meandering snake, and the brushstrokes are wide and the details are fine. alastairjrball.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-first-500.html

Berlin Confidential is always on my list of recommended reading because damn why is this not a big thing yet? It has mysterious murders, tension, myriad and well-defined characters, angst, gay sex, and Weimar Berlin. AND MORE. I can never sum it up. Just go read it. berlinconfidential.tumblr.com/story

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14/Mar/2013

Plague

The plan is simple. Wait for the storm and then fly the supplies dirigible over the enemy city, apparently lost. The grey storm will make it impossible to see from inside the dirigible, so you have to rely on magnetism. As will the enemy. If they don’t shoot you down you just walk into the balloon and fire a few rounds yourself.

You won’t make it out of there alive. You will be captured or killed. If they somehow have the sense not to use the supplies, at least make sure they don’t sever your heads when they kill you.

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7/Mar/2013

Voyage

“Find life.”

You were fitted with a chelonian, deliberate kind of intelligence, and all the cameras in the world. You left our system as a living thing; you taught us all we know about extrasolar space. And you fulfilled your mission; you found life.

You aimed your thruster; you set your course.

And you degraded. Micrometeors, particles of dust, stray gamma bursts, bugs that turned up after hundreds of years, data inconsistencies. So you turned into just another inert clump of metal, gathering ice on your journey to this other world. They did not see you coming.

And you crashed.

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28/Feb/2013

Stearin

That boy always had a lighter on him.

They would always do it in his bedroom; never hers. Every time before he backed onto the bed and fell backwards, all tousled hair and coy grin, he would light the one thick white candle by the window like a sacred ritual. It would go out by itself when they lay there, spent and giggly and warm, and he called it theirs.

When it was a stump of just one inch she asked what he would do when it burnt down.

“I’d get a new one,” he said, with a sad smile.

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21/Feb/2013

Yes

Semaphore towers fell; cables were cut; spy satellites blacking out all over the globe. White noise; telephones were scrambled mid-call – I was interrupted mid-sentence. There were a few shouts, a few wordless moans. And language broke down. Words mitosed into smaller words, and sounds into their constituents until just one syllable was left. This syllable was prolonged and tested and broken, it split itself into the muscle contractions and relaxations, in tongue and throat and lungs and diaphragm, and they were repeated over and over again, every time you touched me in a new place, or in a new way.

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14/Feb/2013

Relēthē

Chy-Gorat died and left nothing behind: no money, no words, not even a withered husk of skin or any bleached bones. His friends remembered the man against his wishes, and Issachi lost his tongue before he could hold his memorial speech.

Gorat started fading then, but they made him a statue. They repair it when it dries and crackles, and when it melts in the sun, and after it is struck by lightning.

And when every walleted picture blanked and every yearbook photo was burnt to ashes, Issachi reconstructed his friend from stray footage and distributed the new images everywhere.

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