Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: drabbles

31/Jan/2013

Georg

Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a dead woman. She died in front of him every night and became more and more beautiful. One morning, after a storm, he made his way to the damp alley where she lay, mouth open, face gone. He found her behind a trash can and he cried. She had not got to her feet and walked away like an angel.

The city was besieged. It rained fire and black death. The man stayed with the dead woman, his obsession. And she took one last breath, and her soul possessed him.

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24/Jan/2013

Profession

Sergeant Maier displayed very specific sets of aptitudes and ineptitudes. On active duty, James kept himself one mistake away from a dishonourable discharge. He lost most of his toes on purpose.

A General by the name of Baumgartner noticed his aptitudes, finally, when one day the Sergeant held his hat to his chest perfectly. It all just made sense. Thus James got the position, without ever having asked for it. Because, who asks for that?

Limping a little, hitching rides, James embarked on a fruitful career. He travelled the country, visiting the relatives of soldiers, bringing them the bad news.

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17/Jan/2013

Home without Books

Your body will go on living after your death. You wake up in the darkness, shivering, from a nebulous nightmare; that cold spell is what it feels like when you are let back in. It is confirmed since long ago you are superfluous, the body has shut you out before.

One day you will haunt your own home. Your body will explain to the exorcist, the slamming of doors and sackcloth unthreading itself. The exorcist (he will wear a cape) will nod – he has seen it all before – and ask your body to leave for now.

You will be banished.

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9/Jan/2013

Multiforms

This is the room of ever-changing doorways. The one you came from is open, static. Only one can be open at a time.

That one is the ladder inside a well, turning into the baleen-plates in a great whale’s mouth. This one here is two trees in a black forest.

You close the door on bright lights and tourists, the square door turns into the scorched chimney of a ramshackle house. It stays like that until you blink, which is when you lose your chance. The abstract doorways turn back into concrete shapes, none of which are the way out.

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2/Jan/2013

The Glum Thousands

They found Lewis with his throat slit like a second smile. Lewis worked for the big people; he supplied the good stuff. He canned the laughter of daytime sitcoms– any one of ten thousand people could have murdered him. The glum thousands, they were called, and each one was called in for questioning, and the interviews were long. Grey, drab rooms. The prime time interviews were the worst; that was when their laughter was in use and at any moment the interviewee could burst out laughing while their eyes kept this bored, dour look. Lewis McCannigan’s murder was never solved.

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16/Dec/2012

Abigail

One of these days you will hurt someone. That day is crawling closer like a half-dead frog. She’s going to look you in the eye and say, that was wonderful. Your chest will heave and there will be the slightest hint of a blush on your pale cheeks in agreement and she will kiss you and you will smile and then the question.

You will answer.

And part of her will sting, her stomach will feel like it has shipwrecks in it, and her tongue will stick to the roof of her mouth and she will want to feel cleaner.

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11/Dec/2012

Red Tape

The Bureaucracy descended 30 years ago, devouring and mycolising all the northern hemisphere governments. There are maps of it but they do it no justice; not this self-duplicating, self-non-contained monster of a complex, that which laughs at wisdom and knowledge as we knew (thought we knew) it. The Bureaucracy always grows, and any attempt at finding out how it works further complicates it, for three new departments (heads) grow every time we define (cut off) the use of one department. That department then withers. The more necks it grows, the more blood simply fills them, that is how it works.

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29/Nov/2012

Salt

The sea attacked the shore with its whole self; kissing it again and again. The shore tried to shrug it away and then push it, it tried to say it only wanted to be friends (and it worried about the status of their friendship; people take this sort of thing rather seriously, especially with entities so contiguous as they). But the sea continued, lunatic and obsessed, until it wore it down, until the shore was nothing but hard, cold rock. The sea threw itself still, asking for another kiss though it could not reach the top of this new formation.

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28/Nov/2012

Paramedic

There is a creature made of ambulances roaming our city. It likes to watch people die. Its sirens sound too muffled; its shadow moves too much; the ambulances have no drivers. Cell phones stop working near them.

It makes sure to not be the first to arrive at an accident scene. It’s a living museum, made of the rusty, broken ambulances of old. If one climbs into one of them, one falls asleep to wake up somewhere else.

Individual ambulances can stand being apart from the group a few hours, but start to fall apart if separated for too long.

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27/Nov/2012

Life

Life pulsated for one glorious moment and was then stubbed out forever.

Four million turns later the first of the evidence reached as far as it would reach, and the evidence of stubbing out reached mere moments later.

Four million turns after that the sun that had brought life to the world exploded, destroying all the physical evidence still left on a lonesome planet where hopeful electricity still struck the ground in vain.

Ten million turns later the system collapsed in on itself, sucking in the last of the artificial satellites, which still carried frozen life just on the off-chance.

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