fiction | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

2/Aug/2013

Heart Attack

Her bed is about 80 centimetres above the floor; that should not be anything. When you are unable to move, an 80 centimetre fall hurts. She wakes up with a clenched jaw and she cannot really breathe. She can speak. She says, “Safeword,” into the air. Someone is doing this to her. No-one hears her. She is sweating profusely. “Safeword!” She jerks and falls off the bed, and starts to lose feeling in her toes, the lack-of-feeling crawling up her legs. “Safeword,” she whispers, and it takes as much energy as a full-lung scream. But it doesn’t work that way.

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1/Aug/2013

I’m So Glad We Don’t Live in This Timeline

This is the timeline where we never fuck, and each time we come close to it we are comically thwarted and thrown half a world away. I come to your city; the trains are all delayed due to weather, and we hardly have 24 minutes. You visit mine; we get shuffled around by formal events and martial laws. We both go to Krakow, but we don’t know that the other one is there until afterwards. Lastly, I find my way back to your city, we have a moment; and the door is kicked in and I’m arrested for domestic terrorism.

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31/Jul/2013

All the Stop Signs

All the stop signs in this town are redder, written in a different font, suggesting that the company producing them never had seen normal stop signs before. Sometimes they are placed in an entirely illogical fashion, as if the map was held the wrong way when they were placed there. There are small campaigns from small people who write letters to their town’s representative, hoping that some bored intern reads it and plucks up and talks to the politician about it. Some times kids go missing from the back of cars. The politicians have bigger things to worry about. Obviously.

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30/Jul/2013

Etemenanki

Today, I told someone that I love her (in a language she barely understands) in a park, in a slightly shaky voice because I hadn’t thought it out as well as I’d hoped. And she said that she loves me (in a language I have mostly forgotten), in a whisper in my ear. Surely there were other languages around us that day.

(in the bugs that kept crawling over us, between their bug pheromones)

(in the electricity between us, between nerve clusters on the surface and deeper down)

(in the stilted, blushing manner of whoever filed that public indecency charge)

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29/Jul/2013

And Now: a Word from Our Sponsor

Eat your twin in utero; get born. Forever have a hollow feeling with you, never feel sated. Always eat, always carry your twin with you. This world is a circus, and you are the sideshow. You eat all the food you can eat, read all the books you can read. Voraciously. Line your throat with candle grease, eat more. Visit your mother in the hospital. Listen to her talk gibbously about her hunger, how you were born and how you were food. They took you away from her. Wonder now, if that was the right decision.

Eat at Olive Garden.

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28/Jul/2013

Dream Journal Entry #7

I was the ambassador to Portugal, where they speak a language of broken glass and smashed wristwatches. I was shaking as my predecessor looked me in the eyes and said, by way of picking long and see-through shards out from his throat, “you mustn’t die inside a dream. The body treats it all as if it’s really happening.” The last shard gone, and the innards of a mechanic watch on the floor, he walked out into the river. I woke up. There was an earthquake. There are cuts inside my mouth now. Does writing count as speaking? I woke up.

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27/Jul/2013

Dream Journal Entry #6

I fall asleep to nature shows, my childhood kryptonite. I would be treated to Attenborough, my parents would go upstairs for alone-time; I can’t believe it took me fifteen years to understand that ritual. I dream of walking in on my parents having sex. My mother twists her neck to look at me. My father is pumping and unbothered. They make small cricket chirps, and I’m seeing this all from the height of a 4-year-old – most of the action is obscured when I’m close enough to the bed, thankfully. Then my mother bites Dad’s head off with her giant mandibles.

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26/Jul/2013

Dream Journal Entry #5

The sex dreams, I never have. If a dream stays with you long enough, it transmutes into some weird memory that no-one else remembers. There is biting, thrashing, scratching, growling. I kiss, and you kiss back. You whisper, “You may do whatever you feel like,” and for days that echoes in my skull. Things aren’t real unless they can touch me (and I touch back); so why can’t you touch me? You mustn’t be real. I’ve done this before; I’ve never done this before. You’re not a dream. You must have happened. We had twenty-four hours like an action movie.

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25/Jul/2013

Dream Journal Entry #4

In my sleep I have a sword and a shield, otherwise I am the same person wearing flannel shirts, thick glasses, and bracelets from five different festivals. The people I meet in my dreams all seem relieved to see that I am carrying all that steel, they put their hands on my shoulders and they thank me. I never think to ask them what for. My dreams are about social happenings, polite dinners, running into old friends. I am always moving toward the setting sun, the direction of my childhood. I wonder what will happen when I reach the ocean.

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24/Jul/2013

Dream Journal Entry #3

Apparently technology works differently in dreams. There’s something unintuitive about the way a cell phone buzzing near your groin indicating that someone far away is talking to you, or wanting to talk to you; this is learnt behaviour and dreams work deeper than that. In my dreams, anything electrical works the opposite way I expect it to: traffic lights are too bright to look at, I cannot get a clear reading from my wristwatch, and if I pick up a phone – a red rotary phone – and dial your number, you actually pick up. You’re still debonair; we talk for hours.

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Tag: fiction