You can find a new flashfic of mine, An Automicrocosm, over at the Flash Flood Journal: flashfloodjournal.blogspot.com/2014/06/an-automicrocosm-by-johannes-punkt.html
Here, Brad (@Squidshire), I wrote a fanfic about you.
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A thought stopped him dead in the middle of the moment, and he forgot what he was doing. He had been holding a knife, but he was not holding a knife anymore: it was safely lodged in the middle of a loaf. He always cut the loaves in half, in half in half in half until they were the thickness he preferred, this was his way, a thought stopped him dead: I wonder how things would go if I pupated right this moment. Another thought: Leather gets more grim the more you think about it.
He bought long bandages of silk and they arrived rolled up like papyrus scrolls. He half-expected there to be hieroglyphs, but it was just so smooth. Right this moment – perhaps a moment could be a few days long. Brad had always considered moments to be like loaves of bread, infinitely divisible. Maybe a moment was composed of several moments closely stacked together. In someone’s eyes, in the eyes of a very old tree spirit perhaps, his whole life was but a moment. He paused momentarily. What was he doing?
He was in the bathtub. He was wrapping himself in silk, a contorted dance in a small space, and he could already feel the new enzymes in his body begin to bite at him, break him down. This was good. People said you could not feel your insides, because you have no nerve endings there, but Brad had always felt inverse like that.
There was the issue of whether he should leave room to breathe or not. He decided against it, but he covered his nostrils the very last thing that he did, writhing around in the bathtub because he had wrapped his arms in silk and could not move them. And then he felt the oxygen leave him like a lover, reluctantly saying farewell, promising to come back.
He was in a deep sleep.
He had never considered himself to be divisible by half, but it turned out that he was. By half by half by half. His organs, once content to be contiguous, loosened their border policies and enmeshed. The silk was his skin and not. New organs were forming, like ex-Soviet states after the fall. He had never counted his organs before but he was sure there was more of them now. Something cracked. It was the sarcophagus he had made himself of silk; to think that something so soft could still crack like ice.
Brad realized that his life was divisible by half, and he had just heard the crack. The thought that had stopped him dead had actually killed him, and for a transitional period he had been dead. He looked at his wings in the too-small mirror of the bathroom, after wiping away the dust. There was a lot of dust to wipe away.
Drink if you have bad reasons for reading these rules again.
Drink if you want there to be a reverse tattoo parlor, that sucks the faded ink right off your skin along with any scars or marks or pasts
Drink every time you look over your shoulder because your pattern recognition is oversensitive
Drink if the words “bad excuse” stand out to you as much as your name
Drink when you have a small, quiet room
Drink when you run out of words, again, as punctuation, as an endless row of commas,
Drink to me
Drink too much
Drink up
Okay: the best you will ever feel is “okay.” When I was little my grandmother smoked like a chimney and died. My mother couldn’t bring herself to say those words; she said grandmother “stopped breathing.” I was slow to grasp the full scope of that statement, okay. Grandmother once drew me a diagram about explaining smoking to me. Okay, she drew two sinewaves one under the other and she talked. She said you feel good and bad, smokers feel bad and worse. And when they feel okay they think they’re feeling good. Yeah? It’s not just smokers. Yeah. Okay? Okay.
“It’s going to be alright.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not going to bother you much longer.”
You had not been aware that anything was wrong. You have just settled in, here.
The child touches your arm in a gesture that is obviously meant to echo the way someone comforted them, but the child is not old enough to have experience with this and just pats you awkwardly.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s going to be alright. Promise.” The child looks at the watch on your arm and tries to decipher it.
You do not know what is going to be alright.
~
Previously: /2014/02/24/midnight-conversation/
When you die, the room you’re in necessarily becomes a library. There are more shelves than you remember, and packed two layers thick on these shelves are all the books you promised to read but never got around to, each one you bought but forgot. There is wall where there used to be doors. Curtains fall over the windows. You sit down to read the books, one by one, until your thumbprint is on every page and you have lived all the lives you wanted. There will be a door where there were walls, and you are allowed to leave.
So this is how it works?
I don’t know.
Is it supposed to feel like this?
I can’t feel anything.
You can’t feel anything?
Well, I can feel all my usual self. I mean, I cannot feel anything different.
How does your usual self feel?
How does your usual self feel?
It feels like a night, rolled up into an incandescent ball.
Is that normal?
It is for me. I don’t know how selves are supposed to feel.
Did something happen to us?
I don’t know.
Wasn’t that mine before?
The night?
Yes.
I don’t think so.
Are you lying?
It is morning, and young men and women are walking the strawberry fields, hanging wicker baskets upside down on wooden latticework. The leaves tickle their dirty, bare feet, and strawberries are tugging the leaves upwards, surrounded by the morning dew hovering still, a snapshot of rain. This year it’s rained a lot, so the pull is stronger than usual, and the customary berry tithe has already fallen upwards, like tossed coins that never come back down. They will disintegrate where the stratosphere turns into mesosphere. Their siblings will be caught in the baskets, placed carefully on counters like small cages.
I found what I needed once, in an old dream like a discarded dress in the back of my wardrobe. I picked it up. It was monolithic, covered with five different kinds of black, and it seemed to have its own climate. When I touched it, it was hot to the touch, and my hand felt alright, like it didn’t need to exist anymore, and while it was inside it, it ceased. And when I pulled my nonexistent hand back out of it, a part of me woke up, and that is the part that is talking to you now.
Dear readers! I have a new story up at The Thrusting Sensations’ blog: thrustingsensations.co.uk/blog/?p=47. You may recall earlier collaborations between me and The Thrusting Sensations resulting in a few stories (/tag/the-thrusting-sensations/). This is a continuation of those. There are more stories like this on their blog, and you should go read it. My story is reproduced below.
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Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost