fiction | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

19/Mar/2014

This Song Is Old

There is an old song that has been sung since the dawn of time, since the first throat. Someone always sings it, it’s why the sun sets at different times in different places. A chorus of voices sing the same patterns at the same time. Sometimes you get the urge to hum a melody you’ve never heard before: this is it. This old song is in the movement of Jupiter. This old song has started to skip beats, experimentally or fatiguefully, like a gramophone record scratch. This song is old. You don’t notice the scratches because you stop existing, momentarily.

11/Mar/2014

Guest Story

Red. Brown. White. Green.

Yesterday I moved my bed to sweep the floor, and in the corner of my room there were mushrooms. They were growing out through a crack in the wall, rotting away the wooden floor and feeding off it. The caps red-brown, the feet white-green. I ripped them all up, threw them in the garbage bin, scrubbed the corner with soap and warm water before putting my bed back.
Two hours later, I caught a sweet fungal scent from behind my bed and pulled it out into the middle of the room.

Red. Brown. White. Green.

The mushrooms had returned. Smaller this time, but still growing, very much alive. I tore them all up once more, scrubbed the corner, poured alcohol down the cracks, then acid. I stretched out in bed and stared at the corner, waiting to see if this time I had beaten them.
A bead of red formed in the crack, like a drop of blood in a wound. Another, growing bigger. A whole string of red beads in the crack, spreading their red caps and slowly reaching down to the floor once more.

Red. Brown. White. Green.

Perhaps one could eat them. If they were going to keep on living in my home, perhaps at least I could find a use for them. I picked one of the bigger caps, sniffed at it. The smell was not bad; it was sweet and fresh. A lick at it. A hesitant bite.
The taste was just like the smell. I had had much better mushrooms, but it was not in any way bad. Just a bit uninspiring.
“With colours like yours, shouldn’t you at least taste bitter?”
The mushrooms did not reply. They were mushrooms, and mushrooms are too good to speak to lowly animals like humans.

Red. Brown. White. Green.

It was easier to just let them have the corner. Trying to get rid of them was just an act of futility, and they tasted all right. During the night they spread across the floor to beneath my bed where they created a small mushroom kingdom emitting a strange, green-and-violet light. When I rolled over in the morning, I noticed that they had surrounded me and several of them were crushed as I just tried to leave bed. The fully grown ones were already getting darker, dripping a shadowy liquid from the edges of their caps, looking as if they were melting, and when I cleaned them away they left dark red stains on my skin.

The red stains turned brown. My white skin turned green.

The mushrooms were retreating back into their corner crack as the sunlight moved across the floor. The mushroom kingdom beneath my bed remained, hidden in shadow, but no green-and-violet light shone from within it. They had encased the dark space with a spongy, grey wall. The mushrooms in my bed dissolved and soaked into the bedsheet, duvet and mattress as the sunlight washed over them. The sunlight made my head hurt and I understood that it was my enemy.

My fingers turned dark and dissolved into an ink-like liquid.

I kicked at the grey wall beneath the bed until it was coated in dark liquid from my feet and gave way.

I saw a green-and-violet light and crawled into it to melt.

by Pao (@Panterdjuret)

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3/Mar/2014

Sandcastle Man

Sandcastle man sits on a cold beach like something medieval. His hands vanish into the grey sand and it must be cold for him, stark naked. His skin has assumed the same colour as the sand itself. The water is beating at his legs, nibbling at his toes, and soon surrounding him. By unfocusing his eyes he can look at his arms as if they’re trees rising from the water instead of columns pushed down into it. He stays unfocused, and eventually he falls apart, and in but two tide cycles the sand is perfectly smooth where he once sat.

24/Feb/2014

Midnight Conversation

You wake up in the middle of the night approximately 20 seconds before the phone starts to buzz; you have enough time to blink the sleep out of your eyes. It’s buzzing. You pick it up before your sleeping partner comes to life from it.

“Hello?” you whisper. The floor is cold against your bare feet.

“Hello,” says an undistorted voice, and then it says your name. You had expected distortion, but you’re not recording the call, you’re not quite sure what you’re expecting.

“What do you want?”

“I just want you to remember that I know who you are.”

Previously: /2014/02/23/stoplight-conversation/

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23/Feb/2014

Stoplight Conversation

You meet a child who knows what you’re thinking. The walk-light has just gone red.

“Have we met before?” you say. “Are you lost?”

“Yes, and no. To both questions. You’re confused now, a bit alarmed. You’re trying to think about anything but That Thing, but you’re circling the topic so narrowly that I can see the shape of it in your mind.”

You look away.

“That’s a naughty word.”

“I want you to–”

“–stop doing that.” The child sighs. “Yes, I know. You needn’t think such mean things about me, you know. It’s not like I can help it.”

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14/Feb/2014

Murder

I have been spending a lot of time on my own lately; I want to be accused of your murder. I can see that you are about to crack and in my greed I want to be the prime suspect. I have been watching television, but only reruns. I have been reading books. When the officers in blue knock on my door I will express shock that is not quite right, and I will have no alibi. They will point to your lousy suicide note and say they have never seen a worse forgery. Yes, this is what I want.

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7/Feb/2014

Rock-dust

Image courtesy of The Thrusting Sensations, who have a facebook page: facebook.com/ThrustingSensations, and a website: thrustingsensations.co.uk

Rock-dust litters the streets of a city on the same latitude as Rome and the Gobi Desert. Abandoned cars are parked in great clots; the cars are all identical. They are big and silver and they are family cars, and one or more children have jumped out of these cars to join the children of the city. On the ground, small dust-particles are carried away by stray crenellations of spilt water or gasoline; the smallest particles are still hanging in the air, and there is the bustle of a town busy creating more of them, a distant clink of metal against rock, metal against rock, metal against rock again.

It is the children who carve the stones, and it must have been they who brought all the stones into the city in the first place, from the surrounding forest. There must be dormant stones there, and trees that bend out of the way when the boulders come rolling. The trees, then, root themselves back firmly into the ground.

At first it was just one stone. There is a picture floating around from that first morning, with an angry and incredulous woman pressing her useless hands against a 50-tonne rock standing in her driveway, between her car and the street. She lifts herself from the ground with her efforts, and the rock remains, violently, perfectly still. The next morning, three more stones neatly and deliberately prohibited anyone from leaving that whole street by car. The working adults of that neighbourhood had dressed in their work clothes and simply commuted that day and the next, but the following morning there was a stone guarding every bus stop in a mile-wide radius. At this point, the stones were mostly jagged and pyramidal, cut-off but smooth, as if broken off a very long time ago from a larger structure.

Some of the stones have cracks in them clean through, after tired frustrated and tiny hands making mistakes. While a stone is still being carved, children will crawl all over it, chipping away at select chunks of stone in concert. Other children hammer large pieces of rock that fall off into rock-dust; they wear paper masks over their faces for this.

The children carve faces into these stones, or, they carve one face into them: a round, masculine face with a large nose, and full lips, and hollows for eyes. It is as if they all know this man and capture him in different moods, with a caricaturistic flair added to give the stone life. But whether seething, serene, smirking or sulking – it is the same face. One of the larger stones depicts this unidentified male, his mouth set into a firm line and one shoulder raised from the asphalt, as though he is rising from the middle of the street as a man coming out of the water. The white painted line in the middle of the road goes right through his neck.

There are still cars coming through the city, though their main arteries are blocked, and they inch along on capillary systems and on novel routes. One citizen has opened her garage and knocked out the back wall to let people through. There is a passage in the North of the city where two stone faces stare at each other and any driver must slow to a crawl to pass through, their car’s wing mirrors folded back like the ears of a frightened animal.

Forest is being cleared in two sweeping arches; the highway is projected to be finished by early next spring.

2/Feb/2014

bit by bit by bit

Her first epiphany was in the bathroom, when she caught her naked reflection in the mirror: There is someone else inside of me.

Her second one came shortly afterwards; she forgot which one of the marmalades in the fridge was hers. She used to know: I am in this body, so is someone else. There might be more.

The third came when she stuttered out the first name that came to mind (after a two-second pause) when she introduced herself at the interview. Amanda: I am inside of someone else’s me.

Bit by bit by bit, she realized herself away.

~ Read the rest of this entry »

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1/Feb/2014

Noise

There is an empty bedroom and a trail of dropped blankets, teddy bears and stuffed dolls leading out through the door, which is ajar, into the living room. The trail disappears but is taken over by footprints. The TV is on, hissing static and snow into the room like an open window in a storm. The tiny sole-marks are almost oversnowed now, but there is another, larger, set of prints around them. Both sets lead into the machine. There is a thick rope, too, tied to one of the legs of the marble coffee table. It is stretched taut now.

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31/Jan/2014

Interest

The men from the bank are here at the door, I let them in, it is freezing outside. There is so much snow that my view of their car must have been obscured for the entire street seemed empty.

They have been observing you, insomniac, they say. You’ve been racking up quite the sleep debt, they say. I don’t understand them.

I try to shake their hands, but they refuse politely.

You come down the stairs a bit like a zombie, Atlantis eyes sunk deep into your skull. They present you the figures; you understand, you say, you fall asleep.

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Tag: fiction