fiction | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

30/Jan/2014

Oubliette

The first thing he forgot was his own name. At first, this pleased him; it was probably a bad name, like Yosef or Stephen or Muriel. But the name-thing gnawed at the back of his hair, and he had all the time in the world. He started making a list in the ground (it was all coarse fibres; there should be a name for that). Sometimes he would start over if he had a really good idea on how to organise it. One day, he grew tired of scratching symbols in the down, and he dropped his symbol-maker, and he

29/Jan/2014

Test Tube

Born from a test tube all splayed out like an autopsied rabbit, I have to invent my own reasons for curling into a ball when I’m crying. It is what people do, I have seen them, and I want to be like you. Sometimes my skin hardens and and I think I will stay like this forever, until it all leathers and cracks open, and I eclose with my new skin glowing red. Sometimes, I stay there for hours, rocking like a dropped porcelain doll, trying to associate this all with warmth and the opposite of dread, whatever that is.

28/Jan/2014

Underground

Be sure to know who you are, when you are commuting. Remember your name distinctly. It is perilous to be pressed up so close to other humans’ identities and waver, because you might lose yourself in the sea of people and, in a fit of sheer panic, grab someone else’s self to hold close to your chest. Do not drift; do not daydream at all. Packed tight like mackerels, everyone swinging this way and that a fraction of a second after the train turns slightly, it is easy to feel a sense of proletarian unity. Don’t. You might lose yourself.

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27/Jan/2014

Unforgivable

One day, without warning, I put a lit cigarette into her eye. The air is perfectly immobile and the only sounds are the sizzle from the cigarette, and a half-swallowed cry far back in her throat.

I stop smoking and I pack my bags to go far away, but my train ticket disappears.

“I want you to stay,” she says.

“What if I hurt you again?”

“Do you plan to?”

“No, that is why I’m leaving.”

“So stay. Unless your guilt is more important to you than my feelings. I forgive you.”

She loves me just as playfully as before.

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26/Jan/2014

Homesickness

There are pills against homesickness now, he thinks, staring upwards at craters and pockmarks. The land where he grew up has been torn up by the roots and does not exist anymore. This deracination was there to stop the approaching forest fires from all around and yet the forest fires rage, with a clucking, cackling laughter in libraries, intent on deleting the past. The sky is unnervingly neutral about it and it hasn’t rained for a whole year and now the impending moon hovers close enough that he can step onto it and walk away. Maybe he will do that.

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25/Jan/2014

Photography of Souls

She was a photographer of the dead. Her studio was morose and draped all black and matte. Before the lifewarmth of their deceased relatives had run out, people would rush, in hearses with special coffins made to preserve warmth without starting to smell, to her abode. There, the dead person’s last life was photographed out of them and printed immediately, onto sepia paper, and given to the relatives to frame.

But when she died, her equipment on standby, all her soul seeped out onto the floor and no-one took her photograph and she rolled away as fog the next morning.

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24/Jan/2014

Thought Experiments

You spend all day in train stations, trying to arrange an accident and a heroism. Last week, you poisoned cats in boxes until you ran out of excuses at the pet store. You have your clipboard and your hardhat, and you instruct the railworkers to start welding things together on the tracks. It is urgent. You want a real fat man to stand on the yellow lines when the train comes in, but he’s standing stock still and your workers all get off the track in time. The train starts screeching to a halt and that’s when I push you.

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23/Jan/2014

The Parable of the Electron

There is an infinity of space between two molecules, even between two atoms as tightly knit as the ones in your cramping chest. It would be foolish for an electron to jump between the two and even if it did, if it embarked on this suicide mission, it would be ludicrous to expect its friends to follow it. It would mean an eternity of loneliness just to reach that other atom, to orbit it a little while. It is absurd for the EMT to apply the defibrillator to your chest, it just means loneliness in the back of the ambulance.

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22/Jan/2014

Guest Drabble: Baptism

In every drop of rain there is the capability to absorb sin, which it loses once it hits the ground. Sin is as woven into your flesh as into anyone else’s: and as you stand there, and the night-time raindrops mingle with the tears that run over your cheekbones, they carry away even the memories of what you have done. You stand there amnesiac, holy – there is no memory in heaven – I forgive you – and the harm you have done is carried down into the dark backward and abysm of subterranean rivers and into the ocean beyond perception, beyond recall.

by Rob Mitchelmore (@kerastion)

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21/Jan/2014

Pierre

The best most accurate memories I have are of the unimportant bits, like the name of the waiter who recommended the wine that made you throw up, if that’s really what happened. I remember the name of a waiter, in any case. Every memory is like a faded photograph that gets more worn each time I bring it out to view it, and I try to fill in the details as best I can remember them. Your hair was now always the same length, even though we knew each other for years. I wish you showed up in actual photos.

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