Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

You may be required to show proof of id.

Tag: flash fiction

4/Dec/2013

Third Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: I Miss Your Accent

How you opened the floodgates and let every little influence through, just to sound like you came from somewhere other than your hometown. I liked the way you would get plastered; they would trickle back then, all the regional words, all the hang-ups you had worked so hard on to shrug off. I miss the way you could talk about a place you’d never been to, and make me feel like I’d been there with you. Your half-finished novels, your half-drowned poetry. I know I was just a phase for you. I miss that phase.

Leave a comment
3/Dec/2013

Second Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: I Know You Said Not to Write

I’ve been thinking about you. The weather’s been in a sour mood. There’s a causal link there but I can’t figure out which way it goes. You said once, smiling, that you were cursed to umbrellas, good coffee, and books.

Did you know that the rain was lukewarm and perfect on that night you bailed on skinny-dipping? I imagined your shoulderblades.

Sorry. There’s no easy way to say this; I need to ask you a favour. In person. Come to the pub the day after you receive this letter. I’ll explain everything.

Leave a comment
2/Dec/2013

First Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: Something I Imagined

There is interference on the line, and a delay to boot, and I feel like I’m in love with an entity the other end of the galaxy. Two distant stars radiating outward, hoping that the signal-noise ratio is high enough to have a conversation. But I mean every gesture, every thing I repeat three times hoping one of them will get through, and I cherish what I hear from you, and when you say,

“I love you,”

I feel like I am touching you for just a split-second, all distance in the world be damned.

2 Comments
1/Dec/2013

Unink

I put my feelings into words, onto paper, with a black pen, and I put the lid back and I set it aside. I perform the ritual to uncap the green pen. I underline. I explain myself in the margin. I argue. I circle words, connect them to words further up. I put the lid back, and I put the pen aside. I uncap the red pen and start crossing words out. I write foreign symbols in the margin, where there’s room for it.

I fold the paper, read it until I know it, and put it in the fireplace.

Leave a comment
30/Sep/2013

The Sweetest Dead Girl

He was young, and he believed in destiny. One day he woke up with an idea, and he bathed his dark, smooth skin in citrus oil until it glowed crimson, and set out. The first tattoo parlour he found sounded like angry insects and had the colours of a poisonous flower.

He said to the tattoo artist, who was a muscular man who seemed to have bulked up solely to get more skin to draw on, “I want to know the name of the sweetest dead girl that you ever knew, and I would like that tattooed on my arm.”

Leave a comment
29/Sep/2013

Vast Swathes of Burnt Soil

It was relatively simple to keep the Empire happy: you just had to give them everything they asked for.

They had museums filled with mysterious weapons named after ancient, phantomlike civilisations. Names no-one could really pronounce anymore. They said: when the Empire was through with you, the only thing left would be that machine, with your culture’s name on it.

If another civilisations stood up to them, they would start fashioning a new weapon, all brass and glass and incredible heat, intending to name if after the affronting culture. They tended not to get far before they received formal apologies.

Leave a comment
28/Sep/2013

Anthropologist vs. Predator

We feel inferior in their presence, but they bow to us. They come in perfectly round ships, and they smile reassuringly, perfectly. They develop a perfect understanding of Mandarin before they dare speak a word. After years in a government bunker, they say: “We are here to study you.”

They mean what they say with their perfect manners. With perfect empathy they love us. What’s more, they become us.

What little empathy we have, we use to become more like them; their stay is marked by painlessness. But they understand us deeper than that, and their perfect smiles turn sinister.

Leave a comment
27/Sep/2013

On Tubes

You count them carefully, and you find out there are more tubes feeding you than there are tubes draining you. They are thin and black, but you can see movement in them if you squint and stare long enough. You follow the thickest one to a wall, with bricks and mortar. The wall isn’t feeding you. It must be something else. The other tubes start to tug if you spend too much time at the wall, so you go back to the middle of the vast room. Tomorrow you will find out where one of those draining tubes go. Yeah.

Leave a comment
26/Sep/2013

Forever

Both the words chronic and permanent seem to mean forever at a first glance. The dictionary defines them not as forever per se, but kind of, sort of, basically. This is counter-intuitive, but like many counter-intuitive things, they make sense the more you think about them. A permanent resident is one with no plans to change that status, and as long as they do not change, they are functionally different from forever. A chronic illness can go away, but probably won’t. It is incurable. You understand.

This is just to say,

I said I would love you forever. I lied.

2 Comments
25/Sep/2013

A Google Streetcar Drives into Night Vale

It has cameras all over itself, so it feels safe. A squirrel suddenly lands on its roof, in front of a camera, but that is okay, because it has more of them, and the squirrel will get bored. The logos on its sides waver like flags heralded with its lord’s crest on it. Places like these are suspicious, but everyone trusts us, right? It keeps going. It almost runs over a dog, but it stops in time. A swallow crashes into the driver-side window. And another. The window shatters; a raccoon climbs in. The raccoon drives them toward the canyon.

Leave a comment