Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: flash fiction

29/Mar/2013

Ceremony and Celebration

They spoke an Old Earth language: a dialect of Mandarin. It was forcefully injected into his brains moments before he was given the honour. It pushed his name out of his head.

“It is a great honour,” Kannyo Madita said, though the man only heard every other word, “to reopen this position, and make that your new and only name.” She repeated his new name in the Old Earth tongue, and he understood it as Prisoner-Ambassador.

The language was still establishing itself in his skull when he was pushed into the cubicle and saw the door melt into the wall.

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28/Mar/2013

Ethanol

The first drink is to forget; the second is to remember again. The third drink is to focus on what’s here and now. A fourth drink – a fifth? – is to cancel out the last few drinks and start afresh. The first drink, the first drink is to sever all the nerves in order to go numb; the second is to lose vision and to blacken out the room and really listen for the first time. The next drink is to hear the bartender’s bad heart beat. The eighth drink is a test of courage, the ninth a test of faith.

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27/Mar/2013

Gestures

Mathilda spent half her life trying to publish her dead father’s plagiarized poetry collection.

Emil tracked down 300 people with the name Jansson because of a typo in his mother’s last will and testament.

Yuko stood serenading for three weeks, every night, outside an abandoned apartment building because no-one had told her we had moved away. I heard about it too late.

Gary only smoked when it rained, but everybody knew.

Dad washed his hands with soap.

I called the police pretending to be our neighbours’ kids who were starting to get concerned about us. The operator always played along.

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26/Mar/2013

Ink

One tattoo for every person whose life you have ended; they creep closer to places where it really hurts. One piercing for everyone you’ve damaged; three pills for everyone who hurt you. A little red blemish for every time you are misunderstood and a new wrinkle for wasted kindness. And after 35 years, you are already running out of skin. You say to yourself like you say every year, that this time there’ll be fewer mistakes. But next week you are back at the parlour, asking the man who asks no questions to draw a blue crow on your thigh.

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25/Mar/2013

Hypnolepidopteromorphism

I had a dream that you kept telling me you were just a dream. You explained it would be a crapshoot whether I would even remember it in the morning, and while you talked you stroked my hair back behind my ear the way you do. You kissed my forehead and kept your mouth there so I could feel your smile. You turned my head and you whispered, “This is not important. This is nothing but impressions gathered during the day, arranged in sequence by your subconscious. This is weakness entering your body. Just enjoy it. Don’t think too much.”

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24/Mar/2013

Erin

The little hedgehog had sharp spines everywhere on her, and unretractable claws, and a helpless, pathetic personality that stayed endearing for a while but not forever. Tears came easily. She saw through her tears how all her friends left her, even other hedgehogs; anyone who ever felt warmth for her eventually cooled off, until she was wary of making new connections. She would keep to corners and to dark spaces; so she was perceived as standoffish, aloof, except for when she cried.

The little hedgehog started filing off her spines one by one until she was a hedgehog no more.

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23/Mar/2013

Watersnake

A small incision shall be made with a knife in the skin, and the skin shall be held open, with instruments if necessary. Use plastic or sterile, stainless, steel. The watersnake shall be given a taste of your blood from when you fasted, and if it likes it, it shall be ushered in through the incision. Panic sets in after five minutes at most, it is important to remove yourself from sharp objects. Remember that if you push against it, it burrows deeper. The benefits shall start after five or six days have passed, and you shall feel good then.

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22/Mar/2013

Just the Best Party

The moon hangs low, brushing against the tops of the evergreens outside of town. There is a constant high-pitched whine that can be heard over the music, and it’s coming from my dog. Every bedroom in a mile-wide radius is occupied. Some people are shagging half-heartedly on couches. We are running out of food, but somehow not booze. Most of us are dancing; it hurts if we stop. This is the forty-third time someone plays this song. Every time we send someone out for supplies or for help, we end up spreading the party. Coordinates attached. Consider this an invitation.

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21/Mar/2013

First Kiss

Our pets always died. We ran out of room in our own garden so I sneaked into the neighbours’. I dug carefully and put the grass back the way it was; I became adept at handling shovels. Extremely adept. So when Mariot – who never called me – called me, I knew what it was about. She told me where to meet her.

Someone got a gravelly grave. I hadn’t recognized his face. I saved the place on my phone, as an X in a geotagged tweet in the drafts folder, and told Mariot she owed me. She gave me a kiss.

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21/Mar/2013

Announcement and Advisories

Short version: daily flash fiction! Trigger Policy updated! Read things what aren’t my writings also!

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Hello! I’m Johannes Punkt and you may know me from such PR stunts as travelling into your dreams and releasing spiders all over the place! Haha, who am I kidding, that’s a thing that starts tonight. Starting today, I will resume a thing I hiatused almost a year ago with the Day of a Whole Lot of Drabbles (2012/06/28/the-day-of-a-whole-lot-of-drabbles/). That is right, I will post drabbles (self-contained 100-word flash stories), once a day, for at least a few months. The first of these will go up in about six hours if my calculations are correct.

I have updated the Trigger Policy page. It is now different from before, in light of the change of pace and content of this blog. You can read the whole thing at /triggers/

I have made the decision to not put any warnings, trigger or otherwise, to the daily drabbles that appear on this blog. Please be aware that anything that shows up might be upsetting and proceed with caution. It is impossible for me to warn adequately as triggers are often too specific for a generalized warning to be useful.

The bigger posts like the conlanging and technobabbling will be less common now, perhaps one every three or four weeks, or when inspiration strikes. I will try to review a book again and maybe make that a thing; that was fun.

Lastly, I will mention some serials I am enjoying at the moment. In order of the installations’ length.

The Ritual is like a treasure hunt that is currently most likely to turn you into a dead wooden statue that always stares and never blinks. mercerbox.wordpress.com/tag/the-ritual/

The First 500 is like a few details of a huge painting being filled in slot by slot like a meandering snake, and the brushstrokes are wide and the details are fine. alastairjrball.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-first-500.html

Berlin Confidential is always on my list of recommended reading because damn why is this not a big thing yet? It has mysterious murders, tension, myriad and well-defined characters, angst, gay sex, and Weimar Berlin. AND MORE. I can never sum it up. Just go read it. berlinconfidential.tumblr.com/story

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