Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

You may be required to show proof of id.

Tag: flash fiction

2/Jan/2013

The Glum Thousands

They found Lewis with his throat slit like a second smile. Lewis worked for the big people; he supplied the good stuff. He canned the laughter of daytime sitcoms– any one of ten thousand people could have murdered him. The glum thousands, they were called, and each one was called in for questioning, and the interviews were long. Grey, drab rooms. The prime time interviews were the worst; that was when their laughter was in use and at any moment the interviewee could burst out laughing while their eyes kept this bored, dour look. Lewis McCannigan’s murder was never solved.

Leave a comment
16/Dec/2012

Abigail

One of these days you will hurt someone. That day is crawling closer like a half-dead frog. She’s going to look you in the eye and say, that was wonderful. Your chest will heave and there will be the slightest hint of a blush on your pale cheeks in agreement and she will kiss you and you will smile and then the question.

You will answer.

And part of her will sting, her stomach will feel like it has shipwrecks in it, and her tongue will stick to the roof of her mouth and she will want to feel cleaner.

Leave a comment
11/Dec/2012

Red Tape

The Bureaucracy descended 30 years ago, devouring and mycolising all the northern hemisphere governments. There are maps of it but they do it no justice; not this self-duplicating, self-non-contained monster of a complex, that which laughs at wisdom and knowledge as we knew (thought we knew) it. The Bureaucracy always grows, and any attempt at finding out how it works further complicates it, for three new departments (heads) grow every time we define (cut off) the use of one department. That department then withers. The more necks it grows, the more blood simply fills them, that is how it works.

Leave a comment
29/Nov/2012

Salt

The sea attacked the shore with its whole self; kissing it again and again. The shore tried to shrug it away and then push it, it tried to say it only wanted to be friends (and it worried about the status of their friendship; people take this sort of thing rather seriously, especially with entities so contiguous as they). But the sea continued, lunatic and obsessed, until it wore it down, until the shore was nothing but hard, cold rock. The sea threw itself still, asking for another kiss though it could not reach the top of this new formation.

1 Comment
28/Nov/2012

Paramedic

There is a creature made of ambulances roaming our city. It likes to watch people die. Its sirens sound too muffled; its shadow moves too much; the ambulances have no drivers. Cell phones stop working near them.

It makes sure to not be the first to arrive at an accident scene. It’s a living museum, made of the rusty, broken ambulances of old. If one climbs into one of them, one falls asleep to wake up somewhere else.

Individual ambulances can stand being apart from the group a few hours, but start to fall apart if separated for too long.

Leave a comment
27/Nov/2012

Life

Life pulsated for one glorious moment and was then stubbed out forever.

Four million turns later the first of the evidence reached as far as it would reach, and the evidence of stubbing out reached mere moments later.

Four million turns after that the sun that had brought life to the world exploded, destroying all the physical evidence still left on a lonesome planet where hopeful electricity still struck the ground in vain.

Ten million turns later the system collapsed in on itself, sucking in the last of the artificial satellites, which still carried frozen life just on the off-chance.

Leave a comment
17/Nov/2012

Arthur

There’s a word inside a stone and whoever pulls the word out of there becomes king. Men have spent half their lifetimes conversing with the stone, laying forth their theories and trying to convince the stone they would be just kings, fair kings, loved kings. The scholars argue whether the word is stuck in a stone or in all stones, and so stonetalking’s spread to all corners of the kingdom.

A young man sits down next to the big stone (the one stone) and ignores the three knights quoting poetry at it. “Hi, how are you?”

“Bored,” the stone says.

Leave a comment
13/Nov/2012

Of White and Blue

In ancient times, the sky was full of suns, cold and far away. Jealous of their beauty, mankind built their own cold lights on the ground and mirrored the darkening sky. At first, the faraway suns still outshone the earth, but the humans in their cities put more and more blue lanterns by their bedframes and in their windows and to light up their streets. Eventually the sky was not only matched, but its beauty was beaten and the pinpricks of light faded away.

When we developed space flight to visit other worlds, we found that there were none there.

Leave a comment
3/Nov/2012

Trace Fossil

The grey bug burrowed deep into its host’s chest. Crawled and scratched and ate its way down to her heart and the heart stopped. The bug, simple as it was, could simply not comprehend what had happened; what was once a very lively source of heat and joy now lay dead in its arms. So it kept digging. It was in love, plain and simple. It dug until its claws and teeth had worn down to nothingness and then it waited until they grew back and it dug again; through bone, out her back. She was just not there anymore.

Leave a comment
28/Oct/2012

Bird of Passage

He was a bird of passage, born with human bones and body. Humans are slower than birds, in many ways, and the instincts weren’t quite right in his head. The swallow sees the leaves turn yellow and knows it is time to leave for warmer climates. He felt the same way when the first snow fell. He had to hand in his minimum two weeks’ notice, organise goodbyes, and buy a plane ticket for the day after his last social promises. He would arrive, make himself known and struggle for months; make friends, even. Then the first snow would fall.

Leave a comment