Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

You may be required to show proof of id.

Tag: flash fiction

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)

1 Comment
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.

1 Comment
20/Jan/2014

No-one Deserves an Aneurysm

You are born with threads going into and out from you. The tall person in the white coat has a busy, worried look on their face as they bring out the scissors with the curved blades to cut most of the threads off of you. First they cut the one that connects you to them, then they separate you from your mother. They give you the scissors, in a gilded box.

You cut them all off as you grow up all forsaken, denied, refused, and you tremor when you cut the last sinewy ones. Your relatives disappear one by one.

2 Comments
19/Jan/2014

Allée

This avenue is lined with buried spotlights aimed straight into the black sky like pillars of solid white. You want to take a picture of the way the beams of light seem to eat all the dancing snowflakes, but one of your hands is entangled in mine. You pause, in thought. You bring out your cameraphone and struggle with it, eventually holding it steady with your free hand and then softly kissing the circle on the touchscreen to take the photo. I squeeze your hand, you put your things away and your hand into my pocket, and we walk on.

Leave a comment
18/Jan/2014

Fingerprints

Did you know that the fingerprints you leave fade away after a few years? It’s just oils; over time, the marks disintegrate into nothing, like a crowd of bored people dispersing after the spectacle is over and the police are asking awkward questions like, “Did anyone try to talk to her?” The marks you left weren’t even your real marks, all the grooves turned to ridges, and mirrored if we compare them to the ones on your fingers. It’s been two and a half years since you touched me, and the grooves and ridges have become part of my skin.

7 Comments
17/Jan/2014

Neon Butterfly

The larvae of the neon butterfly crawl in formation, as opaque as clouded glass but not more. They’re a thin line up wooden telephone masts, over clothing lines, on the underside of precariously balanced planks, just to reach the neon-brimming signs adorning the faces of pizzerias or other greasy venues. In a concerted effort, the larvae wrap their translucent silk around one chosen pipe, and crawl in under the wraps, causing that single letter of the sign to flicker for a season or two until it pops, in the middle of the night, releasing neon butterflies into the urban sky.

1 Comment
16/Jan/2014

Gender Sells

He comes into the room all dressed in almost-blue monochrome and smiles at me while he strips out of the cumbersome suit and tie and and throws it all aside and becomes many-coloured again, true, and the smile turns into a worried frown: “Where is your dress?” Picks up a few red clothes, scrutinizes them.

I look down on my body of oily swirly colour. “Can’t I just go like this?”

Having squeezed into the red dress and stretched white latex gloves over her hands, she touches my chin: “Not when you’re part of the machine,” she says: “Gender sells.”

1 Comment
15/Jan/2014

The Ceremony

The ritual must have begun as something brutal and shamanistic, but has now been formalised into elegance.

The lion is released from her cage and there is a curious symmetry between the way her shoulderblades go up and down and the characteristic, sidling gait the performing woman walks with; the ceremonial robes allow only that.

Anxious performers may carry a dagger, but most go without. The lion circles her three times as she makes her way across the arena, every movement calculated and written down in an old book.

There is swift, bloodless death. It takes a lifetime to master.

1 Comment
14/Jan/2014

Opening Sentence

I’m opening all my books to read the opening sentence out loud, then closing them again. It’s becoming a disjointed story that doesn’t care about characters or theme or even language, having switched tongues three or four times already. Some of its sentences are very short, trying to make an impact, and others are several lines long, desperately trying to get me to stay for as long as possible. But it is very concerned with introductions, like someone who obviously has something important to say, who keeps stretching their hand out to shake yours, but doesn’t get further than that.

2 Comments
13/Jan/2014

The Architect

In the middle of the desert, a woman has drawn herself a home. Straight lines and right angles. There is no wind here ever, so the ground consists of nothing but her footprints, and the lines she has drawn. It is obvious she used to be some sort of artist, maybe even an architect, from the ease with which she drew them. She drew herself a bedroom, stomped out the wall and redrew the room, and her bed, as a little bit bigger; the difference between queensize and kingsize. She goes to sleep there, and dreams about heights and vertigo.

4 Comments