Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: flash fiction

14/Dec/2013

What Happened to Me

When I was small, I used to turn anything with eyes away from me, convinced that there were little spy cameras inside them. It looked like all my stuffed toys were ashamed of me. I kept a record of who had given me what items so that I could know who was watching. I would stare agog at them when they were in the room with me, wondering how they could pretend that they did not know that I knew.

I still haven’t figured out what actually happened to me, but I have figured out that it was something bad.

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13/Dec/2013

In the City of the Dead Last Week

In the city of the dead last week, a man with three tongues tried to kiss me. He said he had three tries, and that he would eat my heart. I turned to liquid and slipped out of his grip, and he fumbled after me, drooling all over himself, his spent tongues lolling, flopping on the floor. I guarded my heart closely on the way out of the city, on the bus with the grinning driver. In the city of the dead, last week, a man with three tongues ate the heart of another girl, someone who stood no chance.

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12/Dec/2013

Something Gives

Something gives. You weren’t expecting it, certainly not at a bus stop like this, but once something breaks it breaks. You feel like a pregnant woman, or a dam, as everything spills out of you. The blackmail, the near misses. It was supposed to happen somewhere else, in front of someone you knew, not like this. “I don’t think I will survive the year,” you say, and she almost hugs you, but then her bus arrives. It was your bus, too, but she gets on it and you think better of it. You keep crying until the next bus arrives.

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11/Dec/2013

Clear Liquid

A glass of clear liquid, but it is not water. When it stirs (when someone slams a door, when someone hesitantly picks the glass up) the liquid becomes opaque and whatever’s in there spins around nervously. “Drink it,” she says. “See what happens.”

The other one picks up the glass and meets the eye of the thing inside. “Sorry,” she mumbles, then she opens her mouth like a yawning hippopotamus and pours all of it down her throat. A few swallowing noises come from the space where she used to stand. “What happened?” she asks, for a moment visible again.

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10/Dec/2013

Dead Sleep

There will be plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead. There will not be enough air. There will be no temperature, but you will invent one. That will be cold. There will not be enough duvet, and your dreams will be restless. It will be like being underwater, and the uncertainty about which way gravity is pulling you. On occasion, you will come closer to the surface and you will almost wake up, but it will be like a sheet of clear ice lies between you and true consciousness, and off you drift again, thinking, “Just five more minutes.”

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9/Dec/2013

Graffiti Area

The wall was installed by the city commissioner shock-full of colourful defiance from the start. It has a sign that says, “Graffiti Area,” and another one that said something about the Queen. It’s grey now. Youth have taken to shoplifting cartloads of spraypaint from local stores, and spending hours each night just painting this massive wall grey. They use old white t-shirts as makeshift balaclava gas-masks. After a night of going at it, they throw away their last spraycans and discard their shirts to discover they have ventilated grey kisses into them, by breathing so heavily so near that wall.

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8/Dec/2013

Final Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: A Hell of a Thing to Forgive Someone For

Hello, it is me again. You must be sick half to death of hearing my voice by now. Do you hear my voice when you read these, or have you forgotten it? I try to read books hearing your voice, but my thoughts tend to stray. They say some things, beginnings and ends mostly, you never forget. I haven’t forgotten a single stupid thing I said; I try to remember you from those particles. It is unfair.

I was wondering if you would care to talk to me at all.

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7/Dec/2013

Sixth Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: Apologies for all the Subterfuge

I’ve been writing you false love letters. It was a necessity; I hope your feelings have not been hurt. You must think me cruel, but it is important that they question everything I write. I cannot let them onto my real designs.

Maybe we were childhood friends, almost-lovers, or I picked you out from the phonebook.

You will receive a phone call in about a week’s time, and a sly slick voice will ask you if you know who I am. It is paramount that you answer that you do not. I am sorry.

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6/Dec/2013

Fifth Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: I Will Start This Love Letter in Medias Res because Otherwise I Will Never Dare to Say This

You held my hands above my head and I was helpless and this forced something in me to change, the penny finally dropped, and I swear you could hear it from my open mouth. Something shifted, like quicksand, and I saw you with new eyes. Do you understand what was going through my head at that time? It was the only time you rendered me speechless, bizarrely. And I closed my eyes and let you take me and I forgive you.

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5/Dec/2013

Fourth Draft of an Unsent Love Letter

Subj: Hypocrisy

Your clothes hugged you tight and I wondered how the muscles on your back would look, but I closed the door on your rainstruck face in the middle of the night and I said, “I have things to do.” I felt like my heart had sunk to my stomach and was being dissolved in its acid. You were so sad, you would have done anything for me, for a cup of hot chocolate and a listening ear. We trembled for different reasons.

Yes, of course I hate myself. There is no reason you would even open this letter.

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