gas mask | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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.

26/Jun/2013

We All Died

A few weeks ago, every citizen died. Lungs caved in, brains spilled out. Office hours remained unchanged. Stiff corpses kept moving through crowded streets, dry mouths kept talking in raspy voices. Their rotten bodies are making the city putrid; the aftershaves and perfumes have long since become ineffective, now simply an overtone of bergamot and pine. Muscles are starting to fall off, eyes are melting from faces. I’m staying in my bed, not daring to breathe but with a gas mask on my face, hoping that the electricity inside my cracked skull will go away if I keep completely still.

10/Apr/2013

Elephant?

There is a new installation in the tallest building in the city. It releases gas that kills artists.

There is an interactive piece of fiction encircling us – they cannot escape.

Not much has changed, except Lilah coughs now, and the graffiti does not catch my eyes anymore.

Any act of rebellion is either formulaic and easily thwarted, or creative, which kills the rebels.

I saw a black mask with huge eyes and a trunk like an elephant’s. I didn’t know what it was for. It looked like art. It was in a locked room in the Building where I work.