Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: rain

Scream the Throats

We sound the drums, rattam; we stretch the skin taut and beat them until they burst and the music stops. We fall the rain, we gather the clouds, we heavy the air until one struggles for oxygen and the music stops. We play the strings, we boom the thunder. We grin, rattam; we sharpen the claws, we scratch against all the glass surfaces we find. We throw the stones, we pound the blood in ears and wrists and jugulars. We close the eyes, we make you scream until the music stops, we beat the drums, rattam, we beat the drums.

~

Old, very old, impossibly old thing I wrote for my dear friend Pao (@Panterdjuret) and wanted to have available on this here website as well. Edited a tiny, very tiny, impossibly tiny bit because things change over the years. Two words are different.

Raincloud Found Dead in Malmö

…witnesses in the area claim to have seen a man clamber up a drainpipe that fell off just as he got up on the roof, where he hurled insults and scrap metal at the sky until a raincloud formed. Reports differ on what happened next: either there was a tempestuous argument, or fisticuffs broke out immediately. By this time it was raining too heavily for anyone to stay outside. Just minutes later the raincloud fell dead from the sky and the man was nowhere to be seen. And now over to sports as the weather, understandably, has been cancelled.

Antigravity Strawberries

It is morning, and young men and women are walking the strawberry fields, hanging wicker baskets upside down on wooden latticework. The leaves tickle their dirty, bare feet, and strawberries are tugging the leaves upwards, surrounded by the morning dew hovering still, a snapshot of rain. This year it’s rained a lot, so the pull is stronger than usual, and the customary berry tithe has already fallen upwards, like tossed coins that never come back down. They will disintegrate where the stratosphere turns into mesosphere. Their siblings will be caught in the baskets, placed carefully on counters like small cages.

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)

The boy who enumerated rain

My story, “The boy who enumerated rain,” was published today over at Minor Literature[s]. You should go read it!

http://minorliteratures.com/2014/01/08/the-boy-who-enumerated-rain/

Decelerate Enough

There was a rhythm to it, if you decelerated yourself enough. One heartbeat every hour and the rain fell melodiously on the roof of my car. That was how I knew this was not natural rain, but something more sinister, or more divine. Maybe it shifted between day and night, but the rain never stopped. There was no point in distinction. An oak a hundred feet away had an aura made of rain and streetlight. I stepped out onto the asphalt, it took a thousand years. I walked toward the oak, toward the drumming, strumming, humming phosphorescence in the distance.

Call It Fate

Somewhere in a ditch the rainwater is separating a dog skeleton from its collar.

In a hospital a baby is born. They cut off one of its two genitals and it screams.

The earthquake cuts the land apart right between your feet and mine.

And the pilot doesn’t get to see his home country from above one last time, when the billowing black cloud obscures his view.

A doctor sells his soul for medical knowledge; he could have made a better deal.

A wall is being built. Yellow signs with black text are hung up. The message cannot be clearer.