Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: romance

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.

2013 NaNoWriMo Excerpt #7

“So how did you two meet anyway?” someone asked.

“Oh, it’s a funny story actually,” Mos said. He had drunk three eggnogs as a kind of protest, but now he spent much time trying to find his nose, which he had cut off to spite his face. He steadied himself against a pole. “We were both very single, and we were hired by a dating website to accept dates with people so they could boost their statistics, and somehow their system placed us …” He waved his hand vaguely, “in incorrect boxes, and we ended up having a great time.”

“Oh, funny,” said the someone. “That’s not what Rakel told me.”

The Sweetest Dead Girl

He was young, and he believed in destiny. One day he woke up with an idea, and he bathed his dark, smooth skin in citrus oil until it glowed crimson, and set out. The first tattoo parlour he found sounded like angry insects and had the colours of a poisonous flower.

He said to the tattoo artist, who was a muscular man who seemed to have bulked up solely to get more skin to draw on, “I want to know the name of the sweetest dead girl that you ever knew, and I would like that tattooed on my arm.”

Dignity

We die together and it is romantic. We don’t stay dead for long because you made a jarring post to your blog, and someone cared, and someone else called the emergency services. The last thing I hear before I die is a siren’s wail, which I find poetic. Elephants climb the stairs. The door is kicked in, we are rescued. I blame you. This is me blaming you, still. They tell me you puked up your insides and that there was no romance in sight, that you convulsed. It was all very undignified. There is no real dignity in love.

Relentless

“I’m really not the kind of person to run away,” you claim, tightening the laces of your new white runner’s shoes. “Like, if you know me, you know that is so not me.”

I do not know you.

“I never ever go away, and I always come back.” You unfurl your fins from your torso like a set of wings. It’s a short pier and a long way down. The sea attacks the cliffs with a relentless kind of romance, the kind that’s not problematic in works of fiction. You sigh. “But I have to do this.”

You disappear.

Overture

Orwell and Julia’s relationship had an overture at a Christmas party two years before they actually, truly, met.

Orwell and Julia’s relationship was a classical opera in three parts. Their marriage was a slow movement, their wedding and divorce both lightning fast.

Orwell and Julia did not know they had met before the night they met again, something Orwell was embarrassed over and Julia was traumatized by. They had both been too intoxicated to remember exactly.

It was obvious, how it would go. The friend who introduced them to one another said they had chemistry. What they had was music.

Shadows

And if you see me, pretend not to know me. I always watch where the sun throws my contours; worried, excited. If our shadows should ever overlap, it will rend the earth we stand on. They are the spiteful, angry shapes that outline us. We will suspect an earthquake – we are Californians, after all – but even the air will vibrate, even the invisible strings that connect our hearts. I will go far away, in my mind, and I hope we will never meet in well-lit rooms. Always cherish the darkness, love that which keeps us nebulous and hard to define.

Hypnopomp

Wake up with something warm beside me in my bed, fumble for my glasses. I can feel the weight of a woman in the bed next to me and at the same time I know that is impossible. Hold both thoughts in my mind, waiting for one of them to cancel the other out. Realize that I’m holding my breath and gasp for air. The warmth does not stir. The scent of mandarins finds its way into my nostrils, and I can’t remember yesterday. Find my glasses. Feel shame.

For a few moments there I actually believed it was you.

Stearin

That boy always had a lighter on him.

They would always do it in his bedroom; never hers. Every time before he backed onto the bed and fell backwards, all tousled hair and coy grin, he would light the one thick white candle by the window like a sacred ritual. It would go out by itself when they lay there, spent and giggly and warm, and he called it theirs.

When it was a stump of just one inch she asked what he would do when it burnt down.

“I’d get a new one,” he said, with a sad smile.

2012 NaNoWriMo Excerpt #3

Last one of these I’m posting before I get anywhere with editing this novella into shape. I haven’t even got to write the really cool scenes yet! (The really cool scenes are some NGE/Michael Bay stuff. Explaining it here would ruin the explositude.)

Previous excerpts can be found here: /2012/11/12/nanowrimo-excerpt-1/ and here: /2013/01/13/2012-nanowrimo-excerpt-2/

This snippet takes place between excerpt 2 and 1. As usual, comments appreciated.

[Content Warning: sex]

~

She closed the door and exhaled and lay down on the floor. Immediately, Ikkje appeared from the doorway from the kitchen and sat down next to her. He held her hand. He wore an apron and smelled like cinnamon.

“Do you love me?” Rovy asked.

Ikkje Pouncer appeared to think for a little while. The house was modest, she thought. Like most of Ikkje’s kind, the house was just at the edge of the city, but Rovy was okay with this. “I think I do. I don’t think anything has changed. What’s wrong?”

He spent most of his days out in the emptiness, unrecorded, hunting and gathering. Rovy shook her head. “Long day, is all. Have you heard of the falling elites?”

“Elites?”

“The bewinged men and women falling from the sky, love.”

“Is that where the elites are?”

“Well, a bunch of them fell and something happened to the Information Market. Hardly any Buskers there, but many buyers. Don’t know what to make of it. Is dinner done soon?”

“It is. I gathered a lot of mushrooms and potatoes, today.” He smiled.

She kissed him. “You know, most hunter-gatherers also do the hunting business. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you bring home a phant of any kind.”

“These potatoes were totally a struggle, I swear.”

She stared at the little information ball that had rolled out of her pockets.

She kissed her husband again, “hey, do you really love me?” Read the rest of this entry »