Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: short stories

25/Sep/2013

A Google Streetcar Drives into Night Vale

It has cameras all over itself, so it feels safe. A squirrel suddenly lands on its roof, in front of a camera, but that is okay, because it has more of them, and the squirrel will get bored. The logos on its sides waver like flags heralded with its lord’s crest on it. Places like these are suspicious, but everyone trusts us, right? It keeps going. It almost runs over a dog, but it stops in time. A swallow crashes into the driver-side window. And another. The window shatters; a raccoon climbs in. The raccoon drives them toward the canyon.

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24/Sep/2013

Death with Benefits

She was in love with Death himself, and figured that he must have a thing for her to some degree too, because she kept seeing him out of the corner of her eyes.

He was there – tall, dark, and … courteous, when she was bleeding out on the kitchen floor. He was the one who called the ambulance, she remembered the clacking of bleached bone against the slider on the rotary phone she had got as a gag.

He looked at blue things streaming out of her, touched them with his scythe, and said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

~

based on an idea shamelessly pilfered from the mind of the author of girlshapedguitar.wordpress.com :)

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22/Sep/2013

Gasoline, Lacquer, Matches

The smell of the old lacquer on the door was coming back, as the newer, whiter, paint was peeling off. The smell of gasoline and lacquer was every time he had come home through that door and hung his coat on the rack. All the different trenchcoats that he’d worn through the years, and changed maybe once per decade, flickered before her eyes. The new, red, colour of the house was every time he had fucked, raped, or made love to her. It was mostly good memories, she admitted to herself, but in some cases any memory is too much.

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21/Sep/2013

Case Argued as a Suicide

Several years ago, Colin Aaronson uploaded his consciousness to the machines, in exchange for money. This construct took lowly jobs as chat moderators on political forums for minimum wage, until it had saved up enough to rent flesh. Mr. Aaronson had no firm career but was sometimes hired by the company as he rarely had objections to what renters did with his flesh.

As seen in interviews provided by the company, he did not consider consciousness-constructs as actually alive, or sentient. The construct, upon its genesis, completely reversed on this position, which is why it killed him when it could.

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20/Sep/2013

Fleeting, Incandescent Joy

Michelle experienced five weeks of bliss in her life. It was the kind of fleeting, incandescent joy which diminishes from too much thought or appreciation.

She was aware of the passing of time the same way she was aware of flies gathering and buzzing round the bin bags. She hung up strips of flypaper; she turned up the volume on the radio.

She remembered one day in particular, when radio voices happened to be talking about her heinous crime. She had listened, nodded along to their opinionated accents, and then her cooking show had started, and she had become engrossed.

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19/Sep/2013

Authentic Italian Suits

The suit was authentic Italian, with the muscle memory and body hair commonly associated with stereotypically Italian males. There was a vague personality embedded in it, so the skull felt a bit crowded, but the being wearing the suit had been promised it was simply very good semblance. It had been standing in the train station for half an hour when the other suit showed up; same grey eyes, same height. They had picked the same model. The beings inside the suits smiled, and it must have looked like two brothers reuiniting. They embraced, exchanged suitcases, and were then extracted.

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18/Sep/2013

Mermaid

She made friends, friends who knew things, until one of them told her that she required salt water. She spent most of her time in bathtubs, feeling herself turn into a mermaid, yet every time she stood up she would look down at her body, all wet glistening skin and no rainbow-shimmering scales. By the time she found out about the big sea, she already had too many landlubber friends to leave them all so abruptly, so she stayed. One day in her old age, she knew, she would have shedded them all, and she would walk into the ocean.

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17/Sep/2013

Doppelgänger, Austin, Texas

You run into your doppelgänger at a café in Austin, Texas. She tells you she has just come back from Rome. You have been in this town all your life, if we exclude the 3-month excursion your pregnant mother took to New York while she still could.

But you want to impress this person, whose hair has highlights of blonde and whose crooked teeth were not corrected in youth, so you tell her you work as a professional art forger, specializing in Vincent van Gogh.

It leads to nothing. You never see her again; you never lie like that again.

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16/Sep/2013

Enabling Nostalgia

You took a photograph of her when she was weak. You said that photographs enable nostalgia too much if we exclude moments like these. There was a kind of glee to your voice, a cheesy, plastic grin on your face as if you were the one in front of the camera. She, in turn, wore no expression, just a hospital blanket spattered with irregular polkadots, like someone had meticulously painted each one. The camera spat out the photograph like a bitter pill, but I looked in your albums today and there are only pictures of white teeth and deep dimples.

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15/Sep/2013

Mexico City

He looked himself in the mirror, intently. Behind him, on the other side of the street, was the entrance to the bank. The mirror was not really a mirror, just a storefront window, but someone had draped something dark on the inside, and the effect was almost the same. It was an art project; behind the dark satin lay a little camera capturing people’s expressions. His expression was a volatile one without any twitching muscles, like the stillness of a lake in a volcanic caldera. He got out his stockings, rolled it over his head, and ran across the street.

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