Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: short stories

4/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #3 – The Cellar Door is an Open Throat

My friends will always say, if they say anything at all, There are ways of gentrifying them without getting them fixed, you know. They cite studies. Psychologists, and psychiatrists, can do amazing things. He just needs to talk to someone. I lower my voice and I lean in and I tell them that I don’t care. I just want it to be over. The house is stained with testosterone, bull’s blood and saliva. No. I take their hands and I smile and I thank them, I let go of their hands and I say: Tomorrow we will get him fixed.

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3/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #2 – Shepard Tone

She lies.

He bites me and draws blood. She becomes furious. She says this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Though she feels more like a mule.

She says the fixer-men will come tomorrow, all hazmat suits and goggles, and they will restrain him. It will be a quick procedure, painless, she says.

She has this way of always taking it to the next level, without moving at all. It’s this ever-escalating false pitch that always sounds like it goes up however many times you hear it.

Yes, for serious, for real: tomorrow we will get him fixed.

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2/Sep/2013

The Rabid Dogs #1 – Tomorrow We Will Get Him Fixed

There is a rabid dog living in the basement; tomorrow we will get him fixed. She says so week after week, picking up vase after broken vase. Tomorrow we will get him fixed, and he will stop biting me, and we can take him outside. It will be good for him. She speaks like that, like living terrified of the Cujo under our house is just a minor nuisance. We soliloquize; dogs have good hearing, don’t they? I wouldn’t know, I am just a mouse. I feel the vibrations in the floorboards. Tomorrow’s the day we will get him fixed.

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1/Sep/2013

Creature of Habit

He was a creature of habit, the kind of man who would cultivate spots with his coffee mug on his breakfast table so that after a few years, there was a pale circle on it like the opposite of a coffee stain on an old map.

Every Tuesday, we would find out whether the barrels of white wine that reeked of fish had made their Rube Goldberg way into the speakeasy, and it would always be down to whether that man had stood guard or not. He was unbribeable; he would not know what to do with the extra money.

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31/Aug/2013

An Atlantis World (#2)

Wavering. The way the adults played it, stonemasons held their breath diving down, letting their metallic tools’ weights drag them to the right depth. They worked in shifts, dragging the tools back up with fishing lines to let the next one descend with them. Underwater, they would carefully remove the stones that held their city up, and bring them to the surface one by one. Others would wash the stones clean of algae, coat them with mortar, and place them on top of the city.

Was it a misstep that collapsed them, just one wrong hammerstrike? We will never know.

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31/Aug/2013

An Atlantis World (#1)

Rickety. The way the children played it, they would build a solid tower out of uniform, wooden blocks. The point was to remove the least important blocks and place them on top, adding to the height of the tower. The game was over when the tower fell, and the collapsor was not under any circumstances allowed to play the game again that day. It must have been a memento mori for their world, with the constant barrage of ice from the sky, filling up the sea. You cannot do this forever; they could have been saying: We don’t intend to.

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30/Aug/2013

Dead Zone

The train slows to a halt in the middle of one of the few dead zones left in the country, all fields of wheat and poppy. We get out our phones in vain, then there is nervous chatter to fill the space the engine rumble left.

A sextet of police officers comes in through the door calmly, wielding their instruments. The front man points – “Him,” he says, baton a millimetre from someone’s nose. “And him. And her.”

These people are led to the last cart, that cart is detached. The train starts rolling again and those left exhale with relief.

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29/Aug/2013

Impact

The thing fell from the sky at night, so it had to be a star. The little town regrouped around it like bacteria in a petri dish around a dropped breadcrumb. Its plump body was the muse for many a song.

Crows did not respect it; they would often sit on one of the three tail fins and pretend the humans revered them. It became the humans’ jobs to clean the star, polish off all the droppings, until the metal was shiny and bolts were loose and fins were waggling and there came a slight hum from the thing’s nose.

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28/Aug/2013

The Balcony on the First Floor

You’re in love with a Hollywood chick. She takes off her glasses and the whole world shifts into focus, every colour is 20% more vibrant. You get both of you drunk, you hold a speech for her, about how unworthy you are of her; she pushes you off the balcony into the pool. She gets a mohawk, does it up all green and purple. She tells you to go fuck yourself; she gets a restraining order. Is this how it’s supposed to happen? You watch the movies again, to figure out where this all went off-script. You don’t get it.

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27/Aug/2013

Pitch Drop

It is a misnomer to say that they have buried the hatchet, as that would imply an intention of keeping it in the ground. The tell-tale thing beats under the floorboards, right below their bed, while the air is thick with taciturnity. The hatchet is the only thing willing to spill guts. They sit about one body’s width apart, sinking into the mattress.

“I’m sorry,” she says, stroking a lock of hair back so she can look at him without turning her head. Her mouth is dry. Her words come like molasses,

but his are a pitch drop. “I know.”

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