Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: short stories

14/Mar/2013

Plague

The plan is simple. Wait for the storm and then fly the supplies dirigible over the enemy city, apparently lost. The grey storm will make it impossible to see from inside the dirigible, so you have to rely on magnetism. As will the enemy. If they don’t shoot you down you just walk into the balloon and fire a few rounds yourself.

You won’t make it out of there alive. You will be captured or killed. If they somehow have the sense not to use the supplies, at least make sure they don’t sever your heads when they kill you.

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7/Mar/2013

Voyage

“Find life.”

You were fitted with a chelonian, deliberate kind of intelligence, and all the cameras in the world. You left our system as a living thing; you taught us all we know about extrasolar space. And you fulfilled your mission; you found life.

You aimed your thruster; you set your course.

And you degraded. Micrometeors, particles of dust, stray gamma bursts, bugs that turned up after hundreds of years, data inconsistencies. So you turned into just another inert clump of metal, gathering ice on your journey to this other world. They did not see you coming.

And you crashed.

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28/Feb/2013

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.

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21/Feb/2013

Yes

Semaphore towers fell; cables were cut; spy satellites blacking out all over the globe. White noise; telephones were scrambled mid-call – I was interrupted mid-sentence. There were a few shouts, a few wordless moans. And language broke down. Words mitosed into smaller words, and sounds into their constituents until just one syllable was left. This syllable was prolonged and tested and broken, it split itself into the muscle contractions and relaxations, in tongue and throat and lungs and diaphragm, and they were repeated over and over again, every time you touched me in a new place, or in a new way.

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14/Feb/2013

Relēthē

Chy-Gorat died and left nothing behind: no money, no words, not even a withered husk of skin or any bleached bones. His friends remembered the man against his wishes, and Issachi lost his tongue before he could hold his memorial speech.

Gorat started fading then, but they made him a statue. They repair it when it dries and crackles, and when it melts in the sun, and after it is struck by lightning.

And when every walleted picture blanked and every yearbook photo was burnt to ashes, Issachi reconstructed his friend from stray footage and distributed the new images everywhere.

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7/Feb/2013

Slachtoffertjes

It fans out in every direction, like shrapnel. It embeds itself in the skin of the little victims of your crime; your bereavement, your divorce. By killing one you remove both. And so there are orphanages and runaways and anti-social services.

The shrapnel not extracted runs inside them, so they will always piss blood when they piss.

And nineteen years later they might feel less diminutive, and twenty little years later you are free from good behaviour. You arm yourself with a shovel. You dig up the corpse, sully the crime scene. You haunt the little victims of your crime.

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4/Feb/2013

SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILST COMPLETING THE HOLOCAUST

So, as you may gather from the title, this is not a nice story. I guess I am to blame for writing it and stuff, but you could also blame girlshapedguitar for making me share the Most Awkward Sex Scene I’ve ever written, which happens to be in the middle of this train wreck of a story. It is a machine of death story that I never submitted. (See: machineofdeath.net)

[Trigger Warnings: baby hitler, suicide, pregnancy angst]

~

SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILST COMPLETING THE HOLOCAUST

a machine of death story

Week 21, day 2

The room glowed a little from being in the presence of that silvery machine. From its top, like a slack tongue, a small strip of paper jutted out.

Björn Willems, MD, tore the strip of paper off and handed it to the woman sitting in front of him. Like a statue of someone who has just received disastrous news, she sat perfectly still. The good doctor leant back in his chair and observed her. It was a good chair, a proper chair. He’d arranged the office furnishings himself, after the MD before him had been killed in a freak accident. It wouldn’t do to keep the furniture of an unlucky woman.

Therefore, the table was new and the chairs were all new. They looked the same but in fact Dr. Willems’ chair was ten centimeters higher off the ground than any other chair. From his elevated position, the doctor gave the woman on the other side of the table a warm, friendly smile.

She smiled back, at first thinly and then as broadly as the doctor, and then they both strained their face muscles and some laughter bubbled up. It turned into a guffaw from Björn and a soundless, out-of-breath clucking from the pregnant woman. Even the little machine seemed to join in, vibrating as it did.

The woman caught her breath, “this is a joke, right? That is,” another breath, “why we are laughing, isn’t it?”

The doctor immediately withdrew his smile into his beard and stopped laughing. He balled his fist and coughed into it once. “What? No, not at all. It is just kind of funny. Don’t worry though, I’m sure he grows up to be a healthy young man.”

All non-artificial colour disappeared from her face. “Try again. New needle. Something must have gone wrong.”

The machines had never been wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

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31/Jan/2013

Georg

Once upon a time, a man fell in love with a dead woman. She died in front of him every night and became more and more beautiful. One morning, after a storm, he made his way to the damp alley where she lay, mouth open, face gone. He found her behind a trash can and he cried. She had not got to her feet and walked away like an angel.

The city was besieged. It rained fire and black death. The man stayed with the dead woman, his obsession. And she took one last breath, and her soul possessed him.

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24/Jan/2013

Profession

Sergeant Maier displayed very specific sets of aptitudes and ineptitudes. On active duty, James kept himself one mistake away from a dishonourable discharge. He lost most of his toes on purpose.

A General by the name of Baumgartner noticed his aptitudes, finally, when one day the Sergeant held his hat to his chest perfectly. It all just made sense. Thus James got the position, without ever having asked for it. Because, who asks for that?

Limping a little, hitching rides, James embarked on a fruitful career. He travelled the country, visiting the relatives of soldiers, bringing them the bad news.

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17/Jan/2013

Home without Books

Your body will go on living after your death. You wake up in the darkness, shivering, from a nebulous nightmare; that cold spell is what it feels like when you are let back in. It is confirmed since long ago you are superfluous, the body has shut you out before.

One day you will haunt your own home. Your body will explain to the exorcist, the slamming of doors and sackcloth unthreading itself. The exorcist (he will wear a cape) will nod – he has seen it all before – and ask your body to leave for now.

You will be banished.

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