short stories | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

26/Jan/2014

Homesickness

There are pills against homesickness now, he thinks, staring upwards at craters and pockmarks. The land where he grew up has been torn up by the roots and does not exist anymore. This deracination was there to stop the approaching forest fires from all around and yet the forest fires rage, with a clucking, cackling laughter in libraries, intent on deleting the past. The sky is unnervingly neutral about it and it hasn’t rained for a whole year and now the impending moon hovers close enough that he can step onto it and walk away. Maybe he will do that.

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25/Jan/2014

Photography of Souls

She was a photographer of the dead. Her studio was morose and draped all black and matte. Before the lifewarmth of their deceased relatives had run out, people would rush, in hearses with special coffins made to preserve warmth without starting to smell, to her abode. There, the dead person’s last life was photographed out of them and printed immediately, onto sepia paper, and given to the relatives to frame.

But when she died, her equipment on standby, all her soul seeped out onto the floor and no-one took her photograph and she rolled away as fog the next morning.

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24/Jan/2014

Thought Experiments

You spend all day in train stations, trying to arrange an accident and a heroism. Last week, you poisoned cats in boxes until you ran out of excuses at the pet store. You have your clipboard and your hardhat, and you instruct the railworkers to start welding things together on the tracks. It is urgent. You want a real fat man to stand on the yellow lines when the train comes in, but he’s standing stock still and your workers all get off the track in time. The train starts screeching to a halt and that’s when I push you.

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23/Jan/2014

The Parable of the Electron

There is an infinity of space between two molecules, even between two atoms as tightly knit as the ones in your cramping chest. It would be foolish for an electron to jump between the two and even if it did, if it embarked on this suicide mission, it would be ludicrous to expect its friends to follow it. It would mean an eternity of loneliness just to reach that other atom, to orbit it a little while. It is absurd for the EMT to apply the defibrillator to your chest, it just means loneliness in the back of the ambulance.

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22/Jan/2014

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)

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21/Jan/2014

Pierre

The best most accurate memories I have are of the unimportant bits, like the name of the waiter who recommended the wine that made you throw up, if that’s really what happened. I remember the name of a waiter, in any case. Every memory is like a faded photograph that gets more worn each time I bring it out to view it, and I try to fill in the details as best I can remember them. Your hair was now always the same length, even though we knew each other for years. I wish you showed up in actual photos.

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20/Jan/2014

No-one Deserves an Aneurysm

You are born with threads going into and out from you. The tall person in the white coat has a busy, worried look on their face as they bring out the scissors with the curved blades to cut most of the threads off of you. First they cut the one that connects you to them, then they separate you from your mother. They give you the scissors, in a gilded box.

You cut them all off as you grow up all forsaken, denied, refused, and you tremor when you cut the last sinewy ones. Your relatives disappear one by one.

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19/Jan/2014

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.

18/Jan/2014

Fingerprints

Did you know that the fingerprints you leave fade away after a few years? It’s just oils; over time, the marks disintegrate into nothing, like a crowd of bored people dispersing after the spectacle is over and the police are asking awkward questions like, “Did anyone try to talk to her?” The marks you left weren’t even your real marks, all the grooves turned to ridges, and mirrored if we compare them to the ones on your fingers. It’s been two and a half years since you touched me, and the grooves and ridges have become part of my skin.

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17/Jan/2014

Neon Butterfly

The larvae of the neon butterfly crawl in formation, as opaque as clouded glass but not more. They’re a thin line up wooden telephone masts, over clothing lines, on the underside of precariously balanced planks, just to reach the neon-brimming signs adorning the faces of pizzerias or other greasy venues. In a concerted effort, the larvae wrap their translucent silk around one chosen pipe, and crawl in under the wraps, causing that single letter of the sign to flicker for a season or two until it pops, in the middle of the night, releasing neon butterflies into the urban sky.

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