short stories | Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

16/Jan/2014

Gender Sells

He comes into the room all dressed in almost-blue monochrome and smiles at me while he strips out of the cumbersome suit and tie and and throws it all aside and becomes many-coloured again, true, and the smile turns into a worried frown: “Where is your dress?” Picks up a few red clothes, scrutinizes them.

I look down on my body of oily swirly colour. “Can’t I just go like this?”

Having squeezed into the red dress and stretched white latex gloves over her hands, she touches my chin: “Not when you’re part of the machine,” she says: “Gender sells.”

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15/Jan/2014

The Ceremony

The ritual must have begun as something brutal and shamanistic, but has now been formalised into elegance.

The lion is released from her cage and there is a curious symmetry between the way her shoulderblades go up and down and the characteristic, sidling gait the performing woman walks with; the ceremonial robes allow only that.

Anxious performers may carry a dagger, but most go without. The lion circles her three times as she makes her way across the arena, every movement calculated and written down in an old book.

There is swift, bloodless death. It takes a lifetime to master.

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14/Jan/2014

Opening Sentence

I’m opening all my books to read the opening sentence out loud, then closing them again. It’s becoming a disjointed story that doesn’t care about characters or theme or even language, having switched tongues three or four times already. Some of its sentences are very short, trying to make an impact, and others are several lines long, desperately trying to get me to stay for as long as possible. But it is very concerned with introductions, like someone who obviously has something important to say, who keeps stretching their hand out to shake yours, but doesn’t get further than that.

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13/Jan/2014

The Architect

In the middle of the desert, a woman has drawn herself a home. Straight lines and right angles. There is no wind here ever, so the ground consists of nothing but her footprints, and the lines she has drawn. It is obvious she used to be some sort of artist, maybe even an architect, from the ease with which she drew them. She drew herself a bedroom, stomped out the wall and redrew the room, and her bed, as a little bit bigger; the difference between queensize and kingsize. She goes to sleep there, and dreams about heights and vertigo.

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12/Jan/2014

Red Warning Lights

Bubbles form on the floors of vast tanks filled with liquid, and on the thick black plastic cables that run from somewhere far above the tanks into them, and in the wrinkles of the brains floating perfectly still in the middle of the tanks, with cables sprouting out of them like they were potatoes. Some of the brains are tiny, some are large. Each brain has a little monitor displaying what it is thinking about. Some of the older brains are dreaming about reading stories about brains trapped in vats. These have been marked with red warning lights above them.

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11/Jan/2014

Haystraw

It was the first summer I can remember and everything was good, it was so warm that individual straws of hay would float in the air, out of boredom or exasperation, and when you touched them they would fall to the ground like they had done nothing wrong and you’d get a static shock. It was the first summer in existence, the summer that would define all other summers, and if you look close at a haystraw you’ll see all its lines, where its last few drops of water ran when it was still grass, you’ll see how it died.

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10/Jan/2014

Nervosity

When you’re nervous, blood rushes to the tips of your fingers and you need to touch something to push it back, to relax it. You carry a locket around your neck for fidgeting with.

Now your fingertips blush and you reach inside your shirt to bring the locket out and touch it, to be able to listen to the orders the masked men are shouting, but that’s not what it looks like you’re doing. As you lose consciousness on the chequered floor, you keep feebly touching the locket to try and force all that blood back inside you. You relax.

9/Jan/2014

Gold

We were fourteen years old and had just struck gold: a forgotten stash of mango schnapps. We rendezvoused in your treehouse, a miniature cabin. Two long summers ago, it had fallen down from its branches, and you’d left it where it landed.

We proceeded to get whispering drunk, and the booze was sickly sweet with a hint of aspirin, and when we’d had enough we put the cap back on and stumbled home at four AM and there were no ambulances tinting people’s faces and shadows blue, no crying mums, or people shaking me violently. You still moved away, though.

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8/Jan/2014

Your Homophobic Uncle

Your homophobic uncle has found out that you’re gay. Maybe it was your earrings, or one of your friends told; whatever. He’s said nothing about it, but why would he need to? He made sure to tell your aunt that he knew, she passed it on to you. The rest of the family are all impressed that he is keeping quiet about it, but he is the kind of man who gets drunk silently on liquid smoke. He always stays in the room to make sure you’re never alone with your little cousins. You’re the only one who’s unsurprised, unimpressed.

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8/Jan/2014

The boy who enumerated rain

My story, “The boy who enumerated rain,” was published today over at Minor Literature[s]. You should go read it!

The Boy Who Enumerated Rain — Johannes Punkt

Tag: short stories