Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: short stories

30/Dec/2013

Composure, or This Wicked World

Whenever he feels so upset that he cannot handle things, he takes time out to play a gorgeous tune on his harp, and then he is – composed. The harp always stays in his bedroom. Sometime later when he has the time, in the middle of the night, he will get up and the floor will creak as he sits down by the harp and plays that same song, and he cries uncontrollably.

He has been going through his collection of sheet music like they were napkins to dry tears with lately and he is running out of songs to play.

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29/Dec/2013

First Snow

Yesterday was the first snow of this winter. Like most firsts, it came on far too strong, and then backed off half-heartedly before turning into a sloppy, wet mess that no-one wants around. Yes, it is always sad to see the first snow disappear like this, because I remember when I was a beginner, too. We all make mistakes starting out, and in retrospect they are really stupid, but with enough retrospect, we come full circle and realize that those mistakes were also stupidly easy to make, and perhaps the time spent regretting them could be better spent amending them.

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28/Dec/2013

רץ

The electricity went out and the apocalypse came and clouds of dust turned out to be more solid than we thought and when they rolled in they flattened our city and you and I survived lying still on the peak of the tallest hill. We stare into space and we are two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, almost touching, and we reminisce about the things in civilisation that we miss the most. You ramble for hours until I curl up and sleep. I have never heard anyone describe a video of kittens riding on turtleback so vividly as you do.

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27/Dec/2013

Scar Tissue

That was around the time we thought it was cool to contract flesh-eating diseases and watch them make their porous way across our bodies. If they reached your heart, you were fucked, and we lost one or two to simple incompetence, falling asleep with the red itch lingering at the shoulder. We had the antidote, and that was what hurt, pain radiating outward from our hearts like a physical representation of grief, us thrashing in our beds for days, while our skin rebuilt itself mostly with scar tissue. Our fingernails never grew again after that, so we’re protective of them.

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26/Dec/2013

Pain and Chemicals

“Will you teach me how to cry?” asks the boy with the broken nose. He is crying now because he just slammed his face into the wall, but that’s not what he is talking about. “I want to be able to cry from emotions, not just pain and chemicals.” He hates cutting onions. “Will you teach me how to cry?”

I tell him, “I can’t teach you that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just a thing that happens. You don’t think about it.”

“Can you teach me not to think about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Then I’d have to think about it.”

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25/Dec/2013

ON AIR

The camera zooms in on the grey letters until the only thing that’s visible is the bun of an unwitting stagehand’s red hairdo and the unlit phrase, “ON AIR.” The camera grows weary, and pans slowly across the room, until it finds an anchor’s face and does a little jig, because the camera handler is bored and light-headed. Someone taps on their watch. Reluctantly, the camera handler places the frame in the correct position and then she has a heart attack and falls over, clutching at her chest, inadvertently pointing the camera at the dusty ceiling. The letters light up.

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24/Dec/2013

When Grandfather Died

Every time a person dies they are taken to a cold, black room below the hospital. There is a waiting period of exactly 24 hours during which relatives and close friends are notified of the death so that they can lament. Sometimes people are so sad they want dead people back. If they are sad enough, the person in the black room will be revived.

When grandfather died, we adults just could not care, but we told you about it on the off-chance that your tiny heart would bear enough sorrow to wake him from the dead. It did not.

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23/Dec/2013

A Certain Kind of Lie

There is a certain kind of lie. I know, I have a long list of specific mendacity, and this is yet another one. This lie is one that two humans say to each other when something ends, and they mean it at the time. As the days, weeks, months go by they hear it again, and reinterpret it, and something bubbles up that was there the whole time: they never meant it, in their heart of hearts.

I said, “for a while”. You nodded. I still mean it; give me time. I hope that was not one of these lies.

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22/Dec/2013

Emotional Compromise

Emotionally compromised. It is such a wonderfully political-sounding, malicious, delicious phrase, “emotionally compromised”. Taste it. It’s smooth. It sounds like: We will rescind our guilt trips if you vow to feel guilty about it at least once a week, for a period of no less than one consecutive hour, and if not active guilt at least one full day of this nagging back-of-your-mind throb. It tastes like: We have found out what you really feel, you can spill it out now, it is over. We have isolated the leak. We have learnt from our mistakes. This will not happen again.

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21/Dec/2013

cul-de-sac

You have a different geography at night; but then so does this city. Day sees you rather put your hand in a blender than shake mine; night sees you one of the dancelanterns held up invisibly above like a swollen starscape, leading me by hand through throngs until we find a newborn alleyway; you cul-de-sac me.

You wear that stunning dress. I am still in my pyjamas. You dress me better with red nailmarks from my thighs to the spot between my shoulderblades. In this part of town, no-one cares about two strangers making love. Our moans are outdinned anyway.

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