Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: short stories

20/Dec/2013

Clock Tower

The clock tower gives a mighty brazen sound. The quarantine is three weeks old now; the buildings around have been entirely evacuated. The temple stands as it was three weeks ago, but lacking people, all its rare books and silver untouched.

A church bench has been hastily dragged from inside the temple to barricade the tower’s door, along with boards and nails and sheets of metal.

If you observe from far up, you can see the first few, weak, tugs at the rope before the bell gets into full swing, on the 12th and the 24th hour of every day.

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19/Dec/2013

Social Moth

Social butterfly? No, a moth. Daytime, I wriggle and slip in-between and dissipate. The social lubrication ushers me; my smile, unfaltering, propels me. I hang from the ceiling. I rub up to people with the grease of a well-oiled machine. We intergrin, anecdotize, thank each other for the pleasant company.

Nighttime, whenever night is, all this liquid wavers within me, leaks out through my pores. I toss, turn. I never sleep. I hang from the ceiling, all my water rushing to my head. All my blood at the edge of my skin. I rotate. I burn my sheets after sleeping.

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18/Dec/2013

for Pao

She sits on a log and stares at a procession of forest ants. They all seem to be walking one way, toward the stream; it must be morning.

“You can never know someone fully,” she says. This is upsetting her. “You can never know exactly what someone else thinks, or what they would do in any given situation. Sometimes, you can make an educated guess.”

She thinks for a while, and stops frowning. “This does mean, however, that you can always get to know someone better. There is always more to uncover, always another layer of skin to peel off.”

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17/Dec/2013

Trigger Warnings

[Trigger warning: that time you were five and an old man with stripey hair leered at you on the bus, and he wouldn’t look away, and he wasn’t smiling but he was interested, and your mother, right next to you, felt a continent away]

[Trigger warning: a vast, uncaring universe]

[Trigger warning: the time your best friend committed suicide, and knowing however much you shout and scream you cannot argue with her logic]

[Trigger warning: a better world, not entirely unlike this one, but better, and you’re not in it, not even a tiny bit of you]

[Trigger warning: irreversibility]

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16/Dec/2013

Cancer Detector

She bought a cancer detector online, set it up, and promptly forgot about it. The same way dogs can sniff out illnesses, the device claimed, it could analyse particles that came into it and sort them. She did not trust the thing, but she had bought it as a ritual, the same way she threw salt over her shoulder or turned her mattress every month.

Whatever; it started beeping in the middle of the night and the man she had taken home left in a hurry, thinking it was a fire alarm, or a good excuse, and that was it.

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15/Dec/2013

Disneyland

You must treat a being to luxury before killing it, those are the rules. A hog is given a spa visit: it has a whole mudpool to itself and it rolls around and it makes contented noises and smiles (have you seen a pig smile?). Subsequently, it is slaughtered swiftly and painlessly, though the executioner weeps. A queen invites her greatest enemy to her greatest feast. He shows up with body-guards, who are seduced away, and he is beheaded at the table, in between stuffings of finest pork. A mother, tired and weary, finally takes her pleading son to Disneyland.

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14/Dec/2013

What Happened to Me

When I was small, I used to turn anything with eyes away from me, convinced that there were little spy cameras inside them. It looked like all my stuffed toys were ashamed of me. I kept a record of who had given me what items so that I could know who was watching. I would stare agog at them when they were in the room with me, wondering how they could pretend that they did not know that I knew.

I still haven’t figured out what actually happened to me, but I have figured out that it was something bad.

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13/Dec/2013

In the City of the Dead Last Week

In the city of the dead last week, a man with three tongues tried to kiss me. He said he had three tries, and that he would eat my heart. I turned to liquid and slipped out of his grip, and he fumbled after me, drooling all over himself, his spent tongues lolling, flopping on the floor. I guarded my heart closely on the way out of the city, on the bus with the grinning driver. In the city of the dead, last week, a man with three tongues ate the heart of another girl, someone who stood no chance.

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12/Dec/2013

Something Gives

Something gives. You weren’t expecting it, certainly not at a bus stop like this, but once something breaks it breaks. You feel like a pregnant woman, or a dam, as everything spills out of you. The blackmail, the near misses. It was supposed to happen somewhere else, in front of someone you knew, not like this. “I don’t think I will survive the year,” you say, and she almost hugs you, but then her bus arrives. It was your bus, too, but she gets on it and you think better of it. You keep crying until the next bus arrives.

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11/Dec/2013

Clear Liquid

A glass of clear liquid, but it is not water. When it stirs (when someone slams a door, when someone hesitantly picks the glass up) the liquid becomes opaque and whatever’s in there spins around nervously. “Drink it,” she says. “See what happens.”

The other one picks up the glass and meets the eye of the thing inside. “Sorry,” she mumbles, then she opens her mouth like a yawning hippopotamus and pours all of it down her throat. A few swallowing noises come from the space where she used to stand. “What happened?” she asks, for a moment visible again.

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