Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: the plague

2/Jan/2014

Rats

The first rat we found, with bulging eyes, we found in my little sister’s room. It made hissing, scratching noises, trying to claw its way out through the floor with its worn-down claws. My sister came straight to the abbess and me. We touched the rat with a firepoker, but it refused to come out from under the bed. We had to torch it.

I guess whatever pestilence was eating its skin thrived in smoke. There were ten coughing, panicked rats the next day, and now my sister is afraid of something invisible. She won’t come out of the bathroom.

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22/Aug/2013

Quarantine

There is a giant circus-like tent hanging over it, ridiculously. See-through plastic windows have been clumsily sewed to the sides. Red graffiti tags adorn the hemline. The ship’s been out there twenty-nine days now, a stone’s throw from the harbour, and officially we need to wait another eleven days. There are no faces staring out at us from the windows, we know we need to burn it on the fortieth day, and we are anxious to. But rules are rules. On the forty-first, the ship will shrug its sheets off, hoist its ropes up, unfurl its cloth and sail away.

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