Kent Kelly - The Girl Who Bled Forever

CR: You tell me. (His voice is slightly muted as he turns. He may be watching Anna intently.)

AM: Captain?

CR: The camera is being moved.

(A silhouette is briefly seen as the camera view tilts and pinwheels. The camera tripod, with the film still running, is being carried on a limping man’s shoulders. Sunlight is coming, trickling up through coursing clouds, but the mountains are hiding all they can. The moment of watching the man’s gait turns to a blur, and then silhouettes of huge crows are hopping away through wild grass. Another tilt, we glimpse a dim ramshackle barn fronted by two ruined grain silos. Further in the distance, a skeletal windmill has its sundered wheel forcibly churned into motion by the wind.)

(A grunt. The camera is resettled. The sun is about ready to rise.)

ANON: Double recording now. Time stamp.

( Beep . A flashing time index appears at bottom right: 05:14:09. The date is not displayed.)

(The camera is refocused, viewing the same vantage spot as before from another angle. Something translucent is hovering in midair. It is near a ditch which is now clearly seen, bordering the edge of the wild and churning cornfield.)

AM: There it is again. It’s like… a hole. In the air. Is that glass? What’s holding it up there?

CR: (Silent.)

ANON: Testing. Testing, anomaly set to be breached in seven… six…

(The time index now reads 05:14:51. The volume is lowered again by the operators, the howling wind purrs into a grainy silence.)

CR: (Rapping on table.) Hey, turn that up.

A SOLDIER IN THE ROOM: Sir! Remain seated.

CR: I just—

ANOTHER SOLDIER: Sit down. Eyes forward.

(Safeties are clicked off. A gasp is heard, believed to be Anna’s.)

CR: Okay, okay.

(The film continues, having been slowed by the operators to one-third time. Each second passes in three jittery seconds. An anachronistic crow glitters its eye in the first of sunlight, then turns over something with its beak and flips it off into the weeds. A beetle, made sluggish by the cold. The beetle spins slowly through the air out of frame, tumbling end-over, and the crow hops after it.)

(The time index now reads 05:14:57. The film is accelerated back to normal speed. The aberration event begins.)

(From out of nowhere, a gray and sickly little arm thrusts out of the air and struggles into sight. The arm is entirely disembodied; where the shoulder should be, it simply ends in a perfectly straight line of nothing. It is as if an invisible wall is between the camera and the arm, hiding the majority of the person from sight. The weaving grass betrays nothing; the arm floats in front of the churning vista as a misted breath of sun-glow is dripping down.)

(The arm flops crazily in the air, perhaps seven feet above the ground. Black blood trickles down its length.)

AM: Oh my God what the fuck —

CR: Shhh .

(The operators restore the volume. The cameraman is heard sobbing, the wind wheels his choking voice away into crow caws. Someone, a child, is squealing with panicked desperation.)

A SOLDIER IN THE ROOM: (Guttural whisper, unintelligible.)

AM: Oh my God oh my God —

(A girlish sob and a grunt are heard. The arm keeps struggling, clasping and releasing cold fingers against the sky. Wild corn stalks flow their tips between the disembodied arm’s bleeding fingertips. She touches them.)

(A starving, pallid girl-thing crawls out of the hole in the sky. The camera has been perfectly positioned so that she is seen in left-side silhouette; the hole in the sky is parallel to the view, and can scarcely be seen. The arm is followed by tangled hair, then a mouth-gaping little face streaked with dirt and tears. The girl, standing on something unseen, tilts out of the hole and reaches for the ground below.)

AM: (Anna gasps, whispers something, perhaps in prayer.)

(The girl loses her grip on something, something inside the invisible part of the hole. Her knees hit the cusp of the floating hole’s bottom edge. Her knees are cut horribly, and she shrieks, a bird-like warbling sound which does not end. She tilts out twitching, her spine contorted, the razor-cusp of the hole slicing deeply into her legs. She freezes and falters, deeply impaled through either shin, as if she is balancing with her knees on a giant razor blade. If she does not move quickly both legs will be severed. The invisible cusp gashes in, ever deeper up into girlish legs, finding bone which only slows but never stops the merciless incisions.)

AM: (Perhaps through her cupped hands.) Oh guh .. guh …

(Blood streams down in pressurized spurts from both of the girl’s legs. The screaming cuts off into a coughing choke. She vomits down into the spinning grass and beads of the liquid are spun toward the camera by the wind. She falls toward the ground, but her other arm — unseen until now — snags on the cusp where her legs had been. Black static-y blood from her shins is still dripping prolifically out of the sky.)

(The higher arm is snagged and almost severed. The girl hangs in the air, feet dangling, dripping with gouts of blood. Her head lolls and a glimpse of shell-shocked eyes is quickly seen and gone. The tangled arm she is hanging by pulls apart, like a moist piece of bacon. The tendons and fleshy tendrils snag upon the hole edge, and then with a barely audible hiss-squelch the entire arm is severed.)

(The cameraman is still sobbing, as is Anna in the viewing room. The girl’s lost arm, wobbling on momentum, falls out of the invisible hole and onto the girl’s head. Her twitching fingers grab futilely and tangle in her own hair. The girl pitches forward onto all fours. Just before she goes, the severed arm grows not-quite-still and plops down behind her, fingers still twitching like insect legs in the grass.)

(Leaving the arm there, the dying girl-thing rises. Her entire soiled nightdress is sheathed in puddling blots of blood. She sprint-hobbles on mutilated legs toward the camera. Her one arm reaches toward the lens, and blood spurts out of the perfectly-sliced stump on the other side where her right shoulder used to be.)

THE ANONYMOUS CAMERAMAN NEAR THE CORNFIELD: (Groaning, fiercely:) Come to me I love you, I’m so sorry, I love you …

AM: Pause. Fuck , do you hear me? Pause it now!

(An horrific freeze-frame. The girl is tangled upon herself in a near-death rictus of agony, a twisted scarecrow with wind-thrown tumbles of honey-gray hair spun over her eyes. But the grimacing mouth and one gaping eye can both be seen. She is a girl, but she is ancient. The eye is starred with a cataract and it looks like a fertile egg cracked open, a glowing orb shot through with bloody veins.)

AM: (Sobbing uncontrollably.)

CR: She’s had enough. Get through. Let’s end this.

(The recording fumbles into action again, herky-jerky. The girl-thing collapses into the camera tripod and a brief glimpse of her bloated and pale belly is seen through the perfectly straight rips in her sliced-open nightgown.)

AM: Shut it off!

CR: Do you hear her? It’s her first time. Shut it off.

AM: (More sobs, turning hysterical.)

CR: Now!

(A compromise may have been reached by the operators. The film continues, showing a careening and tilted sky filled with sunrise and little birds lining up atop the barn roof’s crest-line. The girl’s blood has smeared the lens. But the volume is off now, and as the camera flips into the grass it accidentally finds the full gaping blood-moon of the girl-thing’s face. She is screaming her last words, but she screams in utter silence.)

(Nevertheless, the words are unmistakable. Rotted ancient teeth, dried split lips, an old woman’s tongue in a child’s face. It shrieks at the camera:)