The Girl Who Bled Forever

Puppetry. The haunting play of freeze-frames, observing the girl dying. Watching, trying not to cry out. Unblinking. I cannot save her. I am locked deep in my prison, the monitoring bunker. The guards are in gas masks, their assault rifles pointed at the back of my head. Forcing me to measure her in agony, to move and refocus the crawler cameras, to observe her and to theorize. To try in vain to understand. Impossibly, the girl is forever dying. The riddle of her endless death will be the world’s destruction. For myself, and for Josie, it never ends. The world is disintegrating and I am left staring at this child in suffering, an innocent prisoner trapped inside a video screen.
Day two hundred and eighty-six.
Every morning, just when the sun is rising, the arm crawls out of the sky. The girl, still connected, follows after it. She falls, the arm is severed. I watch, I theorize. I watch her bleed out and die in front of me.
She is looping, trapped in time. Every morning she crawls out and falls before me. Every dawn she hobbles toward me, bleeding, screaming.
Oh God, the icelights.
What does it mean?
I swear to you now, with all my heart, I am going to find the man who has done this to her. And I am not going to kill him, no. I am going to loop him in there, I am going to sacrifice him in the name of that little girl so like a daughter to me. Vengeance. I am going to imprison that bastard, dying forever on, where my Josie still remains.
Here. She is coming. The fingers spread toward the clouds. The world disintegrates all around us…
~