The music changes now, into sounds that we can’t quite fit into a genre. We’re in a new place, where we can make connections we don’t understand. The forest has done something to us, we’ve forgotten where we came from, forgotten that there are machines and clever indie pop music and noise and traffic and hard synthetic sounds and soapy hard-plastic products. We’ve disintegrated entirely, into little prehistorical jellyfish cubes, and find comfort in everything that seems organic. Blood and menstruation and shit and piss and rotting fungus seem safer than the gleaming and alien things we don’t understand.
The three wanderers are about to finish a break in a forest clearing. ŚMIERĆ looks calmer, but sweaty and twisted, as if he’s on his way into a trance. The girls are a little worried about him.
VENKE: Have some water.
ŚMIERĆ: No, no.
They start to walk again. ŚMIERĆ gets up, then collapses. TERESE and VENKE turn around, sit down on either side of him, place a rolled-up jacket under his head.
VENKE: What’s wrong?
ŚMIERĆ: (quiet): Aaaaaaaaaaaa.
VENKE: Are you in pain?
ŚMIERĆ : Aaaaaaaaaaaa.
TERESE: Tell us what’s wrong!
ŚMIERĆ : Aaaaaaaaaaa.
TERESE and VENKE try to help: they make a bed of moss and fabric they strip from the backpack; they undress him and start to wash his body. The water droplets they pour over him make crystal noises like the sounds from a wind chime, but just evaporate on his skin. ŚMIERĆ continues to chant AAAAAAAAAA, looking straight ahead, as if he knows what’s happening.
TERESE puts her hand on ŚMIERĆ’s belly to clean it, but then retracts it swiftly. We notice a round shape on his belly, a little bulge that grows gradually bigger.
TERESE puts her hand on VENKE’s. A thin white membrane covers their eyes like an inner eyelid. In a trance they continue to wash his belly around the bulge and the water runs down the side of his body, outlining its contours in water, like a chalk outline of a hand.
Slowly his makeup is transformed from corpse paint to an Edvard Munch face,
which is then made up into an entirely white face again,
as if dipped in sugar or crystals,
and then into a face without makeup
but also without characteristics, without eyes, nose or mouth
perhaps totally in line with what we recognise as human,
with only generic orifices
or is that just what a face looks like when the makeup is
removed and we look too closely?
VENKE’s and TERESE’s faces change, too. The skin around their eyes swells and becomes red and sore, as if their eyelids have become lips, and their irises are split into little kaleidoscopic colour particles.
Finally brownish black goo starts oozing from all of ŚMIERĆ’s orifices. It’s sometimes a little lumpy, then smoother, more watery.
The girls begin to smear the gunk over his body, initially trying to get rid of it, but later just to make a bit of a mess. It starts to gently etch his skin, like oil slowly brought to a boil.
Gunk begins to bubble under the skin around the bulge on his belly.
ŚMIERĆ breathes quickly and closes his eyes in pain. The girls demonstrate birth breathing with pursed lips, which he attempts to mimic.
The girls study the bulge on the belly. It moves as a finger under a carpet would. They start to gather lichen and moss and leaves and flowers and arrange their haul at the bottom of ŚMIERĆ’s belly.
The thin flower stalks and lichen flakes merge into thicker amphibian folds around the bulge. Slowly we realise that they form an opening, a vagina. Like a sculpture, or a piece of clothing they’re designing. When the girls remove their hands, you can see a hint of movement from the end pieces of the folds, like little tentacles.
Then the girls press their fingers against the vagina, which slowly begins to open. Brown-black gunk gushes over their hands.
TERESE shifts her hands up toward ŚMIERĆ’s face and places a twig carefully between his teeth, so he can bite on it. She starts to breathe in his face, strong quick breaths that he tries to mimic. In the meantime VENKE sticks first one finger into the hole to feel it, then two, and then her arm deep in, as if up a cow’s rectum. TERESE carries on doing the birth breathing. They shout.
VENKE and TERESE: PUSH!
ŚMIERĆ pushes and screams a long HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Black blood gunk doesn’t gush anymore but pulses calmly as it flows from the vagina, continuing in beautiful lava-like streams down the sides of the belly, over the crotch and back to nature. TERESE’s and VENKE’s tongues swim in clear spit, and the drool runs down their chins as they work.
TERESE has turned back toward VENKE who with some effort manages to extract a small, round, white egg as ŚMIERĆ pushes one last time. All three enter into a deeper trance with the egg between their hands.
TERESE: We found it.
VENKE: In a hole we made with our own hands. I was inside.
TERESE: What was it like in there?
VENKE: Warm and soft, red and black, white and yellow.
TERESE: Egg white and egg yolk.
VENKE: I didn’t have access, but I wasn’t expelled.
Slowly the three of them come out of the deepest part of the trance. VENKE rolls her head lightly from side to side, as if she’s stretching. TERESE carefully changes her sitting position. They look at each other.
It’s unclear who says:
I just felt like I’ve gotten so close to you now, am I nuts? Maybe it’s the forest, maybe it’s VENKE, maybe TERESE, maybe it’s me telling you.
TERESE and VENKE lay the egg, which glistens and glitters and radiates light as if from a flashlight or an iPhone, on ŚMIERĆ’s chest. He is tired and happy. He pets the egg and laughs.
But then he jerks and disappears into a trance again. We watch his hair and skin start to melt, and the magical vagina starts rotting. ŚMIERĆ is still all smiles, but his breathing grows irregular.
Then he slowly becomes grainier and grainier
like a picture that is corrupted as it’s
