like a picture that’s resampled and resampled in gradually lower resolution
until he’s completely invisible and blurred.
All the while TERESE and VENKE whisper, this time in Norwegian: Where are you going? Don’t be scared, relax. Go in, but not toward the egg white. See, do you see the other colours? There are so many more colours. Go to them. Do you see the black, the black yolks? Go to the yolks. Go to them. Happy death.
TERESE and VENKE (hum):
Over whites and through the yolk
Looms the shrouded song of death
Waves make for a murky cloak
Sounds of white bone on the breath
ŚMIERĆ has now completely disappeared into a bigger and bigger pool of black gunk that bubbles and seethes. Only the skeleton and the rotting vagina, the phantom hole, are left.
The egg is wobbling on the edge, as if it considers jumping back into the hole,
but the hole gradually closes, bit by bit, like a seam,
and finally melts into the black puddle,
which seethes and boils, reducing into a black blot of gruel.
Two hands are placed on the gruel.
A Satanic pact between you and me.
They start to pick up and break apart the skeleton pieces. After a lot of back and forth and with the aid of both teeth, elbow grease and crushing stomps, they manage to break them up and arrange them into a new form.
Afterward they lie on either side of the bone sculpture and exhale, relieved.
From above you can see two girls resting on their backs, hands stretched out across a white bone mass in the shape of an upside-down cross, with the skull at the top and the egg in the middle where the lines cross each other.
Slowly the bones, too, disappear into the earth, or the earth emerges up from the ground in the form of little ants, dragging the pieces down into the underground.
TERESE and VENKE (hum):
Sounds of white shell on its breath
The egg is left alone again on the ground, wobbles.
The egg trembles even more,
The egg is about to fall,
now the egg falls
into TERESE’s hand
VENKE puts her hand outside TERESE’s.
TERESE puts her other hand around the other side of the egg.
VENKE then puts her other hand around that one.
VENKE: One, two, three!
On ‘three’ the girls lift the egg and put it in Venke’s backpack. They wrap their clothes and a towel around it.
The membranes slide open and disappear from VENKE’s and TERESE’s eyes. They look at each other, they look at the egg nested in the backpack.
As the girls pack, the last pixelated remains of ŚMIERĆ drain down into the stones and moss and earth, down toward the underground and the deepest roots, like cream absorbed into skin, penetrating the layers of meat and bone and marrow. Soon the body and its shape have completely disappeared, and only a little stripe of black sand remains on the brown earth, like a tiny lava-stream fossil, a burnt-out witch’s bonfire.
The girls begin to walk again, slowly. The anxiety of the entire forest is dominated by the fragility of the egg. The girls monitor the egg constantly, hold the egg, warm the egg, rock the egg.
Their hands are visible on the egg, they stroke it, warm it, wrap it up in jumpers, moss and plants. They roll it carefully up hilltops and pass it to each other when they have to climb a fence or step over a brook. TERESE cleans the egg with a damp cloth and VENKE puts it on her chest, as if nursing it. They sleep with the egg between them, their upper bodies naked. They lie awake looking at the egg in the dark, in the flickering light from the fire’s licking flames.
Sometimes one of them wakes up while the other continues to sleep, and only when the first one falls asleep does the other wake. Without knowing it, they push the same nightmare back and forth between each other: one where the egg has rolled too close to the fire and been hardboiled.
It’s light again. The hiking continues, through thickets and over tree stumps, further into the Southern waves of hills and marshes. But the forest is gradually disappearing from the surroundings, as if the egg radiated a new light replacing everything happening around it. The girls walk through brush-wood and rain, over fences and down slopes, but the colours of the landscape are being rubbed out; first the brightest colours, then the softer shades, until it looks like we’re in a pencil sketch or a written-in notebook. Finally the lines fade and are washed white, and we move blindly along the margin, hesitant, as though we’re snow-blind after staring at the egg’s shell too long.
There are no shapes left in the picture anymore. Trees and hills aren’t visible. Nature has been transformed into vague memories of nature. Only VENKE and TERESE are visible, and only barely; we see them as a baby perceives contours or bold shapes, like a tongue that moves under the skin in the jaw. The egg is perceived only dimly and as a negative, as what’s held in the girl’s folded arms. VENKE is seen clenching white-knuckled hands around nothing, or maybe the egg, but TERESE’s hands, too, cling to something, hold something over her chest.
Then the sound of the walking and of the forest fades out, we no longer hear the girls breathe or sniff, talk or shout. We no longer hear twigs snap, or shoes squishing on moss, or birds singing or insects buzzing. Maybe it happened gradually: the sounds became more and more electric and manipulated and now the birds and the bumblebees and VENKE and TERESE have been replaced by synthetic effects and algorithms, or maybe someone abruptly switched off the sound.
Perhaps we’re on our way through a portal, where everything is toned down and rubbed out, cleansed, restarted.
The only sound left is the sound of my voice. This sound is everything, it comes from all directions at the same time, as if the mouth that speaks is around us, as if
