THE BLEED

It starts when somebody watches one all the way through. Not a player, necessarily. Anybody.

The film has an ending. It has always had an ending — it's printed on the front of the box, the way titles were in 1987, when the box had thirty seconds to sell you something and didn't waste them being clever. What it doesn't have is a cast, or a location, or a reason. It gets those from wherever it happens to be.

At first it only takes what's already there. A girl who fits. A house that's close enough. Then it starts altering things to suit — a road that didn't go anywhere now goes somewhere, a man who was a mechanic has always been a caretaker. Then it makes things that were never there at all, and everybody remembers them being there.

And when it needs something gone, it cuts. That's the part nobody survives intact. A person is trimmed out of the edit and the town closes over the gap — her mother has a son, the yearbook has a different face, the grave has a different name and the lichen agrees.

You remember her because you were in the room when it was shot. That's what being in the credits means. Crew see the trims.

Every cut leaves a mark. A glass full in one shot and empty in the next. Two photographs that can't both be right. That's what you're looking for, and it's the only kind of evidence the film can't take off you, because it's made of what the film did.

The film will finish. It always finishes.

What you get to decide is what's in it.