Carved

With a bit of pressure, the knife plunged into the thick flesh. Jessica turned the knife, forcing it to cut along the lines she had sketched onto the skin. This was her favorite part, the carving. She didn’t care much about clearing out the innards, too painstaking and messy. But the carving, that artistic act of mutilation, that was what she had waited all year for. As the cut lines intersected, the freed pieces of orange flesh fell into the hollowed interior with a thunk! With knife in hand, like an artist with her paintbrush, she stepped back from the table to admire her creation. The ghoulish face of her pumpkin grinned back at her.

“Ouch!” Aria cried. Her knife clanged as it dropped to the table, startling Jessica. Blood dribbled down her index finger.

“Babe! Be careful with the knife!” Jessica exclaimed, realizing she sounded just like her mother. Softening her tone, she quickly followed up, “are you okay?”

“Ughh…yeah, just a stupid cut. Look, I got blood all over my pumpkin.”

There was a smear of blood near the outlines she’d drawn for the pumpkin’s eye cutouts. Jessica’s mind spun with morbid ideas as Aria rummaged in the bathroom counter for a Band-Aid. She returned with a dampened paper towel.

“Wait, don’t wash it off!” Jessica pleaded, “it could look cool and creepy, like the eyes are bleeding! You should carve some X’s where the eyes were supposed to be.” She grinned, pleased with herself.

Aria looked at her, annoyed. “But I don’t want it to look creepy. I wanted it to be a funny face.”

Jesscia rolled her eyes. “Uh, babe, its Halloweeeeen, things are supposed to be creepy, not funny.”

The look of resignation on Aria’s face made Jessica feel a tinge of guilt. Things had been a bit off between them since Jessica had shared that she was having mixed feelings about their relationship. Her therapist had recommended it, and she did feel a bit of relief after the reveal. But she was annoyed by how Aria had responded, acquiescing to her more, being less of the fiercely independent and stubborn rebel she had fallen for.

“Look, babe, I’m sorry, you don’t have to–”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll do it…”

---

Jessica admired the spooky light show on her apartment patio. In the dark, the pumpkins glowed from the candle within, the light flickering in the fall breeze.

“Alright, I’ve got a creepy video for us to watch!” Jessica said giddily as Aria joined her on the couch.

“What about a more light-hearted classic, like Hocus Pocus or The Nightmare Before Christmas?” Aria countered.

“Babe…its Halloweeeeen! We need to watch something scary and gory, not that kiddie crap.”

Again, Aria relented. Guilt and annoyance sparred inside Jessica while she searched for the website on her laptop. “Ah, here it is!” she exclaimed, setting the laptop on the coffee table and leaning back. A black webpage showed on the screen, with a single red, sideways arrow for the play function.

“What is this again?” Aria asked, her voice laced with concern.

“It’s supposed to be the most disturbing video ever made!” Jessica explained excitedly. “An A.I. was trained on the grossest bits of a bunch of media and spit out this video. People on reddit are literally going crazy over it.”

“I really don’t want to watch this…”

Annoyance bubbled over into anger for Jessica. She knew exactly what to say to make Aria cave in.

“Babe, I think it’s important that we do things like this together. You know, shared trauma is a way to build relational intimacy, and, like, this isn’t serious trauma, but it’s something intense that we can share the experience of together.” She felt controlling, manipulative, as she said the words, but she brushed off the feeling.

Jessica turned off the lights before plopping back down on the couch and pressing play.

The screen stayed black at first. Barely audible murmuring-like sounds began, and Jessica cranked the volume up. The sounds slowly built into shrieks and screams that sounded almost human. Images flashed and quickly cut away. Swirling and undulating masses of flesh and blood, bulging eyes, some vaguely human but others more animal. Then longer glimpses, of what looked like bones bulging under skin, then breaking and tearing through the surface. Blood and puss bursting out until the colors morphed into other mangled body parts, the cycle repeating over and over. Disturbingly amorphous bodies twisted and pulled apart with wailing sounds of suffering. Then the screen was blank.

Jessica sat dazed, the images still swirling through her head. She looked at the video progress bar. An hour had gone by! She had thought it was only a few minutes!

“Wow…that was…weird…not scary,” Jessica lied, relaxing her tensed shoulders. “What did you…” She turned towards Aria, who was hunched over, hands around her face, sobbing.

“Oh, babe! It was just a video…are…are you okay?”

Aria trembled as she pulled her hands away. Her face was red, mascara smeared from streaming tears, and snot oozed from her nose and slid down around her lips.

“No, I’m not okay! That was so…” She trembled as she sputtered with the words, “…so fucked up! I can’t believe you made me watch that!” She gasped, struggling to calm herself.

Jessica leaned towards her to try and comfort her, but she pushed her away.

---

Lying in bed that night, Jessica wrestled with guilt from what had transpired earlier, as a slideshow of images played across her mind, the pumpkins, the knife, the repulsive hallucinatory images in the video. How could she have known Aria would react so strongly, she thought. It’s just a stupid AI video.

Next to her, Aria stayed curled up in a fetal position. She had gone straight to bed after the video. As far as Jessica could tell, she hadn’t stopped sobbing since then, either.

---

A full bladder woke Jessica in the middle of the night. She groggily sat up and flicked on the bedside lamp. Yawning, she turned and saw Aria sitting upright, starting ahead.

“Jesus, Aria? What are you doing up?”

Aria continued to stare ahead, unblinking. “Do you hear that?” She mumbled, softly.

Jessica stood silent for a moment, listening. All she could hear was the hum of her white noise app. “Hear what?”

“The sounds, from the video, I can hear them…”

---

“Aria?” Jessica looked at her, annoyed. Aria was sitting silently next to her on the couch, staring off again.

“Aria?” She repeated.

Jessica had stopped using ‘Babe’, unconsciously at first, then deliberately as she tried to put emotional distance between them. They were eating takeout and watching some horrible new dating reality show. She was, at least. Aria’s food sat untouched on the coffee table. Aria kept staring ahead, not at the TV, but through it, her gaze fixed on something beyond the room.

“Aria!” Jessica said, raising his voice. “Babe!” she finally yelled. Aria slowly turned her head towards her. Her eyes were glassy and bloodshot.

“Wha…what?” She mumbled.

“What’s…er, I mean, are you okay?” she asked, changing her question midway as she caught her harsh tone.

“Oh, ah yeah…sorry I’m…just tired? I think I’m just…going to…” Her voice trailed off as she stood up and shuffled towards the bathroom.

Jessica knew that Aria was far from okay. In the two weeks since they’d watched the video, she had been a shell of her former self. As far as Jessica could tell, Aria wasn’t sleeping. She had called sick into work almost every day this week and would just lay on the bed or couch, staring off.

Jessica had wanted to break up with her, but she knew she’d feel guilty about it if she did it now. She had been waiting until Aria showed some signs of improvement, but she was getting frustrated at the lack of progress.

---

Jessica bolted upright, yanked from sleep by a shrieking sound.

“Did you hear–”, Jessica caught herself. She was still used to Aria being there, even though she had finally broken up with her weeks ago.

The room was pitch black. The streetlamp which usually cast its glow through the high bedroom window was dark. The wind howled outside. She blindly felt around on her nightstand for her phone. It wasn’t there. It was always there. What the hell, Jessica thought, before another shrieking sound sent shivers down her spine. It sounded like it was coming from the living room.

Jessica reached for the bat under her bed. She stood up uneasily and slowly crept barefoot across the cold hardwood floor, her hands squeezing the bat so hard that they ached. The thumping of her heart echoed loudly in her ears.

She opened the bedroom door with an agonizing squeak. Down the hallway, she could see the back wall of the living room, light dancing across it and outlining the silhouette of…someone.

“Aria?” she yelled, remembering that she had forgotten to ask for her spare key back.

More shrieking sounds, this time recognizable as being from the video. Jessica slinked down the hallway; bat cocked. When she could finally look around the corner and into the living room, she saw someone sitting on the couch, facing the laptop on the coffee table which was playing the video. The bright, flickering images made it hard to focus her sight in the dark. Finally, Jessica recognized Aria’s hair.

“Aria? Babe? What are you doing?”

“I’m watching our video, babe!” Aria’s voice was loud, unhinged. “Come sit down with me!”

“Jesus babe,” a wave of relief washed over Jessica. She lowered the bat and slowly walked around the couch. “Why are you watch–” She stopped when she spotted the pumpkin carving knife laying on the coffee table. Light from the screen illuminated the dark red liquid covering the blade.

“Aria…what’s–”

Aria’s face jerked towards her. Jessica shrieked and stumbled backwards.

 “Oh, oh god, Aria!”

Blood oozed from two x’s carved where her Aria’s eyes should have been.

“Don’t I look creepy babe?” Aria said, smiling. Her teeth were stained with the blood streaming from her mutilated eye sockets. “I fixed myself so I could watch the video!”

Jessica shakily stepped back, her legs wobbly from shock.

“Jesus fucking Christ Aria! I’ll…I’m going to get help, you need help!”

She turned to run but tripped over the dining room table chair. Her body flipped forward, her head cracking against the floor. Warm blood flowed from her split head and pooled around her face.

“Ar..Aria..” Jessica struggled to speak, her voice choking on the blood pooling around her mouth. As her consciousness slipped away, she heard Aria cackle.

“Don’t worry babe, it’s just a video!”