As he placed the last block, a hand entered the frame from the left. It wasn't a human hand. It was too long, with fingers that had an extra joint, casting a jagged shadow across the carpet. The boy didn't scream. He just looked up and whispered something.
It was a fixed-angle shot of a suburban living room from the late 90s. You could tell by the chunky CRT television in the corner and the olive-colored wallpaper. A young boy was sitting on the floor, playing with wooden blocks. He was completely silent. Every few seconds, he would look toward the camera—not at the lens, but behind it, as if someone were standing right where I was sitting. b1340.mp4
I looked up at the corner of my room. There was nothing there but shadows. But on my monitor, in that same corner, I could see the silhouette of something with too many joints, reaching down toward me. I haven't turned my computer back on since. As he placed the last block, a hand
I paused the video and zoomed in on his lips. He was saying a sequence of numbers: My heart stopped. That’s today’s date. The boy didn't scream
I found the file on a bloated, 128MB thumb drive I bought at a garage sale for a dollar. It was the only thing on there, nestled in a folder titled “DO_NOT_RECODE.”
At the five-minute mark, the audio changed. The hum vanished, replaced by the sound of someone breathing directly into a microphone. It was heavy and wet. The boy on the screen froze. He didn't turn around; he just slowly started to dismantle his tower of blocks, one by one.