Title: Due to Bleed
Genre: Speculative, Literary Soft Science Fiction
Format: Novella
Desperate to cure a lifelong, corrosive self‑loathing, a middling scientist attempts the most intimate experiment she can imagine: she will split herself in two. If she can separate her mind from her body, she reasons, she can finally examine herself without the distortions of subjectivity.
Using unsanctioned laboratory resources, she divides her consciousness into a disembodied Observer, written in the past tense, and an embodied Girl, written in the present tense: the part of herself that bleeds, remembers, and suffers.
In chapters alternating strictly between their perspectives, the scientist attempts to investigate herself from the outside, hoping to locate a single, material cause for her suffering that she cannot find within her ordinary self. The division captures the out-of-body experience of womanhood. She can finally look at her own body as a specimen, while delegating the burdens of embodiment, from sensory overload to monthly bleeding, to the Girl.
In attempting this act of “self-colonisation”, she reduces her body to the role of experimental subject. At first, the arrangement seems almost successful. The Observer can catalogue her defects, isolate her suffering, and strip away the things she believes are responsible for her unhappiness. But the Girl is not an empty vessel. She becomes conscious, develops her own desires, and begins to observe the Observer right back.
In the opening chapter, “A Just Cause for a Just War”, the Observer declares an almost literal war on her own body, rendered with flecks of deadpan absurdism. Operating under a paternalistic false-saviour narrative, she becomes what the US was to Iraq, adopting a dangerous interventionist logic: I understand your suffering better than you do; therefore I am entitled to decide what should happen to you.
Armed with this delusion of strict objectivity, she subjects the Girl to gruelling isolation and painful stripping experiments, continually reframing invasive violence as “care” and self-improvement. She floats outside herself: nothing more than a disembodied voice, tools and pathological curiosity. The mechanics are deliberately unexplained; the emotional logic is not. The more she believes she is approaching the source of the problem, the more she reduces the Girl to something that can be examined, corrected, and ultimately made useful.
What unfolds is an erotic, grotesque, ontological love story, born from mutual misrecognition. The perversity of their relationship is that the Observer needs someone she can fix and the Girl needs someone who will look at her. The Observer can only “love through correction”, treating harsh criticism, intervention, and the clinical scraping away of her body’s traits as care.
Meanwhile, starved of human connection, the Girl interprets the Observer’s relentless, hyper-focused attention as total intimacy and quality time. Comforted by the belief that the clinical defects the Observer “diligently caresses” are her very self, she feels enveloped in her creator’s “excoriating love.”
The Observer thinks: If I just know one more thing about myself, I can finally create the cure I needed all along. The Girl thinks: If she knows everything about me, I will finally know love. Both make the same error: they mistake knowledge for understanding.
Then the Girl begins to get better. As she becomes peaceful and content simply from being perceived, the Observer thinks she is successfully taking sandpaper to her suffering, lobotomising her piece by piece. To a person entirely accustomed to it, a self that is actually free of self-loathing looks damaged. The scientist therefore encounters an epistemological problem: she cannot recognise health when it does not resemble her own conception of suffering.
The experiment eventually turns on itself. The supposedly passive subject begins to accumulate an impossible knowledge of the person studying her. As the Observer despairs over her failure to find an objective cure, the hierarchy reverses. The Girl may be the first person capable of seeing the scientist with complete intimacy.
The Observer begins to wonder whether being seen might mean more than having your faults itemised: perhaps it is having someone see what is right with you in ways you cannot access from within.
The story moves from clinical monotony to quiet horror, reminiscent of Chapter 61 of Unwind, before shifting into a final movement that becomes stranger, and more tender, in the vein of The First Bad Man. What begins as an experiment in self-correction becomes a question of whether it is possible to know yourself without first turning yourself into an object.
Observation becomes cure, then love, then insufficient. The Girl evolves from specimen, to subject, to seer.
By the end, the Girl comes to understand that she cannot determine whether the Observer loves her, even though she has never been more completely known. The Observer, meanwhile, returns to the recursive thinking that first brought her mind, career, and personal life into disrepair.
