Content Warning: gore, death, nudity, sex
“Paging Doctor Frankenstein,” Elizabeth said, unbuckling her belt. “I need your electric love.”
She posed on the operating table—her chin propped in one hand as she draped on her side, skin flush with the cold metal. She shivered.
After a moment of jingling keys, the door clicked open. “Thank you for waiting. I was tied up with another patient.” Doctor Frankenstein rolled black, rubber gloves over scabbed rope burns circling his wrists.
“How are you feeling?” He sat under the white bulb that hung from a wire. It was the only light in the small, rheumy space.
Elizabeth didn’t know if the blur was from the dust and film gathered on the bulb or her cloudy vision. Doctor Frankenstein’s ex-assistant had had cataracts before he died. Of natural causes, of course.
Elizabeth sat up on the table and her jean skirt bunched around her thighs. “Tip-top. The new knee is working wonders.” The joint cracked when she stretched her leg. “You’d said the previous owner was a ballerina. How did you know that? Did you go to one of her performances?”
“Say, ‘ah’.” He forced a thermometer under her bumpy tongue. He’d apologized for the pustules when he’d first sewed it in her mouth. The tongue was from a woman who battled smoking and lung cancer her whole life. She lost.
Elizabeth puckered her lips, holding the thermometer in place. Her eyes wandered to the bubbling tank by the doorway where her flabby eel floated on top of the muddy water. She would need to ask The Doctor for a new one before the check-up was over.
The Doctor checked the reading. “You’re a popsicle.” He checked it again. “More freezer than flesh.”
“You could warm me up. Burnin’ love, as the poets say.” She trailed her small, purple fingers down his lab coat. “Find out what flavor I am.”
“Tempting,” he said. He picked a hammer off the wall from an array of toothy saws and fat syringes. “Let’s test your reflexes. See that new knee in action.” The shiny steel was wiped so clean Elizabeth could see her reflection: her forehead swept back, distorted in the long claw. Her mouth, with Paris Kiss N.4 smeared over blue lips, bulged in the hammer’s face when she smiled. She batted her thick eyelashes and blew a kiss.
The Doctor knocked the hammer against the tendon below her kneecap. Her leg didn’t jump. The third time he hit it, she faked it.
Elizabeth twisted around, but The Doctor’s back blocked her from seeing what he scribbled in his journal.
“I heard the—” She bit her tongue; she could not say monster. “I heard the child got a new eyeball,” she said.
The Doctor kept writing, his back to her.
“I heard it was a good one.” Elizabeth popped the top button of her blouse. “From a teenager. Dead not two days.” She undid another.
He still wouldn’t look at her. She gripped the edge of the operating table, the sharp corner bit her palm. She didn’t bleed, but an electric spark zapped the table.
“Oh, Victor,” she said. “Vicky, baby.”
He closed the booklet and took the stethoscope off the wall.
When he was close enough, she straddled her legs around him. He yanked her blouse down and his warm fingers pressed the end of the stethoscope on the patchwork skin over her heart. She intertwined their fingers and guided his hand lower. Maybe the eyeballs she’d gotten were shit, but he’d always given her the best chest in the morgue. “I want that other eyeball.”
He sighed and took the stethoscope buds out of his ears. “You can’t have it.”
She squeezed her too-small fingers around one of his fresh ones. “And why not?”
“Our child needed them.”
Elizabeth let go of his hand before she squeezed it too tight. “It only needed one new eye. Its other one was fine.”
“She wanted them to match. Isn’t that sweet?” He put the stethoscope back in his ears. “Quiet. I need to listen to your heart.”
Elizabeth closed her mouth and worked her jaw to find a comfortable position; her teeth poked out of her gums like broken fingers from a palm. She took a deep breath and held it in her good lung.
The Doctor listened for a long time, his head bowed and eyes hooded. She scratched at the scabbed skin surrounding the metal bolt in her temple.
At last, he wrapped the stethoscope around his hand and hung it back on the wall.
“Did my heart do well?”
The Doctor’s back was to her again, communing with his records.
“How’s my heart?”
He flipped a page.
Her voice rose when she said, “Do you still wear your wedding ring? Under those stupid gloves?”
His pen stilled. “You don’t wear yours.”
“Because it wouldn’t fit these child’s fingers you stapled to my hands.” She clenched her tiny fists.
“Your arthritis was back.” The Doctor cramped his hand around the pen as he finished his notes. “You needed new fingers and I obliged.”
Elizabeth rebuttoned her blouse. She pulled her skirt back over her thighs. “What about when you needed new toes? You dug up three graves before you found the best ones.”
His back was still toward her. “You’re dying.”
Elizabeth laughed. “I’ve been dying for two centuries.”
He rolled his gloves off his sweaty skin. No ring. “There’s nothing more I can do for you. You go through body parts like that.” He snapped. “I can’t keep up. You’re too weak.”
“I just need a little more electricity. One good dose.” She put her hand over her slow heart. “Maybe a new heart too.”
“It won’t be enough. This isn’t up for debate.” He turned around and stared from eyes that weren’t his into eyes that weren’t hers. “You’re dying.”
Elizabeth bit her torn lip and sucked some of the wasted lipstick off. Through her blurry vision, she watched a fly bump against the dirty wall. Its buzz cut off with each attempted escape.
“So is that fly. So are you,” she said.
The Doctor loosened the band of his goggles. “You’re dying quicker.”
“You sure?” She grabbed a scalpel.
He didn’t break eye contact as he drew it from her hand. The fingers he’d given her were too short and stubby, from a child who’d gotten a little too lost. Because they fitted so poorly, the wiring from the skin to her brain wasn’t hooked up right. The currents fizzed or shocked the wrong neurons, the wrong receptors—stitch her thumb, bite her cheek.
The blade slit a small hole in The Doctor’s own stolen finger. While Elizabeth knew he wouldn’t bleed—only a soft buzz of white electricity sparked from the wound—but she still found herself disappointed when it didn’t gush.
“Give me one more shot. A new heart. The best you have. I don’t care if you have to cut it out of your monster’s chest—” She stopped herself before she finished that sentence: “or if you have to rip it out of your own.” Elizabeth would have stood up, but she knew her knee couldn’t bear it. “I know this last year your monster went through three hearts. You went through five.”
“That’s enough.” The Doctor dropped the scalpel and it clanged against the metal table.
Elizabeth bared her brown teeth. “You give me damaged parts yet it’s my fault I’m broken.”
There was a moment of near silence, the only sound in the room was The Doctor’s ragged breath. “You don’t want your heart?” he asked finally.
“No.”
His lab coat swished as he walked out of the room and locked the door.
Elizabeth looked at the dead eel. “It’s just you and me.”
The dead eel swayed in the bubbling tank.
The door cracked open, and The Doctor held a vat. A fresh, pink glob of heart muscle bobbed in the liquid.
Elizabeth’s breath caught. “It’s beautiful.”
“Take off your shirt.”
The scalpel he picked up still had a bit of his tissue caught on the blade. Elizabeth smiled.
She threw her shirt on the metal-paneled floor and lay down on the icy table.
The Doctor stared down at her, scalpel unmoving in his hand. Elizabeth couldn’t shake the sense this was the first time, in a long time, he really looked at her.
She searched his face. Something inside her, something he couldn’t saw off, teased the idea of touching his cheek and calling him Victor. At least one last time. He was finally giving her something useful, after all.
But his eyes didn’t meet hers. Maybe, he was transfixed on the nipples of some unlucky twenty-year-old because they couldn’t look back.
He wasn’t looking at her, at all, was he? These breasts weren’t hers. Hell, neither were her elbows.
She shut her eyes. Her body was not her own.
It wasn’t hers when she batted someone else’s eyelashes and fucked that thing the man she’d married turned into. All she got in exchange was a flash of warmth and half-dead organs.
It wasn’t hers the first time The Doctor had locked her door. Twenty (or was it thirty?) years ago, she’d made a joke that insinuated something a little too true, and voilà, her freedom to roam this rock vanished.
It wasn’t even hers, two centuries ago, when she’d recited scripted vows at age twelve. The obligatory ceremony, with The Doctor’s father officiating and hers uninvited, had taken place at their town’s church: a small, wooden structure held together by bolts and prayer.
When Elizabeth and The Doctor—well, Victor, as he was to her then—had wandered their way back to England a century ago, Elizabeth had wanted to visit that church, but neither could remember its name. “Saint Something or Other” was the best Victor could do. Elizabeth swore the word “chapel” was in it somewhere.
They had spent hours driving back and forth through the countryside, arguing over the map, and swerving sheep, until they had given up and gone to the pub.
There, a young man with white hair and dark sunspots, laughed into his mug when Victor told him of their problem.
Victor’s eyes looked like gasoline waiting for a match when he asked, “What the hell is so hilarious?”
That church had collapsed to rubble fifty years before. Local legend blamed a fire.
Elizabeth picked up the bottle of absinthe from the table and poured more into her glass, a simple equation forming in her mind: bolts and prayer, huh? She was there. The church was not. Well, then. Belief wasn’t made to last.
She hadn’t known why she’d wanted to go back to the church. Each glass of absinthe had made it less and less clear.
Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty—and she’s got a hundred years of it. She’d wanted to see the place that had changed her life. She stared infinity in the eye, daring it to blink, but she could never go back in time. She could never grab the girl she used to be by the shoulders and show her what she becomes.
When this new heart was sewed up, she would go back. Maybe she would kiss the wild grass and pretend it was the exact spot she’d stood. Maybe it would send some comfort back to that child who slipped a wedding band on a stranger’s finger.
She would have to get The Doctor to stop locking the door. She would have to put on a hell of a show. The kind they sell tickets for. Expect—his voice. It had been so flat and detached when he’d asked her if she wanted her heart. She’d confronted him and told him she’d never accept broken parts again. She looked at her useless hands and decided she would never accept any parts again. She would wear out this new heart until she was the one who broke it. After that, she would rather die than come back here. Which, as it turned out, was her only other option.
Change was in the air. Along with the deep musk of rotten eel.
Maybe that’s why he’d taken an extra eyeful. Maybe he knew this was the end too.
Something sharp stabbed her. She opened her eyes and stared down at her raw chest. The Doctor stuck another pin through her peeled-back flesh to hold it open. He was careful to avoid the strikes of electricity that buzzed inside her in replace of blood.
He tweezed out splinters of her cracked ribs.
He wasn’t wearing gloves when he grasped her heart. Her back arched as he pulled. He ripped it out of its cavity with an easy tug and she smacked back down against the steel.
Her old heart splat on the floor when The Doctor dropped it. He wiped his hands on his lab smock while he turned away.
“Where are you going?” Elizabeth choked out. Without a heart, the electricity zapping inside her wouldn’t keep her alive for long.
“Your eel is dead,” he said. “You’ll need a fresh jolt of electricity after I attach the new heart.”
He didn’t lock the door.
She collapsed back on the operating table, heartless and smiling.
Elizabeth wanted to see her new heart, so she looked at the bench. The Doctor had set the fresh, glowing heart right there.
The vat was gone.
She tried to push herself up with her hands, but they were useless. The tiny thumb snapped.
He’d taken her hearts—her first, her latest, and her child’s.
“Why isn’t she crying anymore?” Elizabeth had begged her doctor. She hadn’t slept in the twenty hours of delivery. “Is she asleep?”
Victor had been rocking her, humming a lullaby, when she’d died. He didn’t let go of her body for three days. When dawn broke on the fourth day, he laid her in the crib she never used. At the time, Elizabeth hadn’t known what he’d meant when he’d whispered, “I’ll bring you back.”
He locked himself locked in his laboratory. Quitting all his projects, he dumped out his barrels of frog and cat viscera. He started leaving in the middle of the night, only to return covered in dirt with a shovel slung over his shoulder.
Elizabeth did not ask about the suitcase he dragged behind him.
With all the time he devoted to his lab, it became a rare occurrence for Elizabeth to wake up with him next to her. But one day, when she opened her eyes, he was sitting on the edge of the bed.
Tears slicked his cheeks, but he smiled. “I did it.”
Elizabeth threw up on the sheets when he gently unwrapped the bundle he held in his arms to reveal a patchwork of human body parts—an eyeball not large enough for the gaping, pink socket; two left arms, one swollen to twice the width of the other; a long, red scare across its chest.
“Our child lives.” He took Elizabeth’s hand and forced it on the thing’s chest. “Feel that? I used her heart.”
Elizabeth felt one stuttering beat under her palm before the thing bit her finger.
That was not her child.
In his grief, Elizabeth thought Victor had fooled himself. But he never fooled her. She saw it for what it was: a monster.
On the operating table, Elizabeth opened her eyes when the door hinges whined. A small head poked through.
The monster hoisted itself on the table next to her.
She thought of using the last of her strength to grab the scalpel and lunge for the monster’s throat. But it was running its fingers through her thick hair. Only once or twice did it pull too hard.
Elizabeth couldn’t create life. That’s why she laid her head back down. She didn’t want her last act to be destroying it.
When the electric pulses slithered away, and she couldn’t feel the monster, all she felt was cold.
Oh. This room must be a morgue.
Even if she didn’t know it, she had stepped in here two centuries ago when she walked under the wooden archway of that goddamn church. The new heart was supposed to be another beginning.
She wasn’t sure if she actually clutched her hand inside the space her heart left or if she just imagined it. She would be buried without a heart—just like her child.
The last thing she saw was the door.
The monster had left it open.