Frankenstein

There was an assistant during the blistering heat of it all. Some torture had filled the room and you stood beside me like marble and I only wanted to hear your hair grow and skin wrinkle and wither. The assistant passed up her tools for fingers and shoved her hand in its heart while it wailed, the creature. You watched in wonder as it shook and rolled, and I watched as you held a sick smile back. You asked me, “Is there anything louder?” without shifting your skull. 

I thought, ‘My heart, your sister, the sun, God, lust…’ but I thought better than to give myself away at such a time. Instead, I insisted, “Wine,” and your gaze finally found me. The assistant said nothing through her study of the body, all while the monster thrashed its limbs and spat at her, and I felt your breath on my stomach but really it was only the air upset by your coat. You walked out of the drowsy, humid room without tearing your eyes away from the scene and I followed you like the moon. The sun had risen half-way, and the blinding rays were louder even than the monster. As I followed you, my feet seemed to leave prints digging deeper into the ground with every step I took towards your car, which had taken on your scent and pink aura already. 

“It’s like a fire when you drive it,” you murmured towards the ground, and pulled the passenger door open. Some laughter escaped my lips in a desperate way—I had no idea what you meant by the warning, and some fear seeped out my pores. And God, how I trembled as you drew me inside; we swam in the dust and wet salt spray when you drove, and your eyes darted between my thigh and the boiling asphalt, and the car began to gain speed but I don’t think you noticed over the sound of my heartbeat. You drove for days and bit your fingernails, and there was a frightened voice in my head who reminded me of my experiment, finally. The assistant would have been exhausted by now, and my creature had to have been dead. Perhaps she had been stuck between calling out to me and trusting her shaky hands, between pouring sand down the wet cavity of his chest and sewing him back up. Maybe she had let him walk out of there with clean stitches, and maybe that made her better than me.