Living With What One Would Call Frankenstein's Monster

Chapter 1

His eyes were kind.
That is the first thing I remember about him.
Not the pallor of his skin, nor the peculiar color of his hair. Not the careful symmetry of his face, assembled with greater precision than either Victor or I had believed possible.
His eyes.
They were alive.
And perhaps that was our greatest sin.
The world would come to call him an abomination. Men of science would insist that he violated every law of nature. Men of God would claim that no soul could inhabit a body assembled by human hands that life given without God's blessing could only be an imitation of it.
They were wrong.
There were no crude stitches stretched across his face. No scars betrayed the places where one life ended and another began. Nothing about him announced the graveyards from which we had gathered the pieces of his body.
Had you passed him on the street, you would never have known.
You might even have thought him beautiful.
I did.
Long before he had a name, long before breath filled his lungs, I had seen him as Victor had first imagined him a hand resting lifelessly upon a laboratory table and a pair of eyes that could open and close but could not yet see.
He became more with every passing month.
A bone here. Tissue there. Another midnight excursion through a cemetery while Victor complained that the recently deceased had been terribly inconsiderate in the preservation of their bodies. Angry that they could rot in less time than it took to bury them.
Consistently digging up fresh grave after fresh grave.
We became selective.
Then obsessive.
Victor wanted perfection.
I suppose I did too.
That admission has haunted me longer than any ghost could.
We told ourselves there was a difference between murder and using what death had already discarded. We harmed no living person. We merely gathered what the dead no longer required and attempted to answer a question humanity had asked since it first learned to bury its own:
Where does life go when the body dies?
Victor believed we could call it back.
I believed him.
Then came the storm.
It had rolled across the country for days, blackening the afternoon sky and rattling windows in their frames. I had left Victor alone that evening with strict instructions that we would continue our work when I returned.
He did not wait.
Victor Frankenstein had never possessed much patience.
That... was his downfall.
By morning, Victor was dead.
And our creation was alive.
There are stories that should begin with the name of the monster.
This is not one of them.
It should begin with mine.
My name is Dr. Eliza Kessler. I am a physician and scholar of the paraphysical arts, with particular study devoted to mammalian life. It was through my work that I met Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant, charming and profoundly strange man whose ambitions frightened even those who loved him.
His wife never entirely understood him.
Perhaps neither did I.
They are both dead now.
Victor's death was the consequence of what we created together.
Yet I cannot bring myself to regret that creation.
Because Victor and I did not create a monster.
We created a child.
And in time, I gave that child a name.
Isaac.
Child of laughter.
An unusual name, perhaps, for something born among corpses.
But laughter was precisely what Victor Frankenstein and I brought into this world.
And God forgive me...
I loved him.