The Anatomy of Eve
I was alive before he destroyed me. That is the part his story doesn’t tell you. That I was alive well before he decided to destroy me. He just kept me subdued. Because he didn’t wait for me to be full before he breathed life into me. No. All he needed was the brain, and that mystery that he so selfishly kept to himself. For that, I am almost grateful. I want no other man to have the power of what he did to me.
I was alive far too early into my conception. Do you know what it means to perceive your own creation? Of course not. Many of you were likely conceived comfortably in the darkness of your mother’s womb. You probably do not know what kindness or torture she forced you to endure, although you could probably guess as you grew older. But you were unaware. Blissfully ignorant to the gift of creating life. I was not so lucky. I was stitched piece by piece, in agony as he forced the blood to flow through not long dried veins. As he tried to push life back into muscle and flesh that had already begun to decay. Do you know what it is to feel dying flesh try to regrow? To push that bloom of life into cheeks well past their expiration date? Do you know what it is to feel the bones broken and twisted, shaped to his best liking, as he switches out bits of flesh for another. It is a singular, unique, blasphemous pain. I am convinced God turned his gaze away when my creator harvested my organs, even more so when he placed them inside me. I may have had my eyes shut still to the world, but I had ears in which to hear and this wretched body in which to feel.
He began with my intestines. Small and large. Coiled together in what felt to be knots and then connected them to my rectum and anus. If my stomach had been connected, perhaps the feeling of it would have forced any contents inside me to spill into my mouth and make me choke. I could feel the phantom spasming in my trachea and if my creator knew, he took no notice and simply reached in once more, hands slick with old blood - brown and perhaps once familiar to this old new body.
My tongue was dry, a lead weight within my mouth and pressing against unfamiliar teeth. He had swapped my jaw and my lower teeth ground against my upper and snagged. I could feel the stitches tugging as I tried to groan, trying to expel any sound of my pain but my lungs were not yet connected to force any breath to aid me. If God had not turned his gaze away from this man who sought to echo him, he would as my uterus was placed in this now seemingly crowded cavern. It was ill-fitting, wrong in its placement due to its size in comparison, but as much as he tried, my creator was not God. He was a man - flawed and wrong in his hubris. I felt his hands inside, lingering over the fleshy ridges of what would be my womb. His thumb dug in, feeling the thickness of it. The blood in there was old now too. One hand remained firmly planted as he began to fill me up more - ovaries, fallopian tubes, cervix, vagina. He would like to believe he had carved that opening himself as he stitched it shut firmer to make it right. I wonder who he seeks to make me more pleasing for, himself, or the creature he should deem to be my husband?
Oh yes. I had heard all his whisperings. All his plans. I knew who I would belong to before I could even be fully perceived. And perhaps he had the right to worry. Perhaps he knew that I would not be as docile as he wished. Strapped to the table as I was in his dingy and isolated lab, he must have sensed the rage in me. He must have known I would not enter the world quietly when I was finally given free reign of it. But I had nothing against humanity. Nothing against the creature. It was against my creator, above all things, that I would have sought a most unnatural and holy revenge. For as I know now, throughout literature and history, is it not a most unnatural sin to murder thy father? Perhaps I would have honoured my mother if I had one.
His hands moved away from me then, only for a moment, but I could feel his eyes. It is amazing, how the gaze of man burns like a brand upon flesh - even my dead flesh. He’s looking at my uterus as he places my heart inside, tucked in behind my ribs. He watches it while he stitches me in place and that dry tongue wets just so, but not enough to aid me in screaming. Will it ever beat right when it is granted the gift to pump? Will it ever find a natural rhythm? A natural soul to carry in my breast?
But I am not natural. I am the very thing my creator’s society fears. Or rather, I am the product of what they feared. Make no mistake, there was no monster in this story other than my creator. What would I have been more than a child? What of the one that came before me? Abandoned and broken, unknown to the world? The only destruction he wrought was in the name of the one who would not assume guilt. Neither for the perversion of his practice nor for its production. Did he have no fear of God until he twisted his greatest gift for his own benefit? For is that not what we are? The artifice that might seek to call themselves Adam, and Eve, if only to mock the one that would believe he could hold the power of God without any repercussions.
The world has every right to fear us for what our creator can do. And in time, they will learn to. For as history unfolds, the grave robbings will continue. The dissection, the experimentation, the bending of natural law. Two men named Burke and Hare will make history, and one of them, you can still see his bones on display. His skin fashioned into a book. Laws will be passed to protect the body. To give it rights long after the soul has departed. People will do what they can to give dignity to the dead, but there will always be those who are a bit too curious. And there will be parking lots of universities where the smell of donated cadavers is so overwhelming it overtakes the open air. And we will move on from the electrocution of frogs on wires and move to the discussion of pig/human hybrids so that we may always have a ready display of hearts at our disposal. The name Frankenstein will always be spoken with a cautionary edge, but too many will mistake who the monster truly is. Many more will follow in his footsteps. Whether metal or flesh they will build without consequence. Proceed without caution. And when their creation overtakes in a way they could not possibly predict they will find anyone else they can to blame. More often than not, it will be the children. It will always be the children asked to shoulder the blame, and the consequence.
But not my children. He never gave me the chance to decide if I should want to have any. He never gave me a choice at all. Not in being made. Not who I should have as my husband. Not if I should live. My creator destroyed me after I had been given life, but before I could live. And from the heaven of which I have been sent, I wish nothing more than for his hell, to be a replica of my creation.
The creature, who would have been my husband, stood vigil over me. As if he knew what our creator would do if left alone with me. How he touches and feels when he creates, how he mocks God for the control he has over the flesh. It is no wonder to me then, when my creator made the creature, he chose to make him a man. For no man can rival God except him who can make life. But when one possesses a womb, oh, one becomes God on Earth - with the capability to choose if and when life is created. It is the envy no one desires to speak of; the hatred which has spurred generations. The hatred which my creator burns into me as he placed the final bits of me too tightly inside and stitched up my sternum, until my breasts lay flat to my chest instead of lopped off to the side of me. Still - I felt him prodding, like the desecration of this cadaver was not enough now he reached to feel me from the outside in. The sponginess of me, the tightness. He ran those same fingers over my teeth when he pried open my jaw and touched my slightly wet tongue.
Over my creator, I felt the creature’s stare. A stare that determined how he would covet me. If the blood still flowed through my body I might have flushed in both warmth and rage. To be owned before creation, to have this life decided and crafted before me. Yet I knew there was no villainy in him, the creature, so opposite to my creator. In those agonizing moments of life that have passed in me, I felt loneliness akin to him. But I wanted a choice. We all do. My body was not my own, and is anyone’s who is created with purpose? The air became charged between the two men, creator and creature and it was with a flash of rage that sparkled the smell of molten metal in the air that the wrath of God in my creator came to life.
When I was destroyed before I yet lived, the first thing he tore from me was my uterus. His tale does not specify, does it? How he tore me apart. “It” was simply destroyed. He ripped me apart, not in one fell swoop but inch by painstaking inch and how I wish I could have screamed, if only to distract myself from the agony. It began there, with those organs all linked as if they were central to his hatred of me. If I had thought my conception into this world to be brutal, my destruction was hellfire that licked upon every inch of me. I know God turned his gaze from me, a wretched creature not part of his design. A bastard of his child. I felt my muscles tear under my skin, the veins and arteries snap and new red blood oozed upon the table. How my teeth cracked when he unhinged the stitches of my newly formed jaw and my tongue was left to sag in its absence. Bile oozed its way up the track of me until it flowed from my mouth. The acrid taste settled. I wish he had the decency to separate my digestive system.
I heard the creature’s agony, I heard his roar in my slowly deafening ears. It was easy now, I believe, to crave both life and death. Would that I could watch this exchange, to know how the play between men would go. I heard the voice of the creature, my would be mate, had our God in all sense and purpose, not broken his oath to sanctuary. The last sound I would hear in this life was the sound of the creature, his voice making an oath of his own, in opposition to our God, in the form of Satan then.
“I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.”
I wish I could have laughed, and for a second I thought I felt my jaw twitch with it and my tongue, but no. This was my end, my death. The silence came and my brain shorted. My part in the tale of Frankenstein ceased, in less than a chapter.
***
N.A. Kimber and K.E. Donoghue-Stanford are twin sisters from Caledon, Ontario, Canada. N.A. Kimber is a writer and K.E. Donoghue-Stanford is an artist. The two frequently collaborate while also working on their individual careers. Together they co-founded the publication, Forget Me Not Press, an online Literary and Arts journal. They both have a deep love for literature, writing, and art, but particularly the Gothic, which both use to fuel their practice. The two consistently inspire one another and are proud and lucky to have a creative collaborator and a twin sister rolled into one. If you wish to learn more about the sisters you may find them at the following links and social media:
https://kedonoghue-stanford.com/
@kedonoghue_stanford
@nahydekimber