don't sweat the small stuff

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

Victor stood, dumbfounded, over his creation. Long veins lashed together, sinew chosen for its girth or durability, fresh from the charnel floor. He could scarcely believe it was his own. He felt no pride.
The floor was pitch black beneath the table, a long shadow hanging over days of feverish work he couldn't now recall. It felt tacky as his weight shifted from foot to foot, clutching at his shoes; they, like the floor, would never be the same.
He knew that now, but he could have saved himself a little time if he'd known it a few days ago.
What to do with this chimera?
Man is matter, but matter is not a man; there is nothing supernatural about it. The spirit gone, a great deal of changes take place, and they cannot be reversed.
What remained of the tatters of beasts he had scraped together? He brought the lamp closer to look at his handiwork, unable to discern either how he had gone about it, nor how it had gone so wrong. Even now the theory seemed absurd yet sound. So what that galvanic energy didn't exist per se, nevertheless there had been this fleeting set of weeks where he was certain there was some notion to be rehabilitated from it. Yet here he stood, a carotid attached by his miraculous efforts not to the heart, but to the femoral. Somehow it was all one mass, all one thing, but not the thing he had tried to create.
Perhaps worst of all, the heart had, for one brief moment, beat. Inconsistently, to be sure, a most grotesque tachycardia he could not have imagined before this night; a violent, desperate motion in the dim light of the moon through the upper windows, gone almost as soon as he could bring a candle to bear upon it. The heart had nearly torn itself asunder, beating into itself.
It cannot be reasonably said that he created life. What lay before him had moved, but at best it had briefly metabolized.

Why was it so? Every hair on its head was numbered, so it is said, even such as the beasts slaughtered for the evening meal. How much less a sparrow? How much more a man? If the sparrow can fall, and be no less noticed, the sparrow surely can rise; everything was in its place, whether the eternal hand turned every gear or simply the one. Why, then, should it not turn backward, but instead turn... some other way entirely? How to describe what he had seen? Limb grew to trunk, the pieces became a whole, yet the whole was an even greater abomination than he had first feared, not merely loathsome but also meaningless.

That must be it. The creation was without meaning. Yet when he stepped back in to start anew, perhaps after some sleep, he was struck again by the tacky floor.
Not even red in the lamplight, it still yawned black, soaked through, smooth and dull. Why couldn't blood simply be blood? Surely it would smell horrid enough in time, though had he run the currents through the floor, perhaps he could have slowed the process for a time. But if the arteries didn't grasp each other in any meaningful way, what would happen were he to accidentally apply this method to the floor?

If a sparrow cannot unfall, a tree can do no better. The unholy union of the two would be all the worse.

So it was that the house was burned. When he looked back on the matter he could think of it no other way; it had not been he who had crafted the monster, such as it was, its brief convulsions dying and taking with it his first mania and his pride, nor was it he who had, perhaps in a fright he could not now recall, lit the curtains with the lamp and fled. Had it been him, would he have helped put out the flames along with the others who had awakened to the house already aglow? He was incapable of such gross dishonesty. He was a good man, a mildly wayward student who had grown up on foolish dreams of Aristotle, Aquinas and Abelard.
In the years to come, though, he would remember staring at the house's charred shell, always afraid that something would crawl from the glowing cinders, gesturing to him with one misshapen, unreal limb, the fingers hanging limply or grown back into the hand but for one which was pointed at him, its father. He had, for a brief moment, turned back the clock on what was, in truth, an amazing machine, yet he could only remember that, when the clock was turned back, its gears had flown apart, its balance spring annihilated in a single violent, arrhythmic lurch.

A better man might have learned something from the experience. Victor was only ever glad it was over.