Miss Cadaver Excerpt #1

This is the opening to the novel I’m currently drafting. It’s called Miss Cadaver, though I don’t think my resurrected corpse uses “Cadaver” as her last name. I haven’t decided on a name for her yet. The naming of people, places, and things stalls my writing progress more than it probably should. Anyway, this is a modern-day Frankenstein story about what it means to be human. I hope you enjoy it!

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I remember in vivid detail the second time I was born, although it took months for me to regain the words to describe the sensations. The air in Darryl’s makeshift laboratory, which had once been a barn, smelled of the fresh spring rain falling outside, soaking the decayed leaves and petunias from the previous year, as if the rain could bring them back to life. The stiff, white sheet scratched against my skin as I lay supine on the operating table, with tubes and wires attached to all the places necessary to jumpstart the long-dead heart and brain back into service. My mouth was dry and tasted of soil, not that I had ever been interred, I later learned. This body of mine had been a cadaver at the medical school, which was how Darryl came into possession of it, though he could never possess it the way I have.

Lydia, for all the help she would be to me, warned me that I was nothing without this body.

I screamed the first time I saw my reflection. The day after Darryl brought me back to life, the first thing Lydia did once she was alone with me was to show me exactly what kind of creature I was. I had spent the night on a twin bed in the basement of their house. I hadn’t thought of trying to go anywhere until I heard Lydia unlock the basement door in the morning, and I realized I’d been trapped down there, locked up like a wild creature. She led me to the bathroom mirror, muttering something about wanting to see what humanity, if any, I had in me. In those early days, most of what she said around me was to herself, as I could not yet speak.

The damage from the autopsy was not subtle. Thick black stitches ran along my hairline and around the top of my head where my skull had been sawed off. The skin puckered between each stitch and stretched over the small pieces of hardware keeping my skull in place.

Lydia unwrapped my shroud to show me the huge Y-incision down my torso. Months later, she pulled out a textbook to explain what they had done to me at the medical school, how my body had been cut open, my blood drained, and my organs removed and examined.

“There must be something in you yet that knows it isn’t right for you to be alive,” she said, though I hadn’t learned enough to understand what she could have meant by that.

She helped me get dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans and gave me a cup of tea to steady my nerves.

“I don’t know how much you understand, but I feel it’s my duty to teach you everything I can. I knew what he was planning, but I didn’t think he could pull it off. Now I’m as guilty as he is. Depriving the dead of their peace is almost as despicable as killing.”