Flash Fiction Friday - The Post-Modern Prometheus

There was nothing more I could do for her. I had tried everything, but still I cursed the fates as I sat, listless, before her corpse, slowly decaying, cold and dead. Then I remembered the musty book I had seen in the library, rushed to it, pulling it open, searching, searching... and found my heart's desire. New life surged through me, as it would through her...

They called me mad! Mad? I am saner than the soberest man. I shall have her back, I swear it by the God that has forsaken me! Mad?

And now her flesh was warm to my touch, and I waited, breathless, for her eyes to open, to greet me with a smile...

No. No movement. The warmth was merely the heat of decomposition. The stench was terrible. The incantation was a failure. I threw the book from me in disgust, knocked over the candles, obliterated the pentacle, then sank, spent, into the armchair.

I sat there, cock softening, wondering if I could get in a quick one before she completely went to mush. Mad? She charged $250 an hour and I'll be damned if I don't get my money's worth.

I held my breath and made do.

---

Yeah.  If I haven't mentioned it, I'm drained.  This could have been funnier or more interesting or more sexy or all three, but it is what it is.  I confess a lack of motivation based on the picture alone.

And now, some random thoughts: Frankenstein is the doctor.  His monster is usually called Frankenstein by the uninitiated, but the monster has no name, and is certainly not Frankenstein.  The subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus, hence my titular reference.  Everyone remembers Prometheus as the guy who is chained to the rock and has his liver pecked out by eagles every day (that is, if people remember him at all), but that was because he gave fire to man in violation of the gods' will.  Some legends equate fire with life; others say that Zeus (the king of the gods, in case you missed Clash of the Titans) also withheld the means of life from humanity.  This was all premised on some other legends where Greek gods prove just how capricious and jerky they were.  Thus, Frankenstein, the eponymous doctor, is a modern Prometheus because he violates God's will and gives life to a corpse.  It's not a perfect analogy, but then what is.

Interestingly, in retribution for the theft of fire, Zeus sent Pandora to live with man, and she had her box (everyone knows about Pandora's box, right?) with everything bad in it, and thus one could draw a comparison between fire causing great sorrow and defiance of death causing great sorrow as well.  That Pandora had a "box" rather than, say, something less suggestive, has led unenlightened commentators to suppose that the vagina is the root of all evil.  But fuck them.

I figure that, if someone came up with the means of creating life and they were a man, they'd make a woman first because who wouldn't want to create the perfect sex toy?  Okay, many people wouldn't, but the people who would go to the trouble to come up with the mechanism to create life might.  Or maybe not.  But there are some people who would really like a living RealDoll.

Frankenstein is also often supposed to have either used technology or magic, but in reality, he's something of a Renaissance man; he discovers clues in the past but uses the technology of the present.  It's not an indictment of technology, but rather of knowledge.  But then it's not really about that either; it's all about bad parenting.  Babies are pretty disgusting when they come out, and if we rejected them because of it, they'd probably grow up to be maladjusted serial killers too.  So, be good parents or else your little monster will wind up destroying everything you hold dear and then going off into the Arctic.

It's also always assumed that the monster is horrible to look at, misshapen, ugly, etc.  I think the uncanny valley provides a much better reason why Frankenstein's monster turned out ugly; it's close to human, but not quite.  It's horrible to look at because it reflects the horror in ourselves, because its life isn't quite real, because it reminds us of what we've done.  And yet, the monster is more human than his father, in many ways.

In conclusion, don't blame the monster.  He's a person too, with faults and features, and if he'd just been raised a bit better, if Frankenstein had taken responsibility for his actions, who knows what might have happened?

That was all much more interesting than my piece this week because my piece this week was about having sex with a stinky prostitute corpse because you can't bring it back to life.  Yeah.  Yummy.  How can you stand to be left out of Flash Fiction Friday, that can inspire such greatness?  You should read Frankenstein too, if you haven't already.