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His small fingers fumbled with the needle he held in hand, slick with his work's discharge. He'd chosen a long needle with a wide eye fit for thick and sturdy thread, black as pitch against the delicate feathers he bravely defiled.
Other boys his age were surely working in shops and fields and schools, good boys with ruddy cheeks and smiling faces and crosses round their necks, but not him. He sat in his backyard, sewing scissors lying in the red flecked grass and soil, the sullied metal blades patiently awaiting use as he did his best to clumsily sew the two specimens he'd collected together.
He'd gathered them himself. Freshly shot, from the looks of the small bleeding wounds in their head and chest respectively. Too small to eat. Left to rot. Abandoned… free for the taking. He took the least damaged parts of each, and with a knife his mother used for cutting meat, he halved them. Separated skulls from hollow bones, wings from eyes and beaks.
Primed them for his experiment.
It was hard, he found. The flesh was tough and stubborn, the feathers thick and cumbersome to work through and around. His stitches weren't nearly as neat and uniform as he could have hoped, but he did his best, and that was enough. This was only a first attempt, after all.
These were preliminary tests, just to get a feel for it. A taste of what the real thing may look like. If he botched this, it was only an opportunity to learn, to see what worked and what could be improved as he gets older. He was young. He could do this again and again until he got it right.
So what if his specimens made his hands all sticky and red? So what if it stained his clothes and soaked the dirt?
He was doing science.
He was unveiling the world's most coveted secrets of life, mortality, and the human drive to know, to discover, to create. It wasn't supposed to be pretty. It wasn't even supposed to be good. It was supposed to be raw and yet godlike, divine reinvention of the physical world.
The specimen’s head is too big and wide to be sewn neatly on the neck of the other, more slender specimen, but Henry does his best to line them up as best he can, make as his stitches as parallel as he can manage through the feathers, trying not to rip the already delicate skin. If he pulls too hard, it tears apart, but he doesn't despair; he only redoes the stitch a little further away from the edge, pulls it gentler and stops if it gets caught instead of pulling impatiently.
Slowly, he creates a new bird of two others.
His first experiment is complete.
Grisly. Messy. Odd. New. Something he's never seen before, and may not have ever seen otherwise.
He was so proud.
He’d created something strange of the everyday.
Something unfamiliar from the ordinary.
Just like Dr. Frankenstein.
He wanted to be a scientist. He’d make a good one, he just knew it.
His mother is aggressive as she wipes his hands clean of the blood.
His experiment was abandoned outside, left hidden away in the garden to decompose, disposing of the evidence of his supposed crime.
His mother says what he did was shameful.
‘Perverse’. ‘Disgusting’. ‘Dirty’.
He didn’t understand.
Was that not the point? To do what others dare not for the sake of their stomachs, for the fear of their mortal souls, for the betterment of mankind?
She looked so cross with him, scrubbing his hands clean when he’d gone to such lengths to dirty them. He opened his mouth to protest, to know why she disdained his endeavors so.
“What is wrong with you?”
He decided not to show her his next experiment.
Or his next. No.
He wouldn’t show anyone.
He learned that not everyone thought about Frankenstein the way he did. Few people did.
It’s alright.
He wouldn’t show them either.
They’d see eventually… but not yet.
For now, he’d work quietly. Play along. Do things good boys do, smile and laugh and forget how his fingers itched to once more take up a needle and thread and feel the warmth of life drip from his hands.
His mother would smile, praise him, and forget what a truly strange child she’d raised.
Until he looked in the mirror and couldn’t tell where his mask ended and he truly began.
He’d be a good scientist.