Grounded

Death: Concluding Wind Eggs’ six-week Life Cycle series

There is no mistake more embarrassing than premature celebration

DOCTOR VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN, PH.D. AND M.D. from the world renowned University of Vienna, paused to embrace his upcoming moment of triumph. The moment when he and he alone had created life. Not some white-bearded fantasy in peasant religion, but a real, flesh-and-blood scientist, that scientist being Victor Frankenstein.

He’d lined one wall with his library, a library of books on alchemyand science dating back to Hermes Trismegistus—Paracelsus, Nicholas Flamel, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Albus Dumbeldore—some of them so old the leather had almost entirely flaked away. He’d lined the opposite wall with specimen jars. Eyeballs, ears, hands, scientist brains, criminal brains, philosopher’s brains.

This was the moment when Victor Frankenstein and Frankenstein alone had created life. Not some white-bearded fantasy in peasant religion, but a real, flesh-and-blood scientist.

But the heart of his laboratory was the lightning rod, twenty-feet in diameter and extending from the floor, through the roof, and a hundred yards into the sky. Power cables ran from the rod’s base to the terminals implanted in his creature’s neck, his spine, his hips. Outside? A thunderstorm so loud that the entire valley quaked hurled lightning bolts the size of meteors through the sky.