skit #59: in prudence

Guided by her notorious grandfather's meticulous notes, Victoria constructed an artificial man in her mountaintop laboratory. She did away with the Tesla coils and the grandeur and the superstitions. She would not fail where he did.

She established a trade rate with a lonely mortician, and exchanged her gender's warm flesh for his profession's still meat: tight lips, obedient eyes, attentive ears, dimples, strong hands, a reproductive tract, a heart, a token noggin. She accumulated her ingredients from the mortician's garden, piece-by-piece, pound-by-pound.

To see the inner-workings of her man, she reasoned, he must be utterly transparent. She blanched the tissues of any melanin in a potassium permanganate bath before drying upon several clotheslines. There hung the future of her man, as blank as overexposed photographs, as clean as Sunday's linens. She assembled his diaphanous body with delicate expertise, making no mistakes, transcribing her grandfather's morbid schematics to the unto her invisible patient.

She knew the fate her grandfather met and so dared not allow her Creature to live freely. In prudence, she disengaged the nervous system after every experiment.

Candlelight illuminated the dust which settled on the Creature's skin. The patina implied the visage of a velveteen warthog. She dutifully dabbed rubbing alcohol over his entire body before experimentation, slowly erasing him, in hopes of subduing her disgust under the pretense of minimizing the chance of infection.

During examinations, she arranged a halo of candles around the Creature, whom she perched on a stool. She injected localized dyes to her area of interest, giving him substance only when and where she deemed necessary. She attached diodes to muscles and watched them seize. She introduced luminous fluids and watched them circulate. She pressed her fingertips into his diaphanous flesh to observe his vitals and viscera displace. She turned off his nerves.

She blew out the candles. The dyes faded, and so did her man. She had scribbled notes of how he behaved under ideal conditions. In old age, when she would review these notes from her youth, she found them to be either illegible or inane.

As a scientist, Victoria differed from her grandfather. Where he was reckless, she was compulsively diligent. She repeated her experiments hundreds of times to ensure he results were sound. Endlessly: she turned him on, his muscles contracted, his fluids pumped, she probed him, she turned him off. Every time he felt his heart beat or his finger twitch, he knew a little more of what it was to live.

She initiated experiment: ninth trial, fifteenth series, umpteenth cycle. She plunged her syringe into his thigh. But the Creature was not there, nor was he anywhere in her lab.