For Jessica.
"Imagine this…" a shadow speaks. Its voice is hushed, swallowed by the darkness, leaving only a hint of an echo. Silence ensues. Had the inhabitants of the room dared to breathe, they would have found their breath caught in their throat. Waiting. Anticipating. Desperate.
"Imagine what?" the impatient tone that could only belong to a child, asks.
Laughter follows, deep and throaty and so old. The children groan. "Grandpa!" they whine. A familiar bedtime ritual. It always follows the same pattern. Except tonight. Tonight something is coming, something new, and something old, and something no-one is prepared to face.
Tonight there are lights on at the Frankenstein house, and a storm rampages through the sky. Lightning blazes across the blackness, blinking in and out of existence, like the lifespan of the human race. A mere blip on a radar. Thunder roars and rain pours and the fury of the Earth descends as it is prone to do, wishing to destroy what it mistook to make. But some mistakes are not so easy to erase, and come the morning, the sun will once again shine, the world anew and nothing changed. Except for up in the Frankenstein lands. Something new will be born tonight, and with the rise of the sun, so too shall it stir.
The old man turns back to his grandchildren, eager and irritable tutting drawing his attention away from the window.
He closes his eyes and inhales deeply, turning back to the window. With a voice soft and wary, he starts his story.
"Imagine this…"