Copper Wires

.Her mother had been a quilter, before the rheumatoid arthritis twisted her hands. Maggie had grown up surrounded by patchwork pieces, cotton, silk, even velvet once, diamonds and squares and triangles. Quilting was an exact science. The ultimate creation belied the intricacies of the formula involved in the conception and construction. Measure twice, cut once. Cut more than once, and you'll have to go through the whole process again. It was a lot like quilting, really…

It used to be a spectator sport, the reanimation of corpses with the magic of electricity. 10p sir, to see the dead lady jump! It was miraculous then, and just a little bit of the sideshow. Condemned men, knowing that once they had been shaved and blessed, and hung until they were dead, would then be granted a kind of resurrection. A man in a top hat with a bunch of wires and a crude generator would peel back the skin, and make limbs dance, fingers gesticulate and faces smirk and grimace. Couldn't do much about the eyes though, always crusted and dry. Or the smell. These are things that the sawdust couldn't cover.

It felt like she was handling a snake, like those her daddy used to catch under their house in summer. The flesh beneath her grasp was cool, but not hard. Scaly, tensile, strong. She could feel clusters of tiny muscles bunching, contracting and relaxing just under the surface.

"Increase the wattage just a little," she murmured. Her hand complied, reaching for the dial, sending the slender needle edging just a little further up the meter. The muscles beneath skin the colour of dried sage shifted again, contracting longer before relaxing. Again the needle twitched a millimetre up the meter. One long finger moved, curled, extended, curled again, extended, was still.

"15.8. Perfect," she murmured, and patted the stilled limb with absentminded affection. She nodded at the man beside her.

"Ready for transplant."

She stepped out of the way as he hefted the limb, raw and still bloody at one end, and laid it carefully next to another one on a gleaming steel benchtop. The whole scene, she mused, looked like nothing so much as a Shelley inspired butcher's window. Gently, one fingertip on a lonely arm twitched as the remnants of an electrical impulse still circulated.

Mad science, she would have called it once. Charlatanism, ethically bankrupt, pure and simple. But this work that she did, this act of profane creation, this was real enough.

Although, in a strange kind of way, although I don't have a top hat, I still have the crowd and my back and a handful of copper wires… All my boys, all my pretty boys, all in a row, straight as toast soldiers – they aren't monsters either. They're beautiful. Like my sons, with a copper wire running from my grasp to each of them. Of course, only one of my boys was dead to start with, and he was dead many times over. But in the end, he shall live as well as any of them.