Chapter One
That's One Legendary Find, Bro
Trigger warning: Death, dead bodies, self harm/mutilation, bugs, general gore, body horror
Author’s note: This is the first chapter of the Frankenstein retelling that I’ve been working on. Just wanted to share something of it lol. Hope to have it actually published and in a paperback book format either late 2026 or early 2027, but it is what it is for now :)
They don’t know my secrets. They don’t know how I got this body I’m in. This chiseled chest isn’t my own, just one of the many skeletons of my closet. The parts of other people that I found in the graveyard are now pieces of myself. They are all parts of decaying men. I know that when their bodies are no longer of use, thrown away like garbage, I give them a new life and a new meaning.
I remember that the graveyard felt like a blessing in disguise. Something that is mine, and mine alone to enjoy. The bodies that are buried here have long been forgotten. No one wanders by anymore, no one is left alive to grieve. No one remembers them, and what a perfectly lovely tragedy that is for me. Either way, I only come in the dead of night, when not even the graveyard keeper will be around to notice me. I already know that they have no security system here. And why would they, when the dead do not rise from their graves? You would be surprised how many of them are already missing, already gone before I’ve had the chance to take them. I know I am not the only one doing this. The same body I saw today is gone tomorrow.
The rain is no longer beating down on me, but the ground is still wet. The mud squishes, and the dirt easily gives way to my shovel. The graveyard is a fucked up mud pie. One large loose hole, walls caving in on itself, a continuous grave, where nothing ends up being fully buried until enough new bodies are piled up on top to cover up the rotting ones. The bodies are almost unidentifiable, small bits of bone, limbs jutting out at odd angles, rocks and dirt. It’s a lot of smaller pieces of a person rather than the complete whole. I see a pair of arms raised high, as though reaching for me. I cannot make my way to them, and so they continue to stand at the center of the wreckage waiting for me. Other items inside the mass grave catch my eye: old tattered clothing, shoes, glasses, a used condom, a high heel, a string of pearls, a mallet, a flashlight, a camera, a hook, and a classic pride flag. This looks just as much junkyard as it does graveyard, but it’s the only place we have. There’s something beautiful about seeing all the memorabilia that their loved ones might have thrown into the hole in an effort to cope. It almost feels as though the dead never truly die, living on in this space where everyone is remembered and forgotten at the same time.
Despite the beauty of the grave site, there is evidently not enough space for our dead here. It is hard to tell where one body stops and another starts. They all go into the melting point, into the mass, molding the bodies together, one atop another, always throwing in more, mixing together a type of corpse soup. The ugliest and most conspicuous types of mass graves are the ones that get over filled. There is something more than rot, more than disease here, although I can’t put it into words for you.
Digging down, the further I go, the more the smell hits my nose. They should have buried them deeper, deep enough that no one could reach them.
“Victor.” He calls out to me. I can see his body, now in full view.
Dashing over to him, like a scene from a rom com movie, I wrap myself up in his arms. I feel more manly than I ever have before. I lay my head against his chest and pretend that he is my man. I don’t know if I love it or hate it. I continue to hold him against me, before holding him out, at arms length, to get a better view. He’s got dark brown hair, a hooked nose and the smoothest skin I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s like a piece of art. There is something terrifyingly beautiful about him that I just can’t put my finger on. I drag him back outside of the hole and lay him down on a small patch of grass while I dig through my bag for a roll of plastic wrap. I wouldn’t want him to get dirty.
There is a connection between us now. I feel it deeply as his pale blue eyes look up to meet mine. I imagine this body becoming like a mentor to me. He is teaching me what it means to be a man, and I’m a quick learner. He is whispering the secrets of masculinity into my ears. He is giving me the power to change. Maybe it’s the ghostly powers of my mother, buried somewhere in this very same mass grave. Perhaps she’s intervening from the afterlife to give me the gift of transformation. Perhaps the only gift she’s ever given me. I feel a divine connection to my own queerness, my own transness. I feel powerful within it, this ability to change myself. I have the ability to completely reinvent myself and the ability to change myself back again. I become fluid in my gender, switching in between and in or out of these different parts. Nothing is ever fixed. Nothing is ever normal about the experience and no matter how many times I may pray to some god to make me normal again, it never happens. I was given a gift— to delight in the act of creation.
I pack the man up, what’s left of him anyway. He’s almost too rotten to be useful to me and I know I can’t keep him with me for long. I do my best to mask the smell of him by vigorously spraying him with shitty men’s cologne, stolen from what once used to be a department store. This is significantly less suspicious than the smell of rotting meat, although you can definitely smell both from a mile away.
Leaving the graveyard is hard every time. I feel as though there is some more buried treasure there that I’m leaving behind. The gym bag I’ve stuffed the body into doesn’t look as inconspicuous as I would have liked, but it’ll have to do. The bag drags through the wet mud as I exit the graveyard. The walk back to my apartment stretches on ahead of me. It’s dark out already, and the night cloaks me. There’s no one around to see me, apart from a pair of raccoons wrestling over food scraps in the bush. The building is a couple blocks away and I let out a sigh of relief when it finally comes into view.
I’m told there’s something wrong with it, although I don’t quite know what. The building’s been mostly abandoned for a little over four months at this point. Old neighbours are nowhere in sight. I don’t see anyone poking their head out or walking around the hallways, but I haven’t gone looking. Several windows are broken (including the window to my own apartment), and there are cracks along the walls, but the dull, grey building stands tall. It’s funny, almost, the state of disrepair it’s in. The poor thing’s more of a wreck than I am.
I walk around to the back of the building and toss the body through the already broken window before following suit, carefully avoiding the glass shards. Home sweet home. It might not be pretty, but it’s as good a place to live as any other. The apartment is littered with bugs and maggots. They like to swarm around what used to be the sink, warping over one another over and over again, twisting and turning their bodies. They move as though they are all one thing together, melding into the mass. Sometimes, at night, I can feel them nibble on me too, trying to break through my stitches and crawl their way under my skin. I am a very good source of nutrients, I suppose. Keeping things clean is at the bottom of my list of priorities. Though, I like to pretend that it is clean. I like to pretend that this is a mansion, and that somehow, someday, I’ll walk in and everything will be magically clean and everything will be better. I would get better too, even though I never seem to. The thing I need most is some kind of professional help, an exterminator to come in and rid the apartment of all the little pests that are festering inside of it. Secretly, I’m scared that I might get swept away too, that some part of me would go missing in the cleanup process.
It’s time to transverse the mess: used needles (who would have thought that you could do HRT DIY style now), leftover take-out boxes, paper plates, bandages, mostly covered in yellowish pus, papers, various notebooks from my university days, and stacks of old textbooks. I step past it all, pushing my way through to the bathroom, dragging the body along with me.
When I open the bathroom door, she’s still there. She’s lying in the tub, which I’ve packed with ice to keep her cold. I like to pretend that this keeps her fresh, but I know it’s been too long since she died. The bugs that litter the apartment will get through to her soon. Her arm falls along the side of the white porcelain. She is beautiful, angelic even, but rest assured, she’s no angel. The edges of her white sun dress run ragged, revealing scraped-up knees. She has wild black hair, so matted that, even if she were still alive, you could tell that it hadn’t been brushed in over a decade. The shit she used to box-dye it stains the inside of the bathtub in dark gray splotches.
She does not talk softly, or whisper her secrets to me as the man from the graveyard did. Instead, she screams at the top of her lungs at an angry pitch, so loud that I can’t for the life of me make out what it means.The type of woman who would eat you alive as a form of twisted revenge. She’s girlish, but only in the most vile of ways. She’s the type of girl to curb stomp you, then tell you she did it out of love. Spoiler alert: she’s lying.
I hang the man out to dry like a shirt from the laundry pile. I tie him up by the arms to the railing that holds up the shower curtain, mud and water dripping down his body from the rain. Maybe I’ll wear him next. Maybe I’ll mix and match the bodies for a good blend of both. A body is an outfit I can take off and put on again. I’ve created a kind of medical miracle out of myself and now I need to keep up with it. When my favourite parts begin to rot and fall off, I’ve got to go to the graveyard to find a new one. I’m a gender performance perfectionist and this only feeds into the obsession.
I look at myself in the mirror and see that I’ve become Frankenstein’s monster. I am swollen, ugly, and bursting at the seams. But I already have new arms, new legs, new everything. My right leg is slightly shorter, and my left arm is slightly hairier. I know I can still take it off and make myself better. I’ve been torn apart and sewn together more times than I can count. My fingers trace over the surgery scars. I’ve realized what I am a long time ago: unnatural, disgusting, perverted, and far less than human. That’s the way they see us. Just take a look at my blood-curdling body, all a work of truly hair raising medical magic, you couldn’t even begin to imagine my ghoulish genitalia. Yes, there are oh, so many reasons to fear the queers.
But it is nothing. I am nothing. I need more than a makeover, I need a complete transformation. No matter how many times I change and rearrange my body, it’s never enough. It never works out the way I envisioned it. It’s an ugly, half-finished, sloppily stitched up thing, a continuous project I’m never completely satisfied with. Maybe this is more of a performance art piece or a science experiment. Avant-garde, experimental, or both?
Sometimes, it’s about more than just gender. Sometimes there are parts of myself that I need to remove for no sensible reason at all. Sometimes I just need to cut it all up. I used to imagine myself taking a butcher’s knife and simply hacking away, discarding everything that doesn’t fit. Now, I don’t have to imagine anymore.