What happens first: she survives. She climbs out of the rubble, leaving two corpses behind: a human who helped create her, and the Monster who tried to murder her, the Monster who showed the human lovers mercy but said that she belonged dead. The Monster, sometimes known as Frankenstein’s monster, also known as her husband.
But the Bride was never a bride at all. The Bride was never his.
The world is confusing and frightening and infuriating. The Bride walks it in secret, learning what she can along the way. A few things she learns:
A. A dead woman is more acceptable than a dead man, so long as she is beautiful.
And the Bride is beautiful, it seems—if she doesn’t open her mouth. She learns this from a Christian farmer, who’s the first to take her in, who is eager to help her and teach her and train her to properly walk and dress and speak. But the Bride is all sharp instinctual twitches, and likes her hair the way it is. The Bride’s voice is clicks and chirps and screams, not meant for human speech. Her voice is the creak of old forgotten doors. Her voice is the hiss of snakes.
A pity, such a pity, the farmer says, when he realizes he cannot remake her. The pity, apparently, is her face. Such a beauty, such a waste. He should kill her, but how can he? It would too badly hurt his kindly heart. The only way to help her, he says, is to secretly lock her away, to feed her and pray with her and teach her the natural order of things. This is how the farmer defines mercy.
The Bride, not merciful, crushes the farmer’s throat with one hand and leaves his body on the doorstep for his young wife to find. She should know the kind of man she married: not a friend, never a friend.
B. There are too many mad scientists in the world, all quick to create for the sake of creation—and just as quick to abandon those creations and any consequences they might incur.
No matter where the Bride goes, a mad scientist will always find her somehow, eager to question her, study her, dissect her, replicate her. She doesn’t kill all of them. Some are charming, in their own strange way. Some are gentle. Some don’t touch. But the ones that promise her a companion—a partner, a husband—the ones who assume a person you create is somehow yours to give…
Yes. The Bride does kill these mad scientists, and then learns what she can from their viscera and bones.
C. The living are considered more deserving of life if they’re in love and are loved in return.
This lesson eludes the Bride for a long time as she tries to stay hidden, keeping as best she can to the forgotten roads and the deepest, darkest corners of the forest. No one can find her out here—except the occasional mad scientist, of course. No one will judge her pitiful or monstrous. No one will sentence her to imprisonment or execution.
Does she deserve such things? She can’t see how, but then the Bride knows so very little of herself. She’s heard her story only in bits and pieces, while traveling under cover of night—and even then, it’s not her story, not really. The story belongs to everyone but her: to the Monster, who some have strangely come to pity, to the Doctor, who reluctantly pieced the Bride together to save his own fiancée. How tragic it would’ve been, they say, if the Doctor had died that night with his creations? Not because he was blameless (he wasn’t) or because he was particularly well-liked (mad scientists, as a rule, seem better at building friends than making them), but because he would’ve left his beloved behind, and what a devastating fate that would have been. Because the fiancée’s life isn’t as meaningful without the Doctor, somehow. Because two young lovers deserve happiness—more, it seems, than two young people living their lives alone.
This doesn’t make any sense to the Bride, who cares very much about her own life, despite being beloved by no one and having no desire or love to give. She’s surprised to learn, too, about those who pity the Monster, even though his face is far more frightening than hers. This contradicts that very first lesson, that one must be beautiful to be considered worth saving, that one can’t survive being both ugly and strange.
And yet people do feel sorry for the Monster because he’d been so very lonely—or so the stories say. He’d been all alone in the world, rejected by everyone, even by the dead woman created especially for him. Terrible, so terrible, the people say. Better to die than to live like that.
The Monster must have thought the same. This is why he wanted death, and wanted the Bride to die with him. This is why the Doctor was allowed to live, because his life was deemed worth living. It surprises her. It angers her. It’s maddening—surely, the Doctor should have done something to prove that he’d earned survival? Instead, he had merely felt something, and this somehow meant he was inherently good.
The Bride had felt something, too, of course, but not what the Monster had wanted her to feel. She’d never been given a chance to feel anything else. She’d had no time to decide her own nature. The Bride had barely even understood what it meant, to be dead, to be alive, before the Monster tried to rip that life from her. But she survived anyway. She climbed free—
Only to live like this, hidden away, imprisoning herself.
This isn’t what she wants. She isn’t sure what she wants, but it isn’t this. Some claim on this world, perhaps. Visibility. To know herself. But how can she ever know herself like this? Why should she live this way for them?
The Bride doesn’t want to hide anymore, she decides. She is done with the shadows, the forgotten corners of the world. She will go…somewhere, anywhere, anywhere she wishes.
The Bride will, for the first time, walk openly in the sun.
It takes time, longer than she’d like. But slowly, people learn that the Bride did not die after all, that she has no intention of going quietly, that her story is incomplete.
Slowly, very slowly, they begin to call the Bride a different name. It’s not entirely accurate, this name, but it’s one she vastly prefers.
Here are the things the Widow learns as she openly walks the world:
A. Lots of people, so many people, are deathly afraid of her.
It’s not always enough, being beautiful. Not enough to be pitied, either—even the humans who consider the Monster tragic are still grateful that he’s dead. Sympathy is best left for the epilogue, when it’s too late to make better choices, to change. The living don’t want to be challenged. They want their dead to stay silent and out of sight.
The Widow will not accommodate these wishes. She did not ask to be assembled, sewn together, resurrected—but regardless, here she is. She will not stay hidden to keep humans comfortable. She won’t pretend to be one of them just to ease their tiny, terrorized hearts.
But neither can she hurt them for the sin of being afraid.
The Widow was born afraid. Waking up in a dark room that she didn’t recognize, in a body she didn’t recognize, with unfamiliar men who explained nothing, who kept staring at her, who kept touching her. With the Monster caressing her hand, calling her friend, expecting something from the Widow that she didn’t understand but also didn’t want to give. The Widow had been very afraid, then, and had very nearly been killed for it.
She is a monster, but not the Monster. So, when someone screams at the sight of her—and it does happen frequently—when someone comes across her, turns, and runs away, she lets those people go. No one should be followed when they chose to retreat. No one should be chased, pursued, hunted.
Unless they hunted her first, of course. Unless they gathered into a mob and came with torches and pitchforks, unless they met her outside town and arrogantly chose to attack. If they say she deserves death just because she’s been dead before, well, then she’ll have to reply with sibilance and blood.
Sometimes, there are too many humans to handle. They win, sometimes. She’s overcome.
But she always manages to survive, in the end. And always, she returns.
B. The Widow will never learn who she is—or rather, who she once was.
Her arms and legs don’t quite match up. Her beautiful face once belonged to a different body. She is one woman now, but she used to be several—or perhaps she’s not a person at all. Perhaps she is a lonely prison cell, and all the women she’s wearing are trapped inside her.
They don’t speak to her, the women. There are no half-forgotten memories, no words or dreams. The Widow can’t know their histories, so for the first time—for the last time—she seeks out the Doctor.
She finds him in the ground. He died young anyway, it seems, buried on a pretty little hill, silent and out of sight. A woman sits beside his grave, the beloved, presumably. Her eyes are large. Her breath comes quickly. She’s frightened but chooses not to run.
The woman names herself Elizabeth, and the Widow—after many sharp, exasperated gestures—manages to get across what she’s looking for, who. But Elizabeth is no mad scientist, and has no idea where the Widow’s limbs and organs belong, and it’s unlikely her husband would’ve remembered, either, even if he’d been alive to tell. He’d never spoken of the stolen corpses as people. They were only a necessary evil, construction materials. Stone and mortar and squish. He’d cared about things like bone density, physical deformities, the shape and size and normality of brains. Otherwise, the dead were of no use to him. Why would he want to know their stories; why would he stop to collect their names?
Elizabeth, the Widow sees, has learned exactly what kind of man she married.
But she remains a dutiful widow: visiting her husband, mourning him. Likely she still loves him, even if she clearly disapproves of the things he’s done. Elizabeth is very tense now, trembling slightly, lips pinched into a thin, pale line. She thinks the Widow is about to kill her, and she’s not fighting back, but neither is she resigned.
Elizabeth does not want to join her husband yet. Her life alone has meaning to her.
The Widow bares her teeth in frustration, turns abruptly, and leaves her alive.
There is nothing else to do: no people to question, no leads to chase. Some mysteries, it seems, cannot be solved: all the women the Widow was made from are dead silent, and forever will remain silent and dead. The Widow cannot know their wishes. She’ll never know their stories, their names. She can only hope they’re not screaming inside her.
She can only thank them, and move on.
C. The Widow isn’t the only one with a habit of resurrection.
The Monster finds the Widow one winter night in her cabin just outside of town. It’s been her home for some time now, the locals too afraid—thus far—to do anything about it. She’d hoped to stay here awhile yet, but that’s the trouble with refusing to hide: anyone looking will easily find you, including people you thought long dead.
The Monster looks much the same as the Widow remembers: gargantuan, melancholy, hideous. He looks as pitiful as the stories say.
She doesn’t pity him.
He doesn’t try to stroke her hand this time. Instead, he steps inside, shuts the cabin door behind him, and says, “I see you walk this world again.”
The Widow cocks her head and makes a caw like a half-choked raven. My, how your vocabulary has grown, she’s saying, but he’s never understood her, of course.
The Monster says, “This world. It doesn’t belong to us. We are always ugly, always alone. We belong in the ground. We deserve the ground.”
He says, “Do not return again.”
This is what the Monster wants, what the world wants. This is their idea of mercy.
But the Widow rejects the definition.
If she could speak, the Widow might tell him: The truth is, I like being alone. She might say, They made me for you, but that never made me yours. She might ask, Who dares decide what we deserve? I’ll choose where I belong.
She might say, You can have the ground, my love. I’d like to walk this world a while yet.
The Widow doesn’t speak, and the Monster steps toward her, ominous, lumbering. Steps with purpose.
But these are predictable steps, ones that—this time—she is prepared to meet.
The Widow kicks over a can of gasoline, lights a match. Hisses her dissent.
What happens next: she survives. The Widow of Frankenstein will always survive, for as many times as it takes for her name to reflect the truth. She’ll outlast the Monster. Withstand him. Resist him. Defy him. The Monster will have the ground, and the Widow will have everything above it, everything beyond it.
She’ll walk this earth, live in it. Make noise, take up space. She’ll kill when the occasion calls for it, and be no one’s bride, no one’s prisoner. The Widow will grow and unfold. She’ll caw and croak and crackle. The Widow will discover her own story—and challenge the whole terrified, trembling world to listen.
Originally published in Classic Monsters Unleashed, edited by James Aquilone.
