Frankenkids by Annie Graves

O f course, Frankenstein is an old story that’s been told to death. Movies. Books. Games. Mash-ups. Costumes. Cereal boxes. Music videos.
    It’s all fake anyway, right? But it was enough to get my uncle to try his hand at this Frankensteining business.

    See, Uncle Fraser was lonely. He was old. He had no one to leave his money to. And he lived in a big old falling-over-all-by-itself house, away from everyone else.
    If he hadn’t become a mad scientist on his own – people would have invented stories about him anyway.

    But that’s what he did. He went mad and tried to build himself … a friend.

    I didn’t know Uncle Fraser. My family wanted nothing to do with him after that time he tried to chew the tail off our dog, Mr Snookles.
    All I have as proof are the stories I’ve heard. The eyewitness accounts, the newspaper cuttings and the tales whispered by kids in playgrounds.
    Uncle Fraser started small, they say. (It’s what you do, scientifically speaking, when you’re becoming a mad scientist. You start small.)
    First you draw plans on paper napkins and roam the streets talking to yourself, smelling like you haven’t had a bath in years.
    Then you start telling passers-by.
    You might yell at an old lady at a bus stop. Or shake a kid outside a corner shop.
    It builds your reputation. Word travels fast, and once the world thinks you’re a mad scientist, well, the rest is easy.
    Uncle Fraser locked himself into his big house as soon as the complaints started.
    First it was the town officials asking him to leave the old ladies at bus stops alone.
    Then parents worried that shaking their precious children would dislodge a brain cell.
    And when the police started asking if he knew anything about dead family pets being dug up from their graves, it was time for Uncle Fraser to retire from public life.

    By now Uncle Fraser had collected a
freezer full of dead family pets:
    Dogs.
    Cats.
    Hamsters.
    Budgies.
    Snakes.
    Rabbits.
    Parrots.
    Weasels.
    Tortoises.
    Even a monkey.
    If I had to guess, the most fun part would be putting things together, inventing the combinations.
    Brain of a tortoise.
    Body of a hamster.
    Hind legs of a small dog.
    Front legs of a monkey.
    Maybe the tail of a snake.

    Trial and error would be the best way.
    Then there’d be all that cutting through flesh and sewing sinews. Cobbling muscle and bone together into working order.
    At first, nobody noticed anything.
    Then the town energy board began to record odd spikes in electricity.
    The police got reports of break-ins where the criminal hadn’t stolen anything but extension cables had been left plugged in …

    Of course it was Uncle Fraser trying to zap life into his budgie-cat-monkey-tortoise.
    Or his tortoise-hamster-dog-monkey-snake.
    Or his spider-parrot-weasel-rabbit.
    And that needed far more electricity than Uncle Fraser had in his own house.
    Thanks to those trusty extension cables with their mega-amount of electricity, and an awful lot of luck, Uncle Fraser managed it.

    Pamela was his first success.
    Part parrot, part cat, part monkey.
    The electricity coursed through Pamela’s body with different parts springing to life faster than others.
    Unknown to Uncle Fraser, that night was Hallowe’en.
    It was a local Hallowe’en tradition for kids to dare each other to visit the huge house with the crazy old man in it.
    And this Hallowe’en was no exception.
    As Uncle Fraser spewed electricity into the half-cat, half-monkey with parrot wings, the Landy brothers were creeping up the drive to the house.
    They jumped every time a flash lit up the overgrown garden around them.
    And then they laughed.
    And then they crept a little closer.

    The older brother, Derek, punched his younger brother’s arm and called him a nerd.
    â€˜Shut up,’ said Jake, the younger brother, moving closer to the house. He was clearly the braver of the two.
    â€˜Maybe this isn’t such a good