Flash Fiction Fridays - June 2025
The Rat
Look, I know what I’m supposed to do. As a writer, my job is to convey subtle truths about the human experience through the medium of fiction—to surprise, but also to inform.
But sometimes I just want to do a silly one, okay!?
The Rat
Two hundred years ago, any half-decent necromancer could make a pretty good go of it. Find a little hamlet somewhere in the Carpathian foothills, keep the local priest supplied with his chosen vice, and the world was your abandoned kirkyard.
I’m not saying it was easy. Making your first homunculus is still a six-month job, minimum. Digging out a good-sized cellar is backbreaking work, especially in winter. Parts storage is, and probably always will be, a problem. But if you were willing to put in the work, and if you were savvy about avoiding undue attention, you could usually stitch together a golem or two before the mob caught wind of it and started buying up pitchforks.
Not so these days.
For one thing, everybody gets cremated now. Cats get cremated, for God’s sake. Goldfish, too, probably. There’s a small contingent of traditionalists who still enjoy the thought of spending eternity in an expensive box, but most of them are so old that it’s barely worth the trouble to dig them up. For those with the decency to die young, your choices aren’t much better. It’s usually some drunk twenty-two-year-old drifting across the line to meet an 18-wheeler at a combined speed of two thousand miles per hour, and good luck finding anything useable in that mess.
Gone are the days when Victor Frankenstein could stroll through his garden with a wheelbarrow full of “the mightiest sinews; the most gracefully sculpted jaw bones; the whitest teeth; bright, limpid eyes unclouded by age or disease.” And even if you could find parts, have fun adjusting for impurities. Silicon, botox, copper plates, titanium screws, microplastics. More often than not, you’re designing brand new formulae from scratch.
So no. It isn’t as easy as it used to be. But art imitates life, as they say, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from two centuries of grave robbing, it’s that life is all about compromise.
***
I got lucky with the jogger—I’ll be the first to admit it. He was one of those trail runner triathlete types: peak physical condition, well hydrated, et cetera. Good skin regimen, too, judging by the thick paste of mineral-based SPF 50 under his undyed cotton collar.
The fall severed his spinal cord, but if you can’t weld a neck back together, frankly, you don’t belong in this business. Best of all, he had Location Services turned off on his phone, and hikers go missing in these woods all the time.
Six weeks after they called off the search, I started checking the weather. It was late summer, but August was usually good for a thunderstorm or two. Sure enough, there was a big one this weekend, one of those God-fearing storms they talk about in the Bible. I gave the engine a once over, polished the conductors on the big pylons, and then brought a bottle of champagne down into the lab to celebrate.
I noticed the smell first. It wasn’t rot; I knew my alchemy too well for that. It was a bright, sour, animal smell that cut through the otherwise sterile air of the lab.
I rushed to the body and stared down in horror at the pile of dead rats clustered around its chest and ankles. They must have died from ingesting the preparatory reagents, that strange mix of poisons that engenders unlife. I brushed their bodies onto the floor and surveyed the damage. Far too much to repair in such a short time, and with no spare materials on hand.
Unless…
I worked quickly. The rats couldn’t have metabolized much of the poison, but I didn’t have time to run tests. I adjusted the ratios freehand, trusting to instinct and experience. The damage to the skeleton was minor, and anyway I had plenty of fine new bones to work with. The patches of rat fur gave the skin a mottled look, but you didn’t get into necromancy for the aesthetics. As a rule, we prefer function over form.
I managed to get the newly repaired body onto the table just as the first raindrops started to fall. Hours later, as the last peal of thunder rolled away toward the horizon, I leaned over my creation and listened for the first intake of breath, for the first sign of blasphemous unlife to cross its lips…
*squeak*
This was fun! I really love the idea that the necromancer is annoyed by all the modern treatments like botox and such.