Borrowed Flesh

Ellis Wren

Retelling en 17791 words First published 2026 United States TalesReborn

Caleb North makes podcasts about people who disappear. One autumn, a dying man on a research vessel in the Bering Sea asked him to write it all down. The man was Elias Brandt, who at twenty-five built a living body from borrowed flesh in a hidden lab, then lost it, then watched it come back: his brother strangled, his best friend dead on an island dock, his bride dead in their wedding cabin. He chased it north. At the end of the ice he learned what it had always wanted, and what it meant to be the one who made it. This is his confession, ending with a question: which of them was the monster, and which was only the flesh that carried it.

Adapted from Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Published by TalesReborn.

Borrowed Flesh

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