Faivish the Imbecile – Robert Bagnall

Or good with plum sauce, I thought.

The other thing you must know about my cousin Faivish is that he isn’t really my cousin.

Officially, he’s a ‘revitalization’. Even if there are a lot of other, less polite, names in circulation for what he is.

Revitalizations had been invented in the nineteenth century but had only become practically workable at the turn of the twentieth. Even so, the person revitalized was only ever a shadow of the human they had once been. Popular during wartime for obvious reasons, each new generation was marred by some scandal, disaster, or outrage. Every time things went belly-up, headlines screamed ‘Revitalizations Wreak Havoc’, ‘Frankenstein’s Monsters Go Mad’. The most recent fad had faded rapidly after a grisly incident involving a packed yellow school bus, and the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. My father, ever the businessman, had bought at the bottom of the market. The afternoon Faivish arrived is etched in my memory. I was seven.

“Victor Frankenstein was misunderstood,” my father had argued.

“So was Hitler,” spat my uncle. “He just wanted attention.”

“He was a genius.”

I hoped my father meant Frankenstein, not Hitler.

“It’s not for people like us to understand genius. I’m not even going to try.”

“But you’re happy to buy one of his dolls,” my uncle countered.

“Why can’t we just keep the business in the family?” questioned my mother, trying to pour reasonableness on troubled waters.

“Because the next generation don’t want to become tailors.”

I did, and I said so. True then, true now. Tailors and seamstress. That’s what our family was, what we have always been. A seamstress was my fate. I’ve always enjoyed the comfort of certainty.

“No, really you won’t,” my father baldly stated. “Faivish will allow you to follow your heart, wherever that takes you.

“My heart says seamstress,” I declared.

He wasn’t listening. “There’s a whole world out there opening up, way beyond a dark and dismal basement on Bleecker Street.”

“Won’t he scare the customers?” my mother observed.

“I like dark and dismal,” I chimed.

“You’ve given it a name already?” my uncle scowled.

“Cousin Faivish.”

“Cousin Zombie, more like” my older sister said.

My father wagged a finger. “Don’t call him that. He has feelings.”

“Are you sure?” my mother wondered.

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