John's son Ethan had fallen through spider ice at Stillwater pond and was lost among the silver fish with golden eyes, submerged in iceberg dreams. The crystalline night he exhumed his boy, it snowed enough for a thousand Christmases. The graveyard was all cherry oaks and willows, all sugared with snow. Snowflakes wizened his eyebrows, turning them white and fluffy; it salted his beard and bespeckled the top of his head. He wrapped his son in a sheet, propped him over his shoulder, and fled through snow shadows and hazy streetlights.

The stairs to the basement were behind the grandfather clock in a house with cathedral ceilings, spiral staircases, and weather vanes. Three counter-clockwise spins and it swung open. John laid Ethan out on the workbench and was already gowned in a white lab coat, the one with the LabCorp patch torn off, which he did the day he was fired. Skeleton-butterflies flurried in his stomach with every move, every action. His wife would be spinning in her grave had she been able to see what he was doing. She stepped out in front of a speeding Exxon oil truck a few hours after Ethan's death.

The basement windows slowly began to give rise to terrific mounds of blustery snow-spun sugar--, which made the downstairs even more secret, John thought, knowing that soon the windows would be totally occluded. Private. The basement had been a laboratory of sorts for John ever since he lived there. Expansive and well lit, he built and housed many operable things and beings: voice-activated lawnmowers, aerodynamic flycatchers, and many other gadgets that worked off basic household items. He even tweaked together an android maid!

John felt feverish. Whether it was from the warm, heavy atmosphere of the basement or the actual presence of Ethan on his workbench, he did not know. He slipped on a headset that made meek squeaking noises and pops. Automatically, a set of magnifying goggles clicked down over his eyes, operating on tiny cogs and springs. They locked and charged into place. Tiny red and white bulbs switched on, mosquito-like noises swarmed his ears, and, in just a few seconds, the headset was starting to warm his head.

The apparatus would make for much help, especially when it came to the finer areas of fusion. Halfway through, John backed away, crying. He disconnected the headgear and wiped off his face. When the images of Ethan running through dandelion fields with cracked bits of sun in his hair faded, he turned and delved back into him. To finish.

The circuit boards substituted segments of his spine; servo valves took over the job of striated muscle and joints; synovial fluids were drained; cables were sparked into play; encoders were attached to the brain stem; filters replaced kidneys; fuses worked hand-in-hand with the motor primitives, which manned the functions of the ears, eyes, and lips. At first, John had a problem regulating the homeostatic regulators, which he installed in two sets: one mass in the brain and one in the thoracic cavity.

Ethan's legs - part titanium, part aluminum skin patches - were weighed down with ball-bearing ballasts. Instead of tendons, the boy's new body was riddled and taut with flexinol muscle wires, all cylindrical and copper-colored, made with nickel titanium. They allowed for normal flexing of the hands and feet. The sockets at the shoulders, knees, and pelvis were replaced with shape-memory alloys as big as pool balls and capable of bearing more than one hundred pounds of pressure.

All bodily fluids were drained and hydraulic/water-salient oils were injected into all the appropriate areas with a 2mm syringe. The boy's eyes were disks the size of quarters. And finally (and most importantly if he wanted to hear Ethan speak again) John added the PHP 1500 voice chip, which he sizzled into the brain circuit.

The accumulated sweat under John's arms and above his brow had dried and it began to itch. Under his arms, his lab coat was yellowed with dried sweat and his hands were smeared with grease. Ethan - aged seven years when he drowned, no taller than an adult's waist - lay face-up on his father's workbench. There were only patchworks of flesh and all the rest was slick, oily wiring, metal scraps, and silver joints. His lower jaw remained. Small, chicklet teeth still intact, although not as boyish-white as they used to be; his ears were still his own, his nose, the upper lip, one cheek, his abdomen, one buttock, both his feet, and even the dark-brown hair was still intact.

The creases in John's hands were sweaty and they trembled. His eyes wandered and for a moment, just a brief second, he saw something, another image. He saw the cemetery keeper stumbling upon Ethan's excavated gravesite. He saw him bend down to find that the coffin lid was open and that it was empty. John blinked long and hard and the image was gone. He turned his attention back to his son, his only child at once. Ethan needed just one more manipulation before he could speak to his father again, to at least hug him if he didn't have a full enough mouth to kiss him with.

John streaked across the basement, lab coat ballooning around his knees. There were sprockets, chains, axles, frames, wheels, wrenches, blowtorches, engines, an array of multi-colored circuit boards, gutted computer systems, hanging batteries, stripped wires. Everything, strewn across the basement-laboratory. In one corner, his dissembled maid creation, in the other, a hollowed-out TV with a fish bowl bubbling seaweed in its center. John pushed over mounds of coffee containers filled with screws, nails, and washers. Dust motes shimmered in the light of naked bulbs.

He unhooked a key from a nail in the wall, went over to a metal cabinet, and unlocked it. It took a few minutes for John's eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, he snatched up the dark mass at his feet.

Jumper cables and a dusty car battery.

It was the defibrillator - the life-giving instrument - that would revive Ethan, ultimately. What time of day it was (or even which day it was), John was not sure yet. Between the constant on and off of his goggle headset and the delicate strain on his hands made for black streaks under his eyes. The snow had now totally obstructed the rectangular basement windows.

He attached the jumper cables to two spark plug distensions: one that protruded from Ethan's thoracic cavity, and the other lodged near the lumbar circuit-spine. He blew away the dust from the battery, cleaned off the plugs between his thumb and forefinger, and connected the cables.

Nothing.

He wiggled the cables a bit, and then life. John's shoulders and legs went rigid. He swallowed and watched as tendrils of blue-electric charged through Ethan's body. It buzzed and cracked, snapped and popped. Ethan's interior hummed. Some areas glowed red, and others smoked. One of his disk-eyes rotated while the other remained forward as belt-driven pulleys spun hot-rubber.

"Move, goddammit!" John whispered. "Do some - " And the homeostatic regulators resumed accurate pacing. Ethan's android mouth opened and closed, closed and opened like a fish gasping for air. The jaw wrenched on semi-oiled hinges. John gasped and was taken slightly aback. His arms slowly went limp to his sides. He detached the magnifying helmet (the tool that without it, his forty-five year-old eyes would've never have held through) not once looking away from what he had made.

Ethan whispered something. His copper vocal cords pulled, and he actually said something. John bent down. "What? What, Ethan?" He could smell warm oil; smelled like the peanut oil in a Lionel train. Ethan's eye began to spin in circles again, and then stopped until the two were looking straight forward. John turned and put his ear close to where Ethan's heart--his live heart--once was. There was no beating, only buzzing. An electric buzz and the sound of cogwork.

"Eeethaaaan," whispered John long and hard. He scooped his electric son into his arms and hugged him gently so as not to crush the hardware architecture or to deface any area of the corpse-flesh. The strings of phonemes with pitch accents were assembled on fly circuit boards and etched into the smooth tissue of Ethan's throat so Ethan was able to reply: "Ethan," It said.

Because the synthesizer installed simply modeled physiological characteristics of a human's articulatory tract and did not mock them completely, Ethan's voice was child-like and buggish. The voice that piped from Ethan was not the Ethan that John knew. Having his PhD in robotic engineering and his Master's Degree in chemical engineering, John knew that changes in a real human's autonomic nervous system could account for some of the most significant changes, where the sympathetic and parasympathetic subsystems regulate other subhuman - or abnormal - tones.

Ethan's semi-fleshy eyebrows moved slightly above silver disk eyeballs. As if paralyzed, Ethan's elbow joints inch-wormed up and down as did his knee joints. The rotary sections at the waist and base of the neck turned. John stood back and allowed his new boy to test out his body. His belly was hot and heavy and tears welled up behind his eyes. "That's it, son," he said as he shouldered out of his lab coat. "Keep moving…try out your new self."

The fingers clenched and they met gripper-tip to gripper-tip. Pulley reducers spun, powered by miniature drive motors John had taken from a couple electric pencil sharpeners (one of only a few things he didn't have on-hand during the procedure). Ethan's mouth grinded. "Daa-dad-dy," he mewled.

"My God," John said.

Ethan rotated himself around and sat up. John's hands were clenched tight; his knees stiff and pressed together. He prayed Ethan didn't fall apart now, hoped that all of his work didn't crumble.

Ethan didn't.

He sat up right, charging and twitching, sparking and surging. "Amazing," said John as he unclipped the jumper cables. Everything worked. Nothing failed. Every cog worked, every joint moved, every screw stayed in place. "You're alive again, Ethan," John said, rubbing his nimble fingers down the boy's flesh-metal back. "Now all I have to do is teach you again." A prism tear blinked off of his eyelash. As it fell, Ethan's new body reflected all the colors of the rainbow through it.

"Like when you were a boy."

John's heart broke a second time when the flesh that remained on what was left of Ethan's body began to blacken. Dirty rain was washing away snow all morning. Ethan had fallen to his knee balls near the French doors and was trying to absorb the pattern of rain droplets on the panes of glass. His disk eyes scanned them wildly back and forth like a dog watching a squirrel in the yard, unable to go for it. John had his arms crossed on the kitchen table and he rested his chin across his elbows. "You aren't able to go outside when it's raining, Ethan." John sat up. "Come here," he said, crawling down to the floor. He patted his knees. "Here."

Ethan's head spun completely. He heard his father and acknowledged the command, and then he toppled onto his side, his leg rotating in circles in the air. His work cells were dying. John could tell because his motor skills were delayed and his actions were lethargic. He had to recharge them before Ethan shut down. He slid over, scooped Ethan up into his arms, paying no attention to the slippery areas of decaying skin under his back.

"Damn, you're heavy, boy," he laughed. "Hope you don't hurt daddy's back again - hey, like that time you jumped up on my back in the pool!" Ethan did not respond. He was unable to respond at all. Not a word. This time, John clipped only one jumper cable to Ethan and allowed for the faint charge to revitalize his system. John kissed Ethan's crepid forehead and tasted oil on his lips. He smelled bitter and like chrome.

"All's it'll take is a little time, Ethan. Just a little more time and I'll have you just like when you were alive." John sat on his heels with his son in his arms. He looked up at the ceiling and sighed. "Plenty of time."

Three weeks had passed since John recreated Ethan, brought him back from the dead in robot form. Ethan represented the fruits of John's once-heightened career and already he was regretting his creation. What skin that had remained on the body he dug out of the ground was sloughing off of its metal frame. Ethan had spent his days lying near wall sockets, poking and prodding at the plates with his rubber-tipped fingers; at night, he shut himself down near the warm baseboard heater.

He ignored John completely. He did not follow any commands and did not respond to any verbal - or even painful - stimuli. John was pulling strands of his hair out in front of a mirror in the bathroom where, earlier, he had clawed at the wallpaper. He allowed black stubble to grow in under his neck; he hadn't changed out of his clothes in days; black circles formed under his eyes from worry and time.

Drooling, John slid himself out of the bathroom, whimpering. "Ethan…god dammit, Ethan," he cried. "You must work with me! Help me bring you back! You have to be Ethan again!" Ethan did not respond, as usual. Areas of his deteriorating rib cage were exposed - curled around them, wiring. Copper, gold, silver wiring all serving a purpose, all connected to something. "I've failed," John said, climbing to his feet. "It's been weeks, son! At least listen to me."

Nothing.

Outside, the eaves whistled on wintry winds. The night skies were as black as plums and starless. The snow was gone now and the frozen land spiraled bits of grit and sand. Knees shaking and buckling, John finally made it to his feet. Through stinging tears, he saw Ethan. He had managed to jimmy the socket face off of the wall. It hung, exposing the twisted wires.

A spot of hair on his head began to slide, and then it fell onto the floor in a jelly mass. John slammed the countertop with his fists. "Goddammit, please!" He screamed. Lines of spit connected his inner mouth as he sobbed and he bared gritted teeth. "I need my son," he cried. "Christ!" A pool of blackish fluid began to leak out from underneath Ethan. It pooled and broke off into separate tributaries.

John went over to him with tears dripping off of his cheeks. "Just a little while longer," he said, sniffling. "I need you to stay with me just a bit longer, to at least say goodbye to your father." The hanging socket zapped and popped off blue sparks. Ethan fingered the mess like he knew he needed help. Sparks continued to spray like fireworks. John inserted two fingers into an opening in Ethan's warm chest just at the base of the ribcage to feel for leakage or split lines. His insides were hot and slick with oil.

The thin black microprocessors in Ethan's silvery eyes began to fade until they finally clicked off. John grasped Ethan's shoulders. "No," he said. The maxon servomotors began to shut down. It was like pulling the plug on a refrigerator: all the humming stopped, belts stopped spinning, all the electric stopped flowing. "Ethan, no," cried John. "I lost you once already!" Ethan's little body went limp. Stray sparks flurried out of the wall like flares and fell as soft as feathers all around the two.

John's heart beat like a hummingbird's and then it remained at rest for a moment. He knew he had lost Ethan again. He relaxed his weight to his knees, laid his head on Ethan's chest and began to cry. Tendrils of shredded snow-clouds moved fast across the faded moon and in a single breathe of December air came a handful of snow flurries. John didn't blink, only stared very long and very hard. His eyes were pure, watery glass.

And the snow came down harder.

Flower petals.

Ashes to ashes, nuts to bolts.