Summary Of The Opening Chapter Of Frankenstein: A Narrative Fiction

Rachel stared into the blur of trees passing the bus window. The woods were getting deeper and thicker as the bus moved north, away from her empty home and the pregnant graves of her mother, father and son. She looked up into the sky and thought about the faith she also orphaned there, a faith she had since birth, a faith she had painstakingly force-fit into every moment of her life for thirty years. But it had proven to be like the rest of her relationships, one where she was always expected to give and never to receive. It was her time to receive, so it had to be left behind. She leaned over and reached into her brown purse, which sat on the floorboard tucked between her feet. She exhumed from it her worn little journal and her pencil and
He was no longer aware of the woman’s smell, the cheap, coarse texture of her clothes nor even the nauseating side-to-side movement of the bus. His mind was fixed and bedazzled by this creature’s godlike omniscience and how, though he had never seen her eyes fall upon his person, she seemed to see him with supernatural clarity. “Are you a witch?” he asked. Rachel let out a little giggle and then rejoined with, “A which what?” “You know what I mean,” said the man in a whisper. “But do you know what you mean?” replied Rachel. Rachel had drawn a tree on a page of her journal. She wiped some of the grease from her forehead with her fingertip and then brushed it on the page to smudge and blend the texture of the leaves. She wrote “Art” on the trunk of the tree and then tore the page from the soiled binding string that held it in place. “Best you put this in your satchel with all your other personal items,” advised Rachel as she handed the page to Art. “For on the day you lose it, you will also die.”

Art lifted the paper slowly from Rachel’s hand, placed it into his case, closed the flap and then stared silently at the back of the worn bus seat in front of