Carter googled how to resurrect his dead mom, and studied the top hits. It sounded easy , for a clever resourceful lad like himself, reminding him of the treasure hunts he used to do years ago, on various school and camping trips. The most difficult item on the ingredients list was a fresh baby’s liver. He thought a bit about breaking into the local hospital but quickly dismissed the idea – the security, especially with COVID, was freakish there, as he knew from the visits to his mom still fresh in his memory. Cousin Ally had a baby she wouldn’t shut the fuck up about, but after the debacle at mom’s funeral, she would probably realise it was him. Also her baby was getting kinda big now, “almost walking” as Cousin Ally kept proudly repeating, and Carter wasn’t sure if that still qualified. The instructions didn’t state how old the baby had to be, however Carter felt it was logical to assume the younger the baby, the better the results.

Perhaps it was seeing the stray mom-cat and her newly-born kittens tucked behind by overflowing garbage bins in a blind alley on his way that made him decide to experiment with a kitten’s liver. It would be a test-run. It would be interesting, anyway, to see what happened, and how hard it actually was, and there would be less of a fuss. And then when time was right, and the opportunity presented itself, he could do it again with an actual baby.

He plucked one of the kittens from the litter, after dumping the furious mom in one of the bins and placing the lid on her. He made sure as he legged it to tip the bin over, so the howling mom could find her way out back to her kittens- he wasn’t a heartless monster after all, he knew what mother-love was like. 

Nobody was home, his father wouldn’t be back till much later. The rest of the ingredients were easily assembled, good thing he had a vial of his mother’s ashes handy, as per her wishes. The instructions were also frustratingly vague on whether the liver should be removed from a corpse or a living being.

Carter ended up removing the kitten’s liver from its corpse- it had squirmed around too much while still alive. As always when messing around with animals, he was surprised by the amount of blood even tiny bodies produced. He was frantically wiping up while the ingredients were cooking, and he wasn’t expecting the results so fast anyway, and so he didn’t see the rising steam from the pot forming a shape, human life-sized with the head of a furious cat. He turned around on hearing the unholy cat wail, in time to see fully the hellish monster he had summoned as it attacked him, the sharp teeth tearing at his throat. As he collapsed in a fountain of blood, his last sight was that of his mother’s body standing over him.