Excerpt from Dreadful Young Ladies by Kelly Barnhill
The Taxidermists Other Wife
1.
Not one of us has ever stepped inside the Taxidermists house.
We have no need to do so.
Credit: Bruce Silcox
We already know what well find.
Its mouth is open, lips curled outward like the rim of a trumpet.
Its head is cocked sweetly to one side, as though reconsidering what it was just about to say.
Sarah J. Coleman
Or, perhaps itdoesscratch.
Really, whos to say?
People have petted the howler monkey.
Theyve checked its body for nits.
Theyve unaccountably wanted to scratch their own backsides and theyhave, when theyve thought no one was watching.
The Taxidermist is always watching.
And sometimes, theyve howled in return.
The howler makes them forget why they came to the Taxidermists office in the first place.
They wander away, complaints unfiled, petitions undelivered, pieces of mind ungiven.
The Taxidermist loves his howler monkey.
His secretary, on the other hand, does not.
Sir, his secretary says, bringing in a file.
She says the wordmeetingwith a certain accusation.
Each one was exquisitely mounted, painstakingly preserved, and, apparently, terrifying.
He sits at his desk, ancient books opened to different pages and stacked for ease of access.
The secretary presses her lips into a long, tight line.
She is the former librarian of the former library.
She disapproves of the wanton opening of books.
I wonder if the Carthaginian priests thought to recreate the minutia of the mundane as we do now.
I wonder what they thought they were preserving.
The secretary flares her nostrils, forcing her gaze away from her employer.
The Taxidermist closed the library.
The secretary answers his phones and files his documents and maintains his correspondence and organizes his meetings.
But she hates the Taxidermist.Hateshim.
Im not certain your research is correct, the secretary says.
But gorillas have nothing to do with your meeting tonight.
The Taxidermist is the mayor, and has been for the last fifteen years.
We did not vote for him.
Weve never met anyone whohas.And yet he has won, term after term.
(We already know whats in that house.
This, we are sure, hurts the Taxidermists other wife.
What wife wouldnt be wounded by such a snub?
She is a sweet, pretty thing.
Tight, smooth skin.
She grew up four towns over, though no one can say in which one, exactly.
She brushes a few tendrils of shellacked hair from her face with the backs of her fingers.
She adjusts her crisp, white gloves.
She isperfect.Her symmetry jostles the eye.
Her body moves without hesitancy, without the irregular rhythm of muscle and bone.
She wears high heels that click coldly against the cracked sidewalk.
She wears a skirt that skims her young thighs and flares slightly at her bending knees.
She used to smile at us when she passed, but she doesnt anymore.
We never smiled back.
Instead, she keeps her lovely face porcelain-still, her mouth like a rosebud in a bowl of milk.
We want to love her.
We wish we could love her.
We remember the Taxidermists first wife.
We remember and remember and remember.
Taxidermy is more than Art.
It is more than Love.
The Taxidermist has explained this to us, but we have closed our ears.
We change the subject.
We scan the sky for signs of rain.
Still, words have a way of leaking in.
A hideous copy of what once was unique and alive andbeautiful.
We told ourselves we werent listening.
Still, we found ourselves nodding.
We found ourselvesagreeing.Itishideous when a thing isnt loved.
But the love is not enough, the Taxidermist insisted.
We see death and desire life.
You have towantto make it live.
There was no funeral for Margaret, the first wife.
We learned she was dead in the Fond Memories section of the newspaper.
That was when we had a newspaper.
He never mentioned it out loud.
He never told anyone.
He never even held a funeral.
We tried to grieve.
Here, we shouted.
We brought our presence and our ears and our love.
Let us in and well feed you.
Well share a drink and share a song and make you live again.
But the Taxidermist would not pop launch the door.
Each morning, we saw our gifts heaped in the trash bin outside the house.
We never mentioned it again.
Or the building that will soonnotbe a school.
Not much use pretending were still a town if the schools gone.
We stopped pretending we were a town after the grain elevator closed.
And when the butcher shop shut its doors.
Cant call yourself a town if you cant get a fresh hock for supper.
If you dont have a locker to put your winters buck.
Taxidermists got a lot of damn gall closing the school mid-year.
Not much of a bunch.
On a good day.
When was the last good day?
We stopped pretending we were a town when the hardware store closed.
And the seed store.
And the gas station.
And the green grocer.
And the shoe shop.
At least we still can pickle ourselves at Oles.
Hell keep us topped up with nice, clear vodka so we can see.
Hes always been a morbid fellow.
The Taxidermistll like it, though, Zeke Hanson says.
Hell like it very much.
Night falls early in November.
Each jagged shard of light in the darkness is a tiny message sent from the recesses of time.
You are alone, the stars say.
You are still alone.
We pull our coats tightly against the howl of the wind and start our cars.
The schoolyard is packed earth with a single metal swing set for the children to play on.
The yard is dusty from their feet, every speck of green crushed by the insistence of play.
Just outside the schoolyard is the endless grass of the Hovde farm.
It is green as snakes, and softer than a lie.
We park our cars next to the school but do not lock them.
No one locks their doors.
This is a small town.
Or it was, anyway.
We hold our coats closed tightly at our throats and bend our backs against the wind.
The stars are cold and sharp above our heads and the wind howls across the wide, empty fields.
Taxidermy must embrace imperfection.
The taxidermist must build motivation, history, consequence, action, reaction into one, perfect gesture.
The taxidermists diorama is a poem.
We are all just a collection of faults, the Taxidermist told us once.
A myriad of imperfections through which shines divine Perfection.
It is our flaws that make us beloved by heaven.
It is our scars and handicaps andlackof symmetry that prove that we are or once were alive.
Reveal the subject as the subjectwas,and you reveal the fingerprints of God.
We have shut our ears to the Taxidermist.
We have stopped listening to his hypocrisy.
We know what he has done.
This is the very reason why we can never love his other wife.
