The Taxidermist is always watching.
And later, at night, when they’ve left the office, when they’ve left the howler behind and returned home, they’ve tossed and shivered in bed, dreaming of that lonely howl across the empty fields, the yawning trees, and the wide, cold sky. And sometimes, they’ve howled in return.
The howler makes them forget why they came to the Taxidermist’s 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. “For the meeting.” She says the word meeting with a certain accusation. She lets the file hover over the desk before fanning her fingers, letting the thing hit the desk with a slap.
“Did you know,” the Taxidermist says, “that when Pliny attacked Carthage, he entered the Temple of Astarte and found it filled with no fewer than thirty mountain gorillas? Each one was exquisitely mounted, painstakingly preserved, and, apparently, terrifying. The poor man turned on his heel and ran from the temple, claiming it had been seized by Gorgons.”
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. She shudders at the splay of tight spines, the heedless rustle of unloved pages like the whisper of lifting skirts.
The Taxidermist presses his fingers to his mouth to suppress a burp, though he pretends to clear his throat. He continues. “It is, they believe, the first indication that the art of specimen preservation is not a modern pastime as previously thought. I wonder if the Carthaginian priests thought to re-create the minutiae 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. Everyone knows this. Everyone blames him. The secretary answers his phones and files his documents and maintains his correspondence and organizes his meetings. But she hates the Taxidermist. Hates him.
“I’m not certain your research is correct,” the secretary says. “But gorillas have nothing to do with your meeting tonight.”
“My dear Miss Sorensen,” the Taxidermist says, peering into a heavily diagrammed book, its ancient dust rising from its pages like smoke, “it has everything to do with the meeting tonight. You’ll see.”
3.
The Taxidermist is the mayor, and has been for the last fifteen years. We did not vote for him. We’ve never met anyone who has. And yet he has won, term after term. Always a landslide. We never offer our congratulations, nor do we bring casseroles or homemade bars to his house, nor do we come to his Christmas parties or summer barbeques. (We already know what’s in that house. We know.)
This, we are sure, hurts the Taxidermist’s other wife. What wife wouldn’t be wounded by such a snub? She is a sweet, pretty thing. Young. Large eyes. Tight, smooth skin. She grew up four towns over, though no one can say in which one, exactly. Each day she pushes open the large, heavily carved front door of the house and stands on the porch. She brushes a few tendrils of shellacked hair from her face with the backs of her fingers. She adjusts her crisp, white gloves.
She is perfect. Her symmetry jostles the eye. Her body moves without hesitancy, without the irregular rhythm of muscle and bone.
Each day she walks from their house at the center of town, past what used to be the butcher shop and what used to be the hardware store and what used to be the Shoe Emporium and what used to be the offices of our former newspaper, until she reaches her husband’s office at the Town Hall. 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 doesn’t anymore. We never smiled back. Instead, she keeps her lovely face porcelain-still, her mouth like a rosebud in a bowl of milk. A doll’s mouth.
We want to love her. We wish we could love her. But we can’t. We remember the Taxidermist’s first wife. We remember and remember and remember.
4.
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.
“If the artisan does not love the expired subject on his table, it is true, the final product will be a cold, dead thing. A monstrosity. A hideous copy of what once was unique and alive and beautiful.”
We told ourselves we weren’t listening. Still, we found ourselves nodding. We found ourselves agreeing. It is hideous when a thing isn’t loved.
“But the love is not enough,” the Taxidermist insisted. “Desire, friends. Desire. When God leaned against the riverbank, when he pressed his fingers into the warm mud and pulled out a man, what was the motivation? Desire. God saw mud and made it Man. He made Man because he wanted Man. We see death and desire life. Love isn’t enough. You have to want to make it live.”
5.
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
