We would not expect to see scars.
We would not expect to see seams.
The Taxidermist’s other wife lays her hand upon our arms as we pass. We shiver. Even through our coats, we can feel the stony cold of those fingers. Even through our scarves, we can smell the formaldehyde on her breath.
10.
The Taxidermist takes the podium. His other wife sits in a folding chair just behind. She crosses, then uncrosses, then crosses her legs. She rests her hands, one on top of the other, on her knees. She cocks her head to one side, a studied look of wifely admiration on her face.
(We know! We know what she is. Look in her eyes. Look under her skin. We know what we’ll find.)
The Taxidermist taps his microphone three times. He smiles at the audience. The audience does not smile back.
“My friends,” the Taxidermist says.
(You are no one’s friend. You closed the library. You’re closing the school. We are pickled in memory, preserved on porches and in church basements and bars. We blink through worlds of liquor and mason jars. You have frozen us in time.)
“This isn’t easy for me to say,” the Taxidermist says easily. “We are down to fifty students. That’s all. What we get from the state isn’t enough to cover the heat for the building. It doesn’t cover the health insurance for the employees. Our school, once the pride of the county, is falling apart. It is dying.”
(We are dying. We are dying and we don’t know why.)
“Now, I recognize that, with the school closed, we will be forced to bus our children all the way to Harris, and I recognize that it is a long ride for little ones, but I’m afraid it cannot be helped. Those who do not want their children going so far away can consider homeschooling. We can all come together to help make that happen. This is a community.”
(It was a community. Now it is a cold, dead thing. We are alone, we are alone, we are so alone.)
“It is true that we loved the school.”
(We loved Margaret.)
“And it is true that we will mourn its passing.”
(We wanted to mourn her. We wanted our grief, to prove that we aren’t alone. We wanted our grief to show that we are—were—alive.)
“But we now have an opportunity. Preservation, my friends. The dead are not gone when we preserve what is left.”
The Taxidermist’s other wife lifts her hands, preparing to clap. Her lips unfurl in a mechanical smile. Our eyes dazzle and spin in the glare of those perfect teeth. She splays her fingers out and brings her hands together.
But once her palms are half an inch apart, they stutter and halt. The lights behind her eyes flicker and dim. Her lips freeze in that lovely smile—pink lips insinuating themselves into the white mounds of her cheeks. She is porcelain. She is glass. She is stone and milk. She doesn’t move. The Taxidermist doesn’t notice.
“We, right now, are sitting on holy ground. How many of us first fell in love on this very schoolyard? And here in these halls, how many of us first discovered the tools that would make us the men and women that we are today? Our lives are written on memory. We preserve the memory—in its perfection, in its state of bliss, and we preserve ourselves.”
The Taxidermist’s other wife does not move. She does not blink. She is lifeless, breathless, perfect. She is memory and history and longing.
There are stitches hidden under her collarbone.
(We know! We know what’s in there! We know what we’ll find!)
There are seams sliding along the curve of her spine.
(A gesture. A moment. Proof of life, or the memory of life.)
“My wife,” the Taxidermist says.
(Margaret. We wanted to mourn you. We wanted to grieve. We wanted his tears on our shoulders, his hands in our hands. We wanted to sing songs and tell stories and let you live in the spaces between word and word, between breath and breath.)
“Thinks I’m crazy.”
(She doesn’t think. She simply is. A memory. A state of bliss.)
“But it can work. We can preserve what we have. We can turn our loss into a single perfect moment. We can turn this school into a memory of a school. A moment in time. The fingerprints of a thousand hands, and the mingling of a thousand breaths. And it will be proof forever that we are not alone.”
(We are alone.)
“We are not alone.”
(We are alone. We are still alone.)
The Taxidermist’s other wife does not move.
(Margaret.)
She does not clap.
(Margaret.)
And we feel ourselves lifting. We feel our souls unfurling like wings. We feel the howl of the wind and the vastness of space and the tiny voices of the distant stars. We feel our stitching and our seams, the clean line of empty bones, the weight of plaster and spun glass. We taste arsenic and salt, the grease of leather, the dust of hair. We feel the beat and the longing of our broken, paper hearts. And we love the Taxidermist’s other wife.
Love her.
Curator’s note: The following pages were found in a cave on an islet eleven miles southwest of Barbados. The narrative is, of course, incomplete, disjointed, and unreliable, as is the information contained within its pages. There is no record of Brother Marcel Renau living in the Monastery of the Holy Veil during the years in question. There is a record of the order for the execution of a Gabrielle Belain in St. Pierre in 1698; however, no documentation of the actual execution exists. Some of this narrative is indecipherable. Some is lost
