The Taxidermist's Lover

by Polly Hall

  When you think you know every vein of another, every scar and blemish, a shock like that can force you to re-evaluate every assumption you ever made. Your finger, for example—was it really chopped off by a lawn mower blade? A common enough injury, fingers get in the way. But you are left-handed and this shortened finger of which I speak is the third of your right hand. Severed to the first joint, an uneven, shiny, blunt end. I’m not even sure I noticed it the first time we met. There were too many other interesting contours to take in—the angle of your cheekbones rushing into the unruly craft of your beard, the bulk of your shoulders matching the curved boulders on the beach, the stretched fabric of your trousers across your buttocks—so how could I have missed what was already missing? A part of you I love so much—your hands, the part that has palpated every inch of me, inside and out.

  Forgive me, my darling, for my disjointed ramblings. Time slips and slides as I sit here waiting. Time seems endless, limitless, like your love for me. You have made me into something new, once again. I can see and hear and taste and smell, even feel, but not in the sense you imagine. It is heightened and freed from the limits of a body, yet I am tethered too strongly to shift far. Imagine my perception as a holographic image that lifts and moves when the light refracts from my surfaces—that is how I feel I must move in this new limbo state.

  It wounds me to say it, but my wish for wings was unfounded. I can no more fly than you can. They are a part of me, now you have stitched them with such accuracy to my back, like the angels you see on the ceiling of a cathedral, set proud, feathers spread in a fan. But I cannot fly. Believe me, I have tried. There is a sensation of pulling, like a sticking plaster being slowly removed. As for my tail, I feel heaviness behind me, at the base of where my spine used to be. I know it is long, a white horse’s tail to match my white swan’s wings. You had carefully stored those items in readiness for me. The soul will return to its true nature unless . . . unless . . . unless it is tethered to . . .

  That was what it said. Of course it did. I knew all along that by messing with nature there would be a price. And Wensley had written it down to warn anyone who’d want to try. My greed and selfishness had allowed my judgement to be clouded. I thought I was special. You made me feel special. That was how our love had been founded and I let it escalate into this twisted mess.

  I do not feel the chill here in this place where my consciousness slips from inside to outside my shell of a body. There are no goosebumps on my preserved skin. I am freed from physical pain or sensation. I am within myself, but without, like all the animals you have touched. They want to source their identity through the parts they are made from. At first, I was too preoccupied with my new shape to take much notice of them squabbling and fighting for order. But they are brutes only interested in the one thing I seek too. They seek to find out what they have become. They seek freedom to be their true selves.

  Their souls veer toward the flames of the candles, knowing they may provide a momentary release. Then they draw back, tethered like a kite to a string set aloft on the currents of a strong breeze. I see the flames now. There is clarity in my current state that I had not experienced before now. Now I am dead. They call it dead, yet each death is as unique as each life, so please don’t quote me on this. All I can tell you is how I am. I still exist, my darling Peppercorn. I am still your beloved wife. You have kept me here and I am so, so torn between the love I remember (I say remember because my feelings are stripped back to the core) and the love of onwards and away from this restricting, physical form.

  Do not panic. I was not sickened by the processes that I know you must’ve gone through to keep me in this state. The scrape of flesh and bone and application of chemicals to prevent my spoiling. It does not bother me.

  There is no pain, as I said. I drift between what you would call wakefulness, what I would call “the now,” and the in-between that threatens to come calling for me when I least expect it. It wants me more than you want me. That is my fear. How strong is your love?

  No heat runs through my veins (I have none) but I remember those hot, passionate moments we shared where my blood pumped in vibrant rhythm with your own breathy yearnings. You have formed me from my own skin, my outer layers and the choice pickings of my favorite creatures. I have become your fairy tale, but there is no way of telling you if there is a happy ending in sight. If only you could reach me.

  I’ve coveted the caving of your features, the rise and fall of your shoulders, as you twisted and cut, sawed and bandaged and stitched my motionless body back into being. You did not falter in your service to me. But you did not give me air to breathe. You have given me new life, yes, but a life where you can longer play a part. And this, my darling, makes me sad and exasperated all at the same time.

  Christmas Day—Today

  Evening

  A match strikes and my eyes see the great beyond beckoning. You puff on your pipe. The flames lick and curl about the logs in the hearth. We are bathed in orange. I feel the pull of all the creatures around me, as if they are making a massive effort to reach the flames. They do not fear the fire as they would in their living state. They have become accustomed to it and crave it like a drug. It is their portal, their destiny, their redemption. Their glass eyes twinkle with expectation. Touch me, they seem to say. Burn me up. Set me free. I sit on the chair you have positioned like a throne among our Christmassy scene and weave my mind back over the year to tease out some meaning, to understand how I got here.

  Wensley’s book was no accidental find in a dusty bookshop. I had meant to find it, so I could put right the wrongs that you had done. I do not shirk from my own deliberate actions in the creation of all those poor, wretched hybrids. But I found out how desperate and cruel it had been. And now I have become one.

  You once mentioned the eyes. I remember your words: “The eyes,” you said, “they never quite show what was once inside.” Yes, the eyes are not needed, my love. They are mere fancy. For it is the soul that sees who we truly are, not the eyes. It is the soul that knows who we are. This inescapable fate ties me with sinewy strands of hope, like the workings of your fingers through to the un-beating hole where my heart should be. Wrap me in your arms, sink into me, remind me what it is that keeps us bound together.

  I don’t expect you to answer me as I speak to you. I doubt my own story. I doubt my own existence at times. No one has been able to scrap together evidence, the real proof of what happens when our bodies cease functioning. Even Wensley’s attempts are crude and borne from a longing to explain his experiences on the living side of the veil. I am telling you how it is for me. I am the fathomless proof.

  There are theories and philosophies about life after death in the religions I have encountered. Most extol the afterlife, the future, the better life. They swim with infinite symbolism: the Hindu wheel; Nirvanic cycles of reincarnation into body after body until life lessons are learned; resurrection and ascension; silver cords; karma; judgement; heaven; Valhalla; torment; hell; limbo; confinement; purgatory; descending worlds; ka and ba; the Fields of Aaru; your heart weighed on the scales counterbalanced by the feather of truth; sarcophagi; mummification; doors; tunnels; veils; rivers; ferrymen; Elysian fields; the underworld; Sheol; graves; tombs; pyramids; cemeteries; the world-to-come; extinction; rapture; battles; salvation; atonement; sleep of the soul; isthmus; the dream world; ghosts; change of form; freedom; bridges; Summerland; time.

  There is time here, but it runs differently to how you would perceive it. It does not flow like the hands of a clock or the linear dates of a calendar. I am now. It is now. There are flashbacks and coherent patches, but I am a riddle.

  1. I am not dead.

  2. I am not alive.

  3. What am I?

  Time here is like a big slice of cake gobbled up and ingested by a greedy old hag. She stuffs it in her puckered, salivating mouth with gnarled dirty claws and hardly chews. I plead with her for some crumbs but she ignores me, sucks at her misshapen fingers, licks he
r cracked black lips until a glittering bolus shifts to the wet abyss of her gullet, down her esophagus, then into the churning acid of her stomach where time dissolves and joins the other morsels of time she has swallowed so mercilessly. Then it molds in her dark gut and descends to the underworld of her bowels as a sticky mass ready to be excreted.

  Christmas Day—Now

  I hear you in the kitchen again. Other men’s voices. Yours and others, maybe three? No, just your gruff voice reasoning with another familiar, higher-pitched male voice. I catch some words like flakes of papery ash alighting on my grey skin:

  “. . . she said to come at Christmas . . . always come . . .”

  “. . . not convenient . . .”

  “. . . but, I always . . . where is she? Scarlett?”

  “. . . having a lie down . . .”

  “. . . freezing . . . can I come in? Henry? Henry—what’s happened?” I recognize the voice. It’s Rhett. My Rhett. Like I said, he always turns up at Christmas. I try to stand. I urge my stationary body to move. I will it to move. I pray to the other souls to help me. They carry on cacking and squawking and kicking and spitting. But my soul remains tethered like a tick to my own remodeled body, held fast like a suckling demonic babe. I am my own useless parasite.

  Rhett! Rhett! In here! Come in out of the cold. Share this festive day with me and my lover. But of course, Rhett cannot hear me. Neither can you. But you, my darling, seem to dissuade my brother from entering the warmth of our Christmas bubble. You attempt to turn away my own flesh and blood. You are the cruel, selfish inn-keeper, unwilling to share your space with a weary traveler.

  “It’s fucking dangerous. Do you not realize how serious this is? Do you know how difficult that was, coming across the ice?” Rhett’s voice rises as he confronts you.

  “We—are—fine.” I love your stern tone, but I want to see my brother. I need him.

  “Where is she? Where’s my sister?”

  “Rhett, stop . . .”

  Your voices are coming closer to the door of the lounge. The door swings open and nearly crashes into the wall. Rhett’s eyes flick about the room. He is motionless, like a stunned rabbit. The air is fractured around all three of us. His realization has turned it to glass and imploded in slow motion. Rhett turns to you and then back to me, his hands clenching into fists then splaying out again as if he is grasping at an invisible rail to steady himself. He keeps swearing but not actually finishing the words, his mouth gaping open, so it sounds like “wah—tha—fah.” I want to speak to him but obviously can’t in my current state; my consciousness is so flaky, locked inside this redundant body with animal attachments. I try to reach him in some other way, some signal that he may understand, but he is rubbing his eyes and squinting back tears and panting as if something has caught in his throat. Here is my brother, my twin, witnessing his sister as a work of art.

  The taxidermist’s lover—taxidermied.

  The irony may reach him someday, but for now he just coughs up a mouthful of sick and doesn’t even try to catch it in his hand. He spits it on the rug and you look at it in disgust.

  He must appreciate the workmanship you have so beautifully and lovingly crafted, but the strange hue of my scaly skin and my fake resin eyes, not to mention the large wings that poke through the slits you have cut in my dress are probably not a sight he has imagined in all his years. I am a queen on her throne, a beautiful swan chameleon woman with the tail of a white mare swept round onto my lap. My hands have been positioned on my thighs like a stately heiress waiting for her loyal subjects to serve her. There is nothing uncomfortable about my pose. You have even arranged some tinsel around my wrists and neck, so I complement the Christmas scene.

  “You’ve fuh—fuh—fucking stuffed her!” he manages to blurt out, shock turning to hostility in his croaking voice. He is shaking. You try to reach out to him, but he snatches his arm away, backing toward the door. “Sick bastard.” Something bordering on hysterical laughter bubbles up from his throat. He is moving away from me but there is something I need to tell him.

  Rhett—Rhett it’s me, I’m ok, it’s all ok, I want to tell him. I want to hold him. I want to enfold him. I want to swim back in time and tell him it’s alright and there is no blame and it was me who did it. It was me who killed our parents. I set the candle alight. I started the fire. I left it to burn. I burned the house down. I killed them. It was me. But how will he ever know? How can I ever tell him to release all the guilt that forces him to travel around the world, purging himself in the pleasures of flesh like a mad dog dipping and diving into a rapid river but always coming out thirsty?

  “Rhett, it’s not what you think.” You hold out your hands to him as he continues to back cautiously toward the door like a man who has discovered he’s landed in a pit of sleeping dragons.

  “Sick, fucking sick . . .” Rhett’s temples pulse like they always do when he is battling some complex emotion that forces him to feel something other than lust.

  A door slams and he is gone. My Rhett. My twin has gone back out into the icy void, and I cannot bear it. Think, think. What did Wensley say? What was the other way to release the tethered soul? Fire. I know fire can help, but I cannot move. How can I set myself free if I cannot set myself on fire? But there is another way, the manifestation of fire by spontaneous combustion. A poof of smoke and all that is left are a few charred limbs among blackened ash—as quick as mercury. I focus on my center to build the heat within. My glass eyes are staring ahead, but within I am squinting and squeezing with the greatest effort. Pleeeeeeeeease!

  Nothing.

  I jostle with the other souls to reach the flames that are licking higher in the fireplace from the draught that has entered our home. The crabbit is cruelly pecking his way forward, the jackalope whomping his paws, the cowstrich and wallopea are scraping back their strong, sinewy legs in readiness for a race. As for me . . .

  Nothing.

  I hear you lock the door from the inside, the one that Rhett has just backed out of. He is retreating outside into the now darkening day. You grab a bottle from the kitchen cupboard. The sound of liquid being poured into a glass. A slurp. The glass noisily slammed back down onto the worktop. The creak of the lounge door hinge. And there you stand.

  You stand in the doorway with a bottle of scotch, swaying slightly and look directly at me.

  “Merry Christmas, Scarlett!” You grimace. “Always one to get what you want.”

  You raise the bottle in a toast and take a full mouthful of whisky, letting some slop down your beard. Do not descend to the darkness, my darling—I send out a feathery message like a scribe scratching scrolls of black ink onto parchment—Merry Christmas, sweet love of mine. I sense troubled waters bubbling up within you. When they talk of veils and thresholds, of tunnels leading to light, of ascension into the great white sky above, what do they know? They are living. I’ll tell you how it is.

  Imagine who we were: each cell as a boat on a lake without oars, ready to be plunged into repetitive cascades in search of a destination that is out of sight. Imagine the liquid that silently and secretly slips in perpetual motion within the veins and arteries and capillaries of our bodies. Imagine the secretions, that which has been washed away to join greater rivers, solidifying and becoming gelatinous. Imagine those sensations of ebb and flow, heat and stiffness, rise and fall, petering out to stillness.

  A flicker of movement through the window pane. And another. At first, I think it is a bat, at this late hour, sweeping over our island. But again, I sense light. You do not see it as your back is to the window where you sit and face me, swigging and swaying as you study me: your creation. You reach forward to caress my cheek, but as you do, the window is smashed with deafening force from outside and the fire splutters in response to this invasion of wintery air. Another smash, and another, in quick succession. The flicker was not a bird. I see light hair and pale fingers. A petrol-soaked rag tied to a log is lobbed toward you and lands with a scattering of flames as t
he fire is sent inside our home and brightens the interior.

  You leap up and turn, but your reactions are slowed by the alcohol. Then another whump as the next flaming missile narrowly misses your head and lands near the creatures. Their dry fur and feathers are ideal incendiaries, and I hear them shriek in delight as the flames take hold. I am jealous. The unfurling of the souls from the mixed-up hybrids tease me as they unpeel themselves from their harnessed bodies. It is like watching ectoplasm swirl among the smoke in spiral patterns. My own wings seem to twitch and lurch, my tail is as restless as if the horse to whom it belonged has been spooked into action.

  “Bastard—” You lunge toward the window to see Rhett running away, then you grab at the curtains to beat at the flames, but there are sparks spitting from the flammable creatures. The rug lights like a cartoon bomb wire spreading in a straight line toward me. The thin, bare skin of my feet are positioned neatly on it, soles pressed flat like I am about to stand. I urge the fire to reach me, reasoning that the touch of fire will set me free from the animals you have stitched to me.

  You are swearing and cursing and flailing about. You stagger and cough. Your bottle of whisky falls and adds to the fuel, like an electrical circuit made live. I watch the journey of liquid across the floor.

  Then, a banging and rattling and a hard whump against the door. Rhett is breaking it down. You are losing your battle with the spreading flames that lick and catch the edges of the frayed furniture. It blackens and sizzles as more flames take hold. Flimsy metallic decorations disintegrate and dissolve, folding up and in on themselves as the heat reaches the ceiling. The tree ignites and spits like an angry camel, its dangling ornaments popping and falling to the floor. There is black smoke everywhere and you are on your knees, choking.