Taxidermy

The restaurant had seldom been this quiet. It was a quiet she had found herself surrounded by in recent days. A death in the family always caused a strange, hushed stillness, as if people were suddenly more cautious, aware that death could at any moment come hunting for them too.

She busied herself with putting liquor bottles into boxes, emptying the refrigerator, keeping a tally of everything she packed. The freezer in the back had boxes of steaks and other frozen inventory, but she’d go through that later.

All the tacky framed photos of hunters and their trophies had been taken down from the walls already, leaving outlines where the sun had met paint. She noticed how every surface was covered in leather. Even the wooden bar top had leather lining.

She’d stopped eating meat the previous year. She knew people would prod her with questions, meat having provided for her the life she was living, bought her clothes, their house, and for that reason she told no one about her dietary choice. She simply stopped. No one noticed. It was surprising, to her, the sheer number of things no one noticed.

Packing up the bar, she ran her fingers over the splintered wooden countertop, the deep scratches in the grain, and then at her own fingers, nails freshly painted but the skin still purple and patchy. It hurt to lift the heavy bottles, but she had no choice. The cuts always healed quickly, but the bruises took time. Good concealer makeup and Epsom salt baths—that was her trick. Absentmindedly, she touched the bruise on her cheek.

She looked up at the row of bull’s heads above the bar. She’d spent so much time staring at them over the years, staring into their glass eyes, wondering what they’d done to deserve being there. They looked so mean. Dangerous. Terrifying. Their horns spread horizontally. Like some men would display antique swords or rifles above a mantle, her husband displayed his heads.

The white bull was the most intimidating to her. It reminded her of a ghost. She positioned the ladder beside it first and climbed the rungs until coming face to face with the giant. She felt a burst of illogical fear, imagining him coming through the wall, the rest of his body emerging to trample her.

But nothing happened. She reached forward and put her arms around either side of the head, her fingers searching for a hook or latch but not finding one. She paused, holding the head in a kind of strange embrace. Slowly, she pressed her cheek to its dusty hide. The hair was softer than she expected.

“Careful,” a man’s voice called from below. “Don’t hurt yourself. Come on down. We’ll handle that.”

Two of the men from the moving company helped her off the ladder. The one who had spoken turned to her.

“You weren’t going to try to bring it down yourself, were you? It weighs more than you do,” he laughed.

She said nothing.

They brought the first one down and placed it on a tarp on the floor.

She stared at the head as it lay there. Awkward. Top-heavy. A poor animal, lifeless, dissected, held up by iron spikes for people to gawk at.

They wrapped it up in blankets, tied it with rope cords, and hauled it away to make room on the floor for the next. She followed them to see where they were taking it. They placed it in the back shadows of the moving van. By the time she returned to the bar they already had the next one wrapped and ready to move.

“I’ve never understood taxidermy,” she remarked.

“It’s quite the animal,” he said admiringly, gesturing to the next bull.

“Did you know, people in the 1800s used to put clothes on taxidermied animals?” she said, still looking at the bundle. “They’d pose them, making them look like they were doing human things, like reading and writing or playing sports, wearing little bowties and uniforms.”

“Huh,” he uttered, visibly made uncomfortable.

“I wonder if anyone got worried, when seeing things like that—” she continued, not noticing his discomfort. “—if they stopped to question what those taxidermists really wanted to mount on their walls...”

The mover continued with his task, saying nothing, but occasionally glancing at her out of the corners of his eyes.

He didn’t speak to her again until they had finished packing and loading everything into the van.

“Can we do anything else for you?” he asked as they stood outside. “Take you to get something to eat maybe?”

“No,” she said. “Thank you. I have to go to the funeral home now, to finalize preparations.”

“Of course.”

She locked the front doors and went to her car, hearing the moving van screech and roll out of the lot. She sat in the driver’s seat. For a moment she wondered what her husband’s body looked like now, embalmed and on display in the funeral parlor.

Without forewarning, an image flashed through her mind of his head, only his head, laying in a casket. His eyes were glass marbles, and there was a metal mount in his neck. She smiled at the silliness of it, but held the image in her mind a moment longer, brushing her fingertips softly along her cheek.