We’ll give them to your mother. I stroked its downy back. It was still warm. Makes a good Easter gift. Peter Rabbit, right?
We each took two, bisecting the bodies through their tiny white bellies. There was barely anything to remove, they were so young. Their skulls were dainty, the size of an apricot. I scrubbed them carefully with a toothbrush, washing their coats in the workroom sink. I dried them with a blow-dryer on a low setting. Blush from the drugstore stained each round cheek a delicate, precious pink. I darkened the lines of their eyelids with Sharpie. Peter’s black eyes were taken from a beaded purse that a well-meaning aunt had once gifted me, a look Brynn described as fortysomething soccer mom goes on a post-divorce date.
My mother held the babies and cooed like I’d finally given her grandchildren.
Darlings. She kissed me on the cheek and squeezed my shoulder. My best-behaved kids.
Brynn turned to my mother and held up the empty cereal box. I’ll have to leave for the store now if I wanna outrun the storm. She was still in her sleep shirt and a pair of Milo’s boxer shorts. The flap at the crotch was unpinned; pale underwear kept peeking through.
I’ll go. My mother already had her purse slung over her shoulder. Her long, dark hair licked the floor as she leaned over to kiss Bastien’s head. I’ll be back in an hour.
Behind us, the fridge clicked on, running hard enough to jostle the boxes of Minute Rice stacked on its flat top. Bastien set down his spoon and milk drooled from its bowl, leaking onto the quilted place mat. His eyes were sleepy; he swayed in his chair. I settled him in front of the television, tucked a throw around him peppered with gray dog hairs and crumbs from the floor. He sucked his thumb and sniffled, allergies flaring up again. One of the dogs came up and curled beside him.
Brynn and I went to my parents’ room because I couldn’t fuck her in the same place she slept every night with my brother. What had been my bed was now their bed; a bed for two people who’d committed their lives to each other. I could feel him there between the sheets with us, sad and hurt, and it made me want to cry.
We stood in the doorway of my parents’ room and didn’t look at each other. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and it wouldn’t be the last. In order to do it, I let Milo drift until he was a far-off spot in my mind, a hazy blot on the horizon that I could pretend was something else entirely. Not my brother. Not any part of me. Brynn leaned into me and let her head fall on my shoulder. Time was always too short. All we had were afternoons, little minutes between work shifts.
Will I ever get tired of this? I asked the question aloud, though I already knew the answer. You couldn’t get sick of sustenance when you were starving.
What happens now? She looked out the window, hand pressed against her belly. I curled around her back and put my hand over hers. It wasn’t warm enough anymore without the blankets, but I didn’t care. We didn’t say anything, just listened to the rain lessen until there were only drips pinging off the window’s metal awning.
I stroked one finger down her abdomen. Bunny, bunny, I wished, mouthing the words into her damp neck.
3
At the back of the shop we kept a storage bin that housed leftover animal parts. It was the stuff my father called bits and pieces, things we kept around as supplementary material when there was a rush and we needed extra scraps.
Just in case, he said when I asked why we’d ever need a single duck foot, webbed yellow-orange and black. I’m not gonna throw out something we could use.
Thrift was something I’d incorporated into my own work process. Bills, a word spelled out in all capital letters blinking neon in my skull, kept me awake at night. If there was an opportunity to cut costs, I was willing to consider it.
Parts disappeared and reappeared whenever an especially large workload presented itself. The cabinet held an odd jumble: severed deer hooves with the ankles still attached, rabbit feet with too many toes, mismatched alligator jaws. We had feathers from cardinals, finches, herons, crows, and jays—ruffled and slick, downy and spiked. There were horns of all colors and shapes, antlers, bone segments, fur swatches, disconnected tails. The bin had clear compartments, every drawer labeled with its contents in blue masking tape. Looking at it from far away, you could almost convince yourself you were looking at a real cabinet of wonders.
It was a good place to go for gag taxidermy parts, and with my father gone, gag taxidermy paid the rent. I pinned antlers to rabbit heads stuffed with foam cuttings, shellacked frogs propped at miniature card tables, boiled a million alligator skulls, mouths stuffed with pointy teeth painted blue and orange for UF football fans. I turned ducklings into mermaids, fish tails shimmering green-gold. The parts bin emptied until I was digging out ratty stuff that had been in the drawers as long as I could remember. A coral snakeskin disintegrated in my hands, looped round a spool that had once held reams of fuchsia lace for one of my mother’s sewing projects.
It was always the same old, same old. Even looking at the bin depressed me. I was bored and unhappy and whenever I got that way I started thinking about sex. Lucinda Rex had been on my mind a lot. It was exactly what I shouldn’t be doing, fixating on a woman I barely knew, much less a customer. But while I worked, my mind wandered where it liked. It had been a long time since I’d been attracted to anyone in that kind of way. I went out to bars and met women, ones I never saw again after those blurry, drunk nights in hotel rooms or dirty apartments, but they weren’t like Lucinda. She was the kind of woman I knew might hurt me if I gave her half a chance.
Often I found myself comparing the limber body of a deer with the long line of her legs or the strong cord of her neck. Disassembling an ancient rack of fuzzy pinned moths, I wondered what noises she might make if I licked the tender spot below her ear. Whenever I thought that way, I ruthlessly shut it down—usually by jamming my thumb against the edge of the flesher. Lucinda wasn’t messy like Brynn, but there was a hard quality to her that scared me. They were both women who’d break your heart and smile afterward. It was easier to head to some bar out of town and find someone faceless. After a few beers, I couldn’t tell the difference between my hands and theirs.
But lately after I fucked those no-name women, I always thought about Lucinda. Her dark hair, her slender wrists. At night in bed, dreams of Brynn slid into a miasma of Lucinda until it was like I was sandwiched between their bodies. I woke up early, getting to work before the sun came up so I could try to shake free the images sliding through my brain like a looping projector reel.
Want and need. Two words from my dad’s letter that meant so much and so little. I never knew what I wanted. And I didn’t want to need anything. Better to need nothing; nothing never hurt you when it left.
I was alone a lot at the shop most days, but one afternoon Bastien took Milo’s truck and stopped by with Lolee on their way down to the lake. The amoeba count had been high that summer. Signs were posted all over Central Florida warning about the danger of dunking your head. The lakes and reservoirs were death traps, bacteria ready to crawl inside ear canals and turn brains to mush. August sun cooked the lakes in town until they felt like warm baths. The smell coming off every body of water was sulfurous.
My niece had a towel looped around her throat like a scarf and wore my mother’s wide tortoiseshell sunglasses. She looked like a miniature Brynn, hip cocked and head tilted. The sun leaking through the door made her hair glow white.