I passed Lucinda on my way out. She was leaning against the counter, talking on her phone. I knew she must have heard us arguing, and I felt embarrassed that she’d know the intimate details of our personal business. Then I got angry, wondering why she’d let a woman who was obviously in need of a grief counselor mess around with a bunch of genitalia and dead animals.
She waved her hand excitedly toward the middle of the room, across the black lacquered floor. She mouthed the word amazing. Gave me a thumbs-up, then gestured again.
The boar I’d brought the week before stood upright on a platform, sliced down the middle. Intestines spilled from either side, liquid red that actually puddled onto the floor with a splattering sound that came from a speaker lodged in the ceiling. It wore a stethoscope, which dangled down and ended in a spangled resonator bedazzled with a ton of clear crystals. Grossly enlarged phalluses sculpted from what looked like Play-Doh were rammed into the intestinal bits. The boar’s tongue had been yanked from its jaws, pulled out and draped to the side, painted the same viscous red, cartoonish in its slavering. One of its own intestines had been pulled to the front and hung from the other side of its mouth alongside a horrifically large flesh-toned dildo. Its eyes had been replaced with two green objects. I wasn’t quite able to make out what they were.
I turned back to Lucinda. “What’s this?” I held up two fingers to my own eyes, and then pointed them over at the dismembered boar.
She leaned over the desk to hit a switch. Bulbs flickered and lit the animal from the inside, blinking spastically—red and green, snaking around the intestines and puddling down on the floor. The eyes glowed witchy, stared down hard at me over the two yellow tusks that remained untouched.
“She found them in her attic.” Her eyes widened and she nodded emphatically, glasses sliding down her nose. “Christmas lights. Your mother is a genius.”
MACACA RADIATA—BONNET MACAQUE
At eleven years old, I’d never had a pet of my own. Countless dogs littered our home, running wild when they weren’t out hunting with my father, skulking the property around our dead-end street like a pack of sugared-up children. There was the Pomeranian, Sir Charles, but that dog would bite anybody that wasn’t our mother. If we were lucky, sometimes Milo and I might find a clutch of feral kittens hidden beneath the shed out back. They were black and calico-speckled, eyes milky with pus. We tried to name them, but by night they went back to being homeless. Our father wouldn’t let us keep them.
Too many fleas, he said.
For Christmas, I asked for something wriggling. I didn’t care what. It could have been one of the tarantulas I’d fondled down at the pet store or the lizards basking on their fake rocks. I liked the tiny frogs with their neon skins, smaller than my thumbnail. Gerbils. A turtle. I just wanted something I could hold; something that would move and breathe and reciprocate my affection.
What the hell do we need another animal for? my father asked, half asleep in his recliner. He looked groggy, in and out of naps all afternoon, buried beneath a mound of blankets. There’s too many bodies in this house as it is.
The months leading up to the holiday had been tense. Our father was home most afternoons, grumpy and sick. His skin, always too oily, had turned dry and papery, and his normally wild head of hair had diminished along his skull until he’d shaved off the whole mess. He’d even gotten rid of his mustache. It scared me, seeing that stranger’s face in my living room. Milo and I stayed away from the house when he was there, unsure what might set him off. He yelled when we talked too loud, told us things smelled funny. I overheard him throwing up in my parents’ bathroom and groaning like he was about to die. When I asked my mother what was happening, she told me he’d caught a bug.
We’re going bankrupt, Milo whispered one night as we hid out on the back porch. Our father was yelling about something for the third time that night and our mother was trying to calm him down. That happened to a kid’s family from school and then the parents got divorced.
I don’t think we’re broke. Dad hadn’t been at work, but there were still a lot of regulars. He’d gone in only two days that week before spending the rest of his time holed up in the bedroom. I walked down the hallway quiet as a ghost, sure my footsteps might wake him. He’d piled on several different quilts even though the house was humid and stifling that winter.
My mother looked almost as worn out as he did. She called our aunt more than ever, and she did that only when she was really stressed. It’s not going well, I heard her say into the phone as she snuck a cigarette. She blew quick puffs of it out the open kitchen window. He can’t stand being helpless.
Strength was important to our father, in all areas of his life. He kept himself fit using a weight-lifting set in our carport. He used hand strengtheners regularly, working the muscles in his palms and fingers. His body was his temple, the thing that enabled him to do the work he loved most. You can’t be a taxidermist if you don’t have the right body for it, he told me, pointing out the strong line of his biceps. Gotta cut through meat. Gotta saw through bone.
My father was tall, but we both had the same type of body: naturally muscular and built like bulldogs. My brother, willowy and slight, could barely lift the smallest barbell over his head. Our father tried to get him to work out, but Milo wasn’t interested. He liked reading. He wanted to spend his time playing video games. He talked about his feelings in a way that made my father cringe. Strength is here, too, my father told me, tapping his temple. Can’t be strong in your body if you’re not strong in your mind.
On Christmas morning our parents sat with mugs of coffee, sweat beading their temples as we opened gifts out on the back patio, the only place in our house where we could actually fit a Christmas tree. Our mother liked to decorate all the taxidermied pieces inside. She put Santa hats on the deer mounts and hung tinsel from the squirrels. Shiny red bulbs dangled off the ears of the arctic fox that my father kept in the den.
Milo and I sat cross-legged on the floor. The wrapping paper adhered to our sticky fingers, the cheap dollar-store kind with colors that melted onto our hands, giving us radioactive fingerprints that smeared onto everything we touched.
Oh my God, my mother crowed, as I pried open a thrice-recycled J. C. Penney box. Amid the tornado of white tissue paper was a crimson sweater set. You’re gonna get a lot of use from that. So pretty. She grabbed it and held it up to my chest. Wow, beautiful.
My mother bought me stuff that would never leave the house, much less have the tags removed. Sometimes Brynn would take things I didn’t want, like the makeup or the gummy lip gloss that always smeared my chin, but most of the clothes were too big for her skinny frame.
Milo opened packages of socks and underwear, several knives, and a killer sharpener that would make its way into my bedroom. The last gift my father set in front of me, wrapped in butcher paper. He was sitting pale in the sunlight, barely able to sip his coffee. It scared me to see him looking so sick—my mother kept reaching over and rubbing at his thigh with her hand, as if she were trying to warm him up.
C’mon. Let’s see it. He used the tip of his finger to pry open an end, Scotch tape already pulling free in the humidity. My heart beat hard inside my chest as I envisioned a little buddy that would live in my bedroom. The box was too small to hold a puppy, but I thought they might have gotten me an iguana, or even one of those desert tortoises that could eat lettuce from the palm of your hand. Milo looked over, eyes darting between the box in my lap and our father, who’d handed him nothing.