Setting the raccoon down on the table next to its twin, I wiped a mixture of blood and sweat on my jeans. Then I pulled my braids from their elastics and took down my hair. Digging my fingers into it, I yanked and yanked, but it didn’t help. As usual, I felt nothing.
Earlier:
Milo said that when he hit the babies with his car, they’d just been sitting together in the middle of the road. Instead of leaving them there, he felt the old taxidermy impulse kick in. We couldn’t ever leave roadkill behind. Something inside us always made us stop to pick up dead things.
Funny, right? Hit a dead animal and I immediately think of Dad. Don’t be wasteful, Son. Couldn’t help but bring them home. He’d carried them beneath his arm like a couple of stuffed toys.
He laughed, but it was the flighty kind that verged on tears. Wiping his nose on his bare arm, he left behind a shiny trail of snot. I glanced inside the plastic bag and saw them curled up against each other. They were fully intact. They could have been sleeping.
It was late and I was tired. You didn’t mean to. Don’t get upset.
I know that! Milo’s eyes leaked steadily. They’d been bloodshot for weeks and he just let them drip, like he couldn’t even feel tears anymore. My own eyes were so dry they felt tacky with grit. He stood there looking shamefaced and I couldn’t even empathize. I just wanted to smack him.
Brynn would’ve told him to suck it up. She’d have dug a finger in his side to try to make him laugh, even though he hated to be tickled. He sniffled again, and my fingers clenched on the bag’s handle, dead bodies rustling against the plastic. Most taxidermists didn’t even take on raccoons, and he should have known that. The threat of rabies was too great.
There wasn’t time to clip the wheel, he said. They just looked so surprised.
Don’t worry about it.
It was hard to talk to my brother without yelling about everything he’d done wrong. Wasted tears over dead raccoons when he should’ve been doing anything to fix what was actually broken. All those years fighting to keep Brynn with me, bottling my feelings because I knew they made her flighty, and he’d dumped his emotions over her like a leaky roof. Yet there he sat, crying, knowing Brynn would never stick around for it.
You did this to us, I thought, hating the stupid, woebegone look on his face. You did this, and you knew better.
It was two o’clock in the morning and pitch-dark, no stars out to pinprick the sky. Lolee was curled on one end of my parents’ couch. She’d tried waiting up for Milo, her back rigid, like maybe if she sat up tall enough, she’d keep her eyes open. The news came on, then a movie I didn’t watch. There were car chases, gunshots, wrecks, and siren shrieks until my father came out and dialed the volume down to a low whimper. Lolee fell asleep with her head buried between the cushions. As the blue lights bounced off her pale, wheaty hair, I thought how strange it was to see her sleep the exact same way as Brynn, knowing that it might be the only way I’d ever see Brynn sleep again. Through her children.
But back to the work.
I finished my last beer and carted the raccoons out to the truck. Milo had fallen asleep in my father’s recliner, so I’d put Lolee to bed myself, knowing he’d never do it.
The raccoon bodies were still warm, as if they might wake up and crawl out of the bag and onto my lap. There were no open wounds. Nothing stained the bag, no blood or fecal matter.
They could’ve been mistaken for sleeping if it weren’t for their necks. Their skulls lolled, flopping back limply against their tiny backs. Nothing made an animal look less alive than tension leaked from the spine. It was why we worked so hard to pose our taxidermy just right. Too loose or cricked and you couldn’t help but imagine their death.
I’d only ever seen it once on a human body.
Before Lolee was born, we’d gone out to the lake as a family. It was just the four of us down at the water: Milo, four-year-old Bastien asleep on a towel, and me and Brynn splashing each other in the wake from the boats. When my brother picked Bastien up to take him to the shade, his head rolled all the way back, hanging limp over Milo’s arm. Brynn screamed and crossed the lakefront in wild strides, the towel around her waist flopping off into the water. When she grabbed him from Milo, I worried she might accidentally hurt the kid.
Don’t you do that, she muttered into his neck. Don’t you ever, ever do that!
Bewildered, Bastien clung to her and cried. They stayed like that for a long time. Her clutching him, his chubby kid legs dragging down her body. Her top had twisted to the side, nearly exposing her breasts. Milo tried to drape a towel around her shoulders and she turned away jerkily, baring her teeth.
When she got like that, I knew from her body language to leave her alone, but Milo never knew when to quit. He was good at listening and empathizing, but he was always too close, too present. Sometimes Brynn needed space; she needed to feel bad and be by herself. In that moment with Bastien, he wanted to touch her even though she looked feral. When he dropped a hand onto her shoulder, she tensed, but let it rest. I gathered up our things while the three of them huddled together. She’d needed that and I hadn’t known.
Brynn liked the solidness of married life. She told me this constantly, pointing to her mother as an example of what she never wanted to be: thrice married, living in a trailer, working at the same shitty job for fourteen years to support kids she never spent time with. If my marriage doesn’t work out, I’m not sticking around. I’m not gonna be one of those women who stay in the same place all their life. It’s too fucking depressing.
I knew her marriage would work out because I’d given her exactly what she wanted: a stable household, kids she hardly had to raise, and a normal husband who’d love her despite her flaws. Someone who was thoughtful, did romantic things like buy flowers for three-month anniversaries. A guy who’d listen and care about her hurts and share his own feelings. I’d given her someone I could trust. I knew he’d love her almost as much as I did. Almost.
Where was I?
I made my way through the dark store with practiced ease. I knew how many feet from the register to the shelving units on the opposite wall, knew the breadth between the boar’s tusks and the magazine rack. I knew where the bin of gator heads sat and where to walk to avoid knocking them over. When I flipped on the lights in the back, they produced the familiar buzzing that signaled peace to my brain.
I set the grocery bag on the metal table and removed the raccoons. They lay pliant. Eyes liquid, hands still reaching for each other.
Where’s your mother? I asked, picking up the one on the left. Stroking a finger down the length of its soft back. Where’s your kin?
I busied myself with the prep work that usually calmed me: laying out the tools in neat, orderly rows. The coupled fleshers, the scraper. Small scalpels and sharp kitchen scissors I used to clip the tough bits of ligament. I washed my hands, waited for the water to warm up, and then washed them again. Pulled out my apron from the closet and settled it over my body like an afghan. Standing in front of the table again, I looked down at the raccoons and to my amazement found I couldn’t concentrate.
I grabbed a six-pack from the fridge and set it on the metal prep tray before cracking one open. Then I picked up one of the scalpels, testing the blade against the ball of my thumb. Maybe they weren’t sharp enough. Pulling out the whetstone from the drawer below the sink, I sat down and methodically sharpened every blade. The steady scritch-scratching added to the cloudy fog the beer had already stewed in my brain. Once everything was sharpened and I’d finished my drink, there was nothing left to do but look at those two dead babies.