Photo: “Touchstone Wildlife and Art Museum, Haughton” by
Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau is licensed under CC BY 2.0
It’s hard to remember not to coo at the babies,
the soft swirls of the raccoon kits’ fur, the little white teeth
lining the lion cub’s levered-open yawn. I do not like dead things,
but pains have been taken to ensure that when I stand surrounded
by dozens of dusty, still chests, I can imagine them breathing.
More than the usual salt and formaldehyde—
Some wear sunglasses. Others, like the doe hanging limp
in the crooked sneer of the cross-eyed hyena, exclaim
in little paper-and-wire bubbles, yelp why-I-oughta!
with a vehemence that doesn’t match their bored expressions.
The taxidermist’s widow is deaf as a diaphonized adder
and misses our nervous laughter at the more grotesque exhibits.
Her glinting eyes, though, are the farthest thing from clouded resin.
She catches some negligible gesture, interprets it
as interest in the zebras, and urges us over the barrier
into their paper-mâché savanna. She questions why we hesitate
to run our fingers down the stiff bristles of their stripes,
why we won’t sit astride their backs and test the strength
of their wooden spines. The kids love this, she says.
When they come on their field trips, I can’t get ‘em out of here.
She snaps three pictures before she lets us climb out,
each blurry with the shaking of her hands,
and points out a blank spot on the wall above us
where the best can hang until the masking tape rots.
Released, we retreat to the museum’s back
where a steep blue staircase climbs a tight blue hallway
to a humid second story. By the time I step off the landing,
I decide I have half had my fill of corpses. I steel myself for
another unicorn head, maybe, another dead horse
beaten into a bad joke, but instead I see THE RAPTURE
in crooked, peeling letters, paintings of empty bodies
piloting crashed cars, manifestos and bible verses
and a strange, paranoid arithmetic papering the walls.
Above it all, the taxidermist’s portrait reigns like a god.
We stop dead, a long moment, until I meet my own gaze
in the sheen of preservation glass and clarity hits
like a bolt to the heart or a pickup to my wide-eyed stare.
I do not like dead things, but I know well the mad desire
to stuff and mount the end of any small world.
Phoebe Cragon is a technical writer from Shreveport, Louisiana. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Centenary College, and her work has previously appeared in publications such as Rejection Letters, The Bookends Review, and The Writing Disorder.