Tarcutta Wake Read Online Free Page A

matched up and you couldn’t see the lions’ seams. None of the animals were in glass cabinets; none of them had hundred-year-old paper tags with serial numbers and Latin names in spidery handwriting.
    The mot had been built as a theatre in the twenties. The stage was still there, with its red velvet curtains pulled aside. Some of the animals stood on the stage awkwardly, as if in the middle of a dress rehearsal where everyone had forgotten their lines. The animals that were not on the stage – the audience animals – were waiting patiently for the actor animals to remember.
    The taxidermist lived with his wife in a small house behind the theatre-museum. They’d set up a lounge room in what had once been a dressing room. The wife was in there most days, sitting on the worn-out leather couch and watching daytime television or reading southern gothic novels, while the taxidermist took care of the business and made sure that visitors paid the two dollar entry.
    It was the taxidermist’s wife who fascinated us more than anything, more than the stiff animals or the display of taxidermy tools that looked like instruments of meticulous torture. The taxidermist’s wife, who was in love with a man devoted to preserving the dead. For a time we liked to speculate about who her former lovers might be – the Latin professor, the obituarist, the forensics photographer. But the taxidermist’s wife walked right through the walls of the ideas we had for her, back to the faded couch and Carson McCullers.
    She knew almost nothing about the taxidermy process, and could not answer any of our questions, redirecting us to her husband when we asked about ear pliers or polyurethane forms.
    But she understood the gentleness of such work. She knew a thing or two about responsibility. If we came in early on a Thursday, we’d find her kneeling in front of the pet cabinet with a small white box open on her lap. The pet cabinet was a cupboard stacked with dozens of small white boxes, and in each was the preserved skin of a cat or a small dog, or in one case, a large coffee-coloured rabbit.
    Nobody was coming back for any of them. Loving owners had grieved for them years ago when they died of old age or snail pellets or traffic, and they were brought to the taxidermist wrapped in towels or soft cloth. But these animals were to remain eyeless, jawless, shapeless, marking the point where that grief was no longer a thousand-dollar grief or a twelve-hundred-and fifty-dollar grief.
    Once a week, the taxidermist’s wife would take each skin and rearrange it in its box so that it wouldn’t develop unnatural creases. There was a reverence to it, the way she tucked their tails and paws in. Sometimes we’d hear her speaking softly to the skins, You were so beautiful. Who’d ever wanna get over you, hey? Who’d ever wanna leave you behind?

Vending machine at the end of the world
    He moved into a hotel that had my name and called most nights from the payphone in the hallway. Before that he used to call from a phone box on the corner of Second Avenue and Pine, and I could always hear sirens in the background, and drunks shouting at each other. Fuck you motherfuckers, I can fly. That was when he was sleeping in a park at night, and working during the day selling tickets over the phone for the Seattle Opera. The money he earned selling opera tickets he spent on beer and international phone cards. Then he cut down on beer and moved into the hotel that had my name. That kind of love scared the hell out of me. The kind of love that makes a person cut down on beer and move into a hotel just because of its name.
    When he called it was nearly midnight for me but early morning for him. I lay on my stomach on the ugly grey carpet of the house that I grew up in, the phone cord stretched to the front door so I could blow cigarette smoke through the wire screen. I imagined him sitting with his face to the wall, ignoring the