On the Clock of Decomposition
Originally Published in eFiction, May 2014
Matt finds the dog behind a spruce. It’s too dark to see its condition, so he comes closer and as he does, he can hear the dog’s breath churn. It doesn’t growl at him, just stares with its reflective green eyes. He hesitates before picking it up, but when the dog shows no sign of aggression he lifts it to his chest, listens to the sound of its frothing exhales against the wool of his hunting coat. It isn’t until he gets the dog back to the road in front of his headlights that he sees its grey fur is sticky with blood and its back leg is bent in too many angles where his bumper had hit it. It’s an older mutt with ratty fur. He puts the dog on the trunk of the car as he readies the back seat. He spreads out last month’s newspaper across the leather, careful to overlap the pages. When he lifts the dog off the trunk there is blood on the car, black and slick in the dark.
He drives home with the heat off to prevent the bird in the passenger’s seat from beginning to decay. It is too cold a night to catch a hummingbird, he knows, which is what made it so much more bizarre. He’d spent the day sitting in the brush by a stream waiting for the woodchuck to reappear. He’d been watching that woodchuck for weeks now, observing its habits as he’d always done with his father when he was young. Learning the subtlest movements of its body, the angle of head to neck as it gnawed through a bough. It is important to know everything about the animal before you shoot it. His father said you could always tell when a taxidermist does his homework.
He was waiting for the woodchuck, his mind settling deep into the quiet of the woods, when the flutter of wings by his left ear distracted him– a vivid green hummingbird poking its beak desperately into and out of the nooks of crumbling leaves, plants dying for the winter. He watched for a moment, the hummingbird’s wings a blur in the cold, watched as it slowly lowered towards the ground. Wings beating slower until it hovered barely an inch above the dirt. He took careful note of the color of the hummingbird’s eyes, black but with dark flecks of green, before drawing his right hand forward to catch it. Its heart whispering against his hand, like the vibration of a distant train, until he placed his fingers beneath the wings and compressed its thorax, waited for the whir of its heart to quiet.
Mona used to love hummingbirds– she’d set out feeders by the kitchen window filled with red sugar water. In the cold vacuum of his car, he tries to forget that.
He lives in his childhood home but it is not the same way it was when he was a child. There are the touches left from his marriage, from before Mona died– brick-bordered flowerbeds filled with the brown sunflower stems of seasons past, pale yellow shingled house siding, a mailbox painted in cow spots. It’d made Mona laugh. The inside of the house is also filled with Mona. Mona’s good wedding china, the silk couch with the dragon pattern, the side tables she’d stenciled flowers onto, the paint bleeding into the rough wood grain. What has changed since Mona are the mounted animals she’d never let him put out– the white-tailed deer, the coyote, and the rattlesnake.
The garage is the only thing that has stayed the same since Matt’s childhood. The left side is filled with the same tools that his father used, the tables and vices. A wall of saws, tweezers, hooks, and drills, drawers of clay, borax, wire, and thread, asbestos and artificial glass eyes. A hoard of instruments his father had spent his whole life collecting.
He parks his car in the right side of the garage. The dog has gone quiet in the back seat. He gets out from behind the wheel and makes a nest out of anything he can find. He takes a wooden crate from a shipment of borax and stuffs it with straw he usually uses to stuff small birds that don’t need clay moulds. Then he goes and picks up the dog, newspaper and all, and deposits it gently into the crate.
The dog’s eyes are still open but the frothy breaths are less frequent, more labored. The blood has begun to clot against its matted fur. In the opaque light of his garage, he can see now that the dog is wearing a collar, but there are no metal tags on it. It’s a blue collar, well worn. The dog is old, and the tufts of fur around its snout reminds him of a distinguished man’s mustache.
It is already ten at night, and the hummingbird has been dead for over four hours. He decides to monitor the dog’s progress, and that if it makes it till morning he will drive it to the nearest shelter, in Morgantown. He does not come up with a plan for if the dog gets worse in the meantime. Instead, he retrieves the bird from the car and places it on the work table.
The first part of preparing the animal is always his least favorite part. He takes a wisp of cotton from a drawer and fills the hummingbird’s beak, then binds it shut with spare wire and tape. He knows that it is just to keep the beak in place, perfectly in place– but it is during this process that he always has doubts. It is not anything he admits to himself, simply a tremor in his normally steady hand that serves as any indication of hesitation. In binding the bird’s beak shut, he is reminded of his sister, Clara, who would sit beneath this table decades earlier as his father taught him how to mount whatever they had caught that day. And then the night she’d gotten up to go to the bathroom. She was maybe four, or even younger. They were binding shut the mouth of a squirrel and her eyes widened at the sight, and she started beating her small hands against their fathers pant leg, screaming let it go, let it go–
The dog in the borax box lets out a whine, high pitched and lingering. The dog is trying to lick its broken leg but cannot reach for the pain in its ribs; the leg is swelling and the angles in the bone seem sharper than they had in the dark. He looks at the peg board in front of him, at the tools for filing bones, forceps, snips, scalpels. The dog whines again.
Matt calls his sister.
Clara has four dogs. As a girl, his sister never had stuffed animals, teddy bears or sewn wool horses or rabbits in bonnets. One day when they were both young, they were at the corner store and there was a soft brown bear, perfectly sized for Clara’s five year-old arms, thin as twigs, and she asked their father if he would buy it for her. He chuckled.
“I’ll buy you a rifle when you’re old enough,” he replied, “and then you can make your own.” He was kidding, would never have had his daughter go out and shoot. But he didn’t buy her the bear. Clara never once asked for a baby doll– perhaps she didn’t think it belonged in a house of stuffed deer and woodchucks and owls. She has three daughters, now.
The phone rings five times before the youngest of the three girls picks up.
“Poke!” Audrey says. She is miffed when Matt asks for her mother.
Clara lives on the other side of Pennsylvania with her husband, Rich, who worked vaguely and unimportantly on Nixon’s campaign. Her whole family calls Matt Poke from when his nieces were younger and they’d run up to him and poke his gut till he chased them around the house. The girls would hide in the hall closet and he’d pretend not to find them until they came out to poke his stomach again. They’re too old for it now, but in the fashion of unwanted nicknames, Poke stuck.
“Call the police department,” Clara says about the dog. “They probably have missing pet reports on file.” Clara recommends this though she knows that the town Sheriff unplugs the station phone at night, that the only precinct to contact this late is three towns away. Yet she proposes it anyway because she enjoys giving advice, whether or not it is helpful.
“It’ll have to wait until morning,” he says.
Clara attempts to make plans with him for the coming weekend, wants to come over and help him go through some of Mona’s things. He rebuffs her, as always. It has been over a year since Mona’s death, but his phone conversations with his sister still end the same way as months before.
“Maybe next weekend, Clara.”
“Okay, Poke.”
He begins his wait for morning by skinning the hummingbird. Its feathers are the iridescent green of a fresh oil slick, and he runs his callused fingertips over the edges of them. He then takes a number three scalpel, the smallest he owns, and draws a gentle line from the hollow if its breast to the base of the tail. The incision is as thin as a hair, and as he separates skin from body he is entranced by the familiar motions of it, the gentle tugs of tissue. He sprinkles borax as he goes, but lightly, being careful not to stain the feathers.
The feathers are so beautiful in a hummingbird. As he works, he thinks he understands why Mona must have loved them.
It always amazes Matt how eyes change in the few moments between life and death. He remembers in the woods, holding the hummingbird in his hand, how the flecks of green hid in the black, like water catching the light at the bottom of a well. Iridescent as the feathers. Now they are dull, and he feels no remorse as he enlarges the occipital hole with small pincers, removing the eyes, and then the brain and the tongue.
He has tucked a clean rag around the dog, partly to hide the blood and partly because the dog looked cold. The bleeding has slowed and the dog is slipping in and out of sleep. Matt bundles straw for stuffing the bird as he watches the blanket rise and fall raggedly with the dog’s breath. The wind hisses through cracks in the garage door. He reaches over and feels the dog’s nose with his free hand. It is black speckled pink, and it is freezing. With his fingers to the dogs nose, he feels like a mother placing her hand against a child’s fevered brow, as he’d seen Clara do for her daughters countless times. It was also what he did when Mona was in the hospital. Rushed there after the accident and it was the only gesture that seemed to make sense at the time, with the silence of tubes and the heart monitor that had already been turned off.
He casually got back into taxidermy after his father’s death, over ten years ago. Only did it once a month, maybe less. But when Mona died so suddenly– a Wednesday, one minute there, the next minute not– this is when he began preserving animals in earnest.
He does not wish to notice this trend in his life. Instead, he turns on the space heater.
“Boy, you look cold,” he says aloud to the dog.
Here is something Matt does not know: Mona was thinking of leaving him if she hadn’t been in the accident first. He doesn’t know that in the bottom of her bedside table, hidden beneath gum wrappers and receipts, in one of those many drawers he’d yet to look in since her death, there was a journal. Inside of it was a letter to him from his wife, accusing him of respecting the animals he mounts more than all the people around him who try to love him.
He will never read this letter. A few weeks ago, Clara came over, and she sifted through drawers and sorted through Mona’s things without Matt’s knowledge, as she often does, and she found the journal. She knew that Mona was right, that her brother had been meticulously replacing pain with straw and clay and wire, so that his emotions more closely resembled his own taxidermied animals than who she once knew Matt to be; a fact about him that she had been trying to ignore.
On her way home that night, Clara threw the journal in a lake off of Interstate 176. Then she turned the radio up and she tried to forget.
She will never tell a soul.
He looks at the skin of the hummingbird, the smallest animal he has ever attempted to preserve. Its spine is at his fingertips, and he holds the bone snips in his right hand, ready. Its vertebrae are so fragile, its spine a zipper of spun glass. Mona had a spine of steel but it had broken anyway, in the end. Owls, coyotes, woodchucks– he has held all of their spines in his hands. He removed them with snips and saws and razors and replaced them with straw, or clay, or wire. Within a few hours, a few days, they looked alive again.
The dog is still whining. Mona always wanted a dog, but Matt had said no for the same reason Clara had never gotten a stuffed animal. A living dog doesn’t belong in a house of mounted animals, a house of glass eyes.
He looks at the dog’s eyes. They are watery and streaks of black are leaking from the inner corners to its snout. The sun is up. He goes to the dog. He places his hand on its nose again, still cold. Runs his hand down across its ears and its eyes close to his touch. Gentle stroke down the side, but the dog yelps as his hand nears its back. Another spine, he thinks. Another spine at his fingertips.
He calls the sheriff’s office. There is no report for a missing dog. The sheriff offers Matt the number of animal control.
“They can take care of it for you,” the sheriff says. Matt assumes this means putting the dog to sleep, and he declines the sheriff’s offer. He knows that they will kill it at the shelter in Morgantown, too. The hummingbird lays forgotten on the table in many pieces. Its wings have become saturated with borax and blood in his absence, hours of work ruined by a half hour’s distraction. He sweeps it to the side of his workspace. It is a lost cause– he does not know how to return the original luster to the feathers.
He gets the sense that this dog will not be beautiful in death, either. Its fur will not kaleidoscope in the light after it dies. It will simply lie there in a borax crate, on the clock of decomposition. He knows he would not be able to stuff it when it dies. He sees now that a dog is different then a wild thing, a bird or a squirrel. Its eyes are too human. Mona had always wanted a dog, he thinks again.
He expects the dog to die of a broken spine, as Mona had. It does not matter that the dog’s tail is wagging and that its good leg is moving slightly, that its pain is actually drawn from broken ribs. If Matt used his knowledge of animal behavior and anatomy, he would be able to figure this out. But instead, he binds the dog’s broken ribcage in a bandage made for securing taxidermied birds to their perches, and he splints and encases the dog’s broken leg with plaster intended for reshaping the skin of a deer’s head.
If the dog lives, he thinks, he will keep it.