Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  Lights flickered to life, fluorescents strobing spastically. Suzanne screamed loud enough to maybe wake the boar, half-undressed on the metal table in the center of the room. Its face sagged forward, opened from below, unencumbered of its tusks. Those sat upright, placed side by side like yellow daggers. The boar’s naked frame peeked out. Its bones were so human, so like our own. The skeleton was sad and small without the weight of muscles and fat to flesh it out.

  I pointed the others to the front of the shop and told them to drink the rest of the beer. Said there were candy bars and bags of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky under the counter, hidden in the cubby next to the cash register.

  My father’s tools were put away, except for one small knife sitting out on the countertop. I set down my beer and picked up the blade. More than anything, I wanted to show Brynn how capable I was. I knew she’d never see me as someone she wanted, not the way that I wanted her. I was too much girl, too much of the same. But I could show her my worth in different ways.

  I’d bring the animal back to life. It would stretch into a run, craning its neck, arched and triumphant. Or I could make it look coy and sweet, a cartoon animal. I’d create anything, everything. My hands commanded the flesh, brought life back from the grip of death. I had that power in me.

  This is what you like to do? Skin these things? She ran a hand down the boar’s back leg—down its thick femur, scraped and bleached. Then she brought the thumb of that hand to my mouth. She pressed it there for a second, like pushing a pause button, and then leaned into me with an exhale of yeasty breath. When we kissed, smashed up against the metal table, I didn’t care that the knife fell, or that her beer tipped over and spilled onto the boar’s feet.

  Her eyes were slit and sleepy, cheeks dimpled. It was a soft face like a powdered doughnut, all sugary-sweet. Our mouths met again. My heart thumped wildly in my chest, scrambling behind my ribs like a burrowing animal. I wanted to stroke the hair on her arms, mark the wide mole on her neck, skim the bony collarbones visible from the top of her nightgown. She brought my hand below its trailing end, swept it up her legs, sticky, damp with sweat and tacky from the humidity. Pressing my fingers forward into the vee of her crotch, I found the warm, snarling heart of her. I let my fingers jut there, mouths still eating at each other. Rubbing through the cotton, so much like my own.

  There was nothing to say, and that seemed right. I tucked into her, through the underwear, both of us breathing hard, listening for the sound of our friends in the other room. When one of them knocked something over, Brynn and I jumped apart. She reached for her beer and nearly tipped it over again before draining the last sip. My own mouth was dry, but I couldn’t drink any more. We went into the front of the shop, with our friends. Turned off the lights, played hide-and-seek. Brynn and I hid behind the bear with its shaggy coat. Our bodies like shadows. Hands finding each other in the dark. Lips grazing. Every time we parted I could smell the imprint of her on me: her spit, my spit, hands full of the scent of her.

  When we crawled into bed at 3:00 AM, Brynn said good night and then turned to face the wall. I rolled onto my side and watched the clock, but instead of the numbers, I just kept seeing everything I wanted stretched out in front of me. All of it set out neatly, laid cleanly and precisely. Easy to navigate as the skeletal structure waiting for me back at the shop. I just had to set the bones the way I wanted them and it could all be mine.

  2

  Milo scrounged for quarters in the center console of his truck, unseating crumpled fast-food napkins and dried oak leaves. “I hate all this shitty construction.”

  The gallery was one of the new places that had recently cropped up. There were vintage furniture stores and craft beer bars in what used to be a strip mall. Newcomers renovated the beat-up sections of the downtown area, painting walls and repaving streets with brick until everyone’s tires bounced at speeds of over fifteen miles per hour. It wasn’t new to me. It was what Central Floridians did: pave over everything so they could forget what had been there before. Theme parks and chain restaurants were built over homes and libraries. Banks took the place of family-owned businesses. There were highways built over historic areas; places where you wouldn’t know something had ever happened unless a person told you or you read about it in a book. The park where the Seminole once lived had been razed to build carnival space, which in turn had been repurposed as a power building that eventually became a Publix. No one ever seemed to remember what came before. A kind of local amnesia, my father called it. That particular portion of Morse held an old appliance store with a run-down ACE sign papering most of the front window, a co-op that sold locally grown food, and the gallery.

  Though all of the buildings were brick, Lucinda Rex’s place was painted a flat slate gray. Nothing hinted that it was even a business, other than the front door, where REX was etched in glass, as if a dinosaur might be housed on the premises.

  “Is it okay that you’re missing so much work?” I asked. “Are they going to fire you?”

  He shrugged and finally dug free some loose change. “If they were gonna fire me they’d have done it by now.” Six quarters nestled in his palm alongside a couple of straw wrappers and an old french fry. “I’ve worked there so long now I don’t think they even remember I get paid.”

  Milo had parked out in the street in front of one of the meters. It was broken, but he tried putting the quarters in anyway. Instead of taking the change, it kept spitting them back out into his hand.

  Another quarter. “Huh,” he said. Another quarter.

  I loved my brother, but the way he lived made no sense. No rules, no lists. No caring if his bills got sent to collections or if his truck ran out of gas on the highway and he had to walk three miles in the Florida heat to get a refill. He once told me he’d be happy to live in a tent if it meant never keeping a job. Often he slept until noon and stayed up until dawn reading books in bed. As a lifelong control freak, I found it infuriating. I’d never be the kind of person who could stop caring. Brynn had loved his complete lack of anger and outrage. I get enough of that from you, she said. Let him just be Milo. Like a warm glass of milk. Wholesome and happy.

  “I’m gonna go talk to the lady,” I said. “Find out where she wants us to deliver the package.”

  Milo dropped in another quarter and, when it rolled out, put in a fifth. “‘Deliver the package’? You make it sound like we’re dropping off a kilo of cocaine.”

  “What do you think’s inside the boar?”

  “You’re so fucking stupid, I can’t believe we’re related.” He stuffed the quarters in his pocket and leaned back against the truck. “I think this thing is busted.”

  “No shit.”

  It was weird outside in that part of town. It didn’t feel like old Florida. The sidewalk had been power-washed into submission and no plant life remained, aside from a row of very small cacti set in the gravel that trimmed the edge of the building. The door that led into the gallery was darkly tinted with an intercom placed next to the handle. I pushed the red button on the bottom. It buzzed and the latch clicked open.

  Milo and I looked at each other and laughed.

  “If I’m not back in ten minutes, call the police.”

  “If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’m leaving and you can walk home.”

  Inside was a solid thirty degrees colder than out on the pavement. It was dimly lit and the floors were painted black. The space was disorienting, and I thought that said a lot about Lucinda Rex—that she was the kind of person who’d want you confused; maybe the type who’d set up a situation so that when you stumbled out the end of the corridor, she’d be there waiting for you, perfectly cool and collected. I was always impressed with people who could think that far ahead. Though I planned out everything, my life was somehow made up of an endless series of unwanted surprises.

  The hallway opened into the actual warehouse. Large objects sat draped with tawny canvases. A few nude mannequins leaned against the far wall. Some were miss
ing legs, others arms, and one contorted body in the corner had no head. Light installations dangled from the ceiling, set to strike the walls and the floor and the mannequin bodies.

  Lucinda walked out from the back dressed all in black. “Great, you’re here. Where is it?”

  There was a compelling quality to the way she held herself, so erect a rod might have been jammed into her underwear. I immediately felt myself shifting, trying to stand taller in my dirty clothes.

  “It’s still outside. I wasn’t sure how you wanted to do this.”

  “Just cart it through the front.” She stared at me without blinking and I tried to stare back the same way, then looked at the floor.

  I was always drawn to a certain kind of energy. A specific kind of woman, one who was self-assured and knew she could do and have whatever she wanted. Lucinda smiled, all teeth and strong jawbone and beautiful hair. I walked back down the hallway quickly, trying not to smudge up the floors.

  Back outside, Milo was checking on the boar. “He looks good. Kinda cross-eyed maybe.”

  “He always looked cross-eyed.”

  We unstrapped the tarp and lifted it up and over. Milo climbed into the truck bed and pushed the mount forward until I could pull it off the end. We got it through the door and moved down the long hallway. Boar hair sprinkled everywhere.

  “You can put it over here.” Lucinda stood in the far left corner of the room, next to one of the canvased objects. Just knowing that she was watching me made my hands tremble. I was forced to clench them hard into the boar’s rear.

  Once we set it down, I wished we’d never brought it. It looked out of its element and much smaller than it had in the shop, where it had always sat like a king lording over its lesser subjects. I thought of Brynn and how her hand had once touched its leg, fingers sliding up the bone now encased in fur.

  Lucinda crouched and assessed the tusk that had broken. Her skirt rode up high, exposing a lot of thigh—she had great legs, sinewy and strong, lines of muscles standing out until I could see where they connected with tendon, slipping over the joint. “This looks much better. Very clean. I can hardly see the break now.”

  “Good. I mean, thanks.”

  Milo narrowed his eyes. He knew, I could tell, and it made me feel stressed out. He was watching my hands, which were scrunched around the hem of my shirt so I would stop wiping my palms on my jeans.

  “So what are you gonna do with him?” He patted the boar on the rump. Dust flew up and hung suspended in the air.

  “He’s part of an installation. I was hoping your mother would be interested in collaborating.”

  “Our mother?” I couldn’t imagine what our mother would do in an art gallery. The only public art she’d ever engaged in was face painting at the fall festival. She freehanded everything: animals, robots, monsters, fairies. The kids lined up around the building for her.

  “I’d like to see if she’d participate.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Here. Just give her my card.” Lucinda handed me one. It was black and embossed with white writing. When her hand touched mine, I could feel how tough she was; the strength in her fingers, the long, lean line of her forearms. Even seeing those small muscles made me want to slip my hands along her body and feel for the rest of them. Every time I found a woman I was really interested in, I started thinking about her in terms of how I might disassemble her. It was unnerving.

  I cleared my throat and stepped back, examining the card. “I’m not sure she’ll want to participate.”

  Milo reached toward the tarp next to the boar and lifted a corner. “So what you got under here? This place is pretty empty.”

  “Please, don’t touch anything.” Lucinda took the corner from his hand. “Have your mother call me, I’d love to speak with her.”

  “Sure thing.” Milo nodded and looked at me, motioning toward the doorway.

  “Oh, and I’d be very interested in looking at the other animals you’ve got displayed in your shop. Let me know if you’d be willing to part with them.” Lucinda smiled broadly, and I could nearly count all the perfect white teeth in her head. In her black business suit she looked like a beautiful, dangerous predator. I imagined her mounted on a branch, crouched over an unsuspecting herd of deer.

  Sometimes I hated the way I was. That I could look at an incredibly lovely woman and picture her mounted like a dead animal made me wonder what was wrong with my brain.

  I moved toward the door. “Call if you need anything else, or if you need help with the boar.”

  Outside, I let the sun warm me until my blood ran hot again. My scalp burned where my hair was parted, the braid hanging halfway down my back. I twisted the hank of hair and yanked, trying to get my thoughts in order.

  “What was that about?” Milo unlocked my side of the truck and then walked around the front to climb in his side. “You into her?”

  “It was about nothing. We sold the boar. Now we can spend the money on groceries or something.”

  We drove home down back streets. I rolled down my window and let the air wash over me. It was sunny and warm, but already clouds lined with black were boiling up on the horizon, out over the lake. Lucinda was pretty, but I could learn to forget. I’d done it before.

  I scooped a palmful of air, opening my fingers in the wind. We drove past the old convenience store that had once been a Chevron, a Texaco, and most recently a 7-Eleven. “Could you drop me at the shop? Gonna flip a few deer mounts. Need to catch up on work.”

  “You need to catch up on sleep.” He turned down our street, toward the shop. “It’s not healthy, how you’re acting. Even Dad went home sometimes.”

  What I could have said, but didn’t: Dad had a wife and a family to go home to, not a shitty apartment with no central air and a roach infestation under the scummy kitchen sink. And even then, it wasn’t enough to keep him going. He owned a business and his own home, had a wife and kids who loved him. Grandkids, even. With all of that, he left his body behind for someone he loved to find. A mess for his daughter to clean up.

  I dug the keys from my pocket. The goat still sat in the window, looking lonesome without its sexual partners. “Maybe we can have Mom set up something more appropriate. Wouldn’t hurt to keep her occupied.”

  “What, you don’t want her hanging around that creepy gallery?”

  My father would’ve wanted me to keep our mother home. Would’ve liked me taking care of her the way he would’ve: given her a list of tasks, made her feel needed. He wasn’t the kind of dad who talked about his feelings, but sometimes he came up with some stunners out of nowhere. Once over beers, he’d smiled and leaned in, like he was gonna offer some sage advice. Your mother is a little funny, he said, touching my arm. Laughing. She does things sometimes that don’t make any sense. It’s part of her charm, sure, but it means we gotta watch out for her. Don’t want her getting into trouble.

  “I think we can find something for her to do a little closer to home,” I said. “She doesn’t need that kind of excitement.”

  “Excitement? She’s not a toddler, Jessa.”

  “Well, she’s sure acting like one.”

  He looked unhappy and I couldn’t understand why. Did he want our mother given free rein to create whatever animal porn she wanted? Did he like her running around in the middle of the night?

  Milo sighed and I got out of the truck before he could say whatever he was about to drop on me. I felt like a nerve rubbed raw, probably from stress and lack of sleep and the fact that I hadn’t had sex in months.

  “See you at dinner,” he finally said, pointing a finger at me through the truck window. I waved him away and went inside, thunder already rumbling in the distance.

  All the lights were off and I left them that way. My eyes were gritty and sticky. I was tired of everything. We should’ve been open for business, but there was no one coming. Most of our work was done piecemeal, calls over the phone from middling hunters looking for price estimates. The drop-ins had dw
indled to nothing.

  I sat down in a chair next to a rack of outdated hunting magazines and bent down to unlace my boots. The socks I wore had holes in each heel; they didn’t match and I hadn’t washed them in a while. Every part of me felt achy, as if I were coming down with a mild flu. This happened to me every time I got anxious about the business, and recently everything was about the business. How we had no money, how I didn’t know what to do about my mother, how I wasn’t the man that my father was or would ever be, but maybe he wasn’t the man I’d thought he was. So what did I know about anything?

  Leaning back, I propped my head against a rolled-up T-shirt, one with a picture of a deer with red crosshairs superimposed over its sleek body. I fell asleep there, telling myself it would be just for a minute, and then I’d start working on one of the many pieces stored in the skinning fridge. Everything felt easier on the cusp of sleep.

  My parents’ house sat lit by buttery circles of dueling streetlamps. There were homes on either side, but no one lived in them. FOR RENT signs perpetually swung in the weedy front lawns. It stayed swampy year-round. Soupy ditchwater bred mosquitoes and their squirming larvae until they clouded the sky. They bled us dry, tiny vampires that hugged our necks and the backs of our calves, leaving behind bright pink welts.

  The entrance to the local cemetery was at the far end of the street. Milo and I played hide-and-seek there when we were young. It was where we’d shared our first cigarettes and our beginner sips of whiskey, backs leaned against the lot’s sole mausoleum. It belonged to the Laniers, a family that died out before we were born. We traced our fingers in the engravings until we could sign the names in our sleep. They felt like family we’d never met, watching over us as we ran around the weedy tombstones. We forgot about the bodies buried below us in the dirt, so focused on the fun we were having.