Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

LEPORIDAE OF THE ORDER LAGOMORPHA—RABBIT KITS

  Movement under my hand broke the spell.

  Don’t stop. Why’d you stop?

  Fingers splayed wide on her bare skin, I prayed the fluttering away. Let myself think it was an anomaly. Maybe her stomach was upset, something that could be quickly cured by antacids.

  Here, like this. Brynn moved my palm from where I’d cupped her belly button and dragged it down, lower, until it edged the thin lace of her underwear. Shadows licked her skin, dotting her breasts and hips in dripping gray. Rain drummed against the driveway and the wide oaks in a thick, continual beat that slurred into white noise. We were cocooned in a nest of blankets that smelled like my father’s aftershave and my mother’s lemon talcum powder.

  A single tap against my temple. Where’d you go? Her nose dug into my neck. She snuffled, rooting around, and I curled my head to the side, trying to trap her there. My arm slid around her stomach and then I felt it again: a kind of squirming, a wriggling set low in her belly. New life burbled and popped. I’d felt it there before. We both knew what it meant. She rolled away and propped her head on her folded arm, staring out the window.

  Yeah, she sighed. I know.

  That morning I’d said bunny, bunny to my four-year-old nephew as I walked into my parents’ kitchen. He was standing at the counter with my mother as she pressed orange halves on a citrus squeezer. I smiled at him and he smiled back, his mouth a solid block of orange from where he’d bitten down into a stray segment.

  Whath nummy nummy, Bastien mumbled, tongue working around the peel. He choked and it was a wet, sticky sound. Poor Florida baby couldn’t handle the constant pollen, drifting onto all our cars and staining the roads yellow. It made him hack and wheeze, a forty-year-old smoker’s cough, pale eyes forever bottomed out with purple smudges.

  Keeps us safe from monsters.

  I dug the peel from between his lips, tossing it into the overflowing garbage. Milo never took out the trash, said he was too tired when he got home from work. Brynn said he never had time for her, that they never had sex anymore, and I was fine with that.

  It means good luck. If you say it on the first of the month, everything will turn out perfect, just how you want it.

  Bastien closed his eyes. Bunny, bunny. He held up one finger and blew on it, like you would a birthday candle.

  It rained every day that May, sky drowning the world at four o’clock before the sun came out again to boil the leftover water off the pavement. The world cracked open and smelled fresh cut, seeping green over everything. I drove with the windows down and inhaled the world: the dank scent of wet dirt at a construction site, orange clay smoothed into wet puddles at the high school baseball field, the fruity shampoo as my hair whipped around my face. Even the festering Dumpster beside a traffic light held appeal; it all teemed with life. There were birds nesting in the eaves of the taxidermy shop. When one of the babies fell out and cracked its neck, I spent a whole afternoon carefully preserving it for Bastien.

  Every day my mother made scrambled eggs with sharp cheddar cheese, Milo’s favorite. The three of them had moved back into my parents’ house on the premise of saving money to buy one of their own. Milo’s old room had been converted to a sewing studio, so the three of them shored up in my childhood bedroom. They slept every night beneath the tattered posters that still clung to the dark wood paneling: bands Brynn and I used to like and movies we’d watched in high school. My brother, whom I loved, curled up with the woman I loved beneath my red-and-white quilt. Milo said he was glad Brynn spent all her time with me since he was always gone. Said he knew I’d take care of her and make sure she was happy. He smiled as he said it, never a moment’s pause that I’d be touching his wife as soon as he walked out the door.

  How could he not know? I wondered. How could he think anything less was happening, when he knew I’d had her first?

  Milo’s job at the Lexus dealership was forty-five minutes away. He got up early and came home late, taking overtime and working holidays. It was a low-paying gig that didn’t require any previous experience, which was good because his resume took up less than half a sheet of paper. He’d gotten the job through one of his high school buddies. It was the first time he’d ever really tried, and it didn’t agree with him.

  If I make it through the ninety-day trial period, I’ll be set for a promotion, he said. Just gotta make it through these first ninety and then it won’t be like this anymore. Get our own place. Have another kid.

  On his days off, he stayed in bed until midafternoon and then ventured out to the kitchen for a sandwich before passing out on the couch again. He looked tired all the time, skin grayed out and hair lank with grease. His polos were never clean. Brynn sometimes did laundry, but we both acted like kids on summer vacation. She let my mother do the chores as we hung out and watched television. When Milo came home he’d kiss Brynn first thing. She leaned into it so hard I could hear their teeth click together.

  You take such good care of us, she’d say, drawing a line down his cheek with a fingernail I’d painted for her. Who else would love me so much? No one’s sweeter than you, baby.

  He’d look better then, and I knew it was all worth it to him—the long hours, the driving, just to come home to her and Bastien. Listening in on these whispered conversations, I tried to imagine myself in my brother’s position and couldn’t make the image stick. I knew what she wanted from each of us; the things we provided. I watched my brother work himself to death, saw how he was still able to be emotionally there for her, and wished I could be the kind of person who could do both.

  I came over every day on my lunch break from the shop, eating leftover crusts from Bastien’s peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

  I like our little family. Brynn snuck her hand into the crease of my elbow. I’d let it sit there, collecting sweat, mine and hers. Something I could take home and keep at the end of the day when I drank rum and Cokes next to the busted AC unit in my apartment. Drunk, thinking about what kind of person I was: taking from the people I cared about, taking because if I didn’t take what I needed, I might die.

  We sat at the dining room table and ate ham sandwiches for lunch. Bastien slurped speckled cereal milk from a yellowing Tupperware. Between bites of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, he touched the little bunnies in their basket with a gentle hand—the kits my father and I had lovingly worked on for several weeks, attempting to perfect the downy sweetness found in mammal babies. My father had found them in a cardboard box inside our garage, cuddled in a nest of shredded newspapers and telephone book pages.

  Asphyxiated. Carbon monoxide from the car engine. He cupped one in his palm, body the size of a fat dinner roll. When I took it from him, its neck flopped back until the head was lying over my fingers, limp and dangling.

  We’ll give them to your mother. I stroked its downy back. It was still warm. Makes a good Easter gift. Peter Rabbit, right?

  We each took two, bisecting the bodies through their tiny white bellies. There was barely anything to remove, they were so young. Their skulls were dainty, the size of an apricot. I scrubbed them carefully with a toothbrush, washing their coats in the workroom sink. I dried them with a blow-dryer on a low setting. Blush from the drugstore stained each round cheek a delicate, precious pink. I darkened the lines of their eyelids with Sharpie. Peter’s black eyes were taken from a beaded purse that a well-meaning aunt had once gifted me, a look Brynn described as fortysomething soccer mom goes on a post-divorce date.

  My mother held the babies and cooed like I’d finally given her grandchildren.

  Darlings. She kissed me on the cheek and squeezed my shoulder. My best-behaved kids.

  Brynn turned to my mother and held up the empty cereal box. I’ll have to leave for the store now if I wanna outrun the storm. She was still in her sleep shirt and a pair of Milo’s boxer shorts. The flap at the crotch was unpinned; pale underwear kept peeking through.

  I’ll go. My mother already had her purse slung over her shou
lder. Her long, dark hair licked the floor as she leaned over to kiss Bastien’s head. I’ll be back in an hour.

  Behind us, the fridge clicked on, running hard enough to jostle the boxes of Minute Rice stacked on its flat top. Bastien set down his spoon and milk drooled from its bowl, leaking onto the quilted place mat. His eyes were sleepy; he swayed in his chair. I settled him in front of the television, tucked a throw around him peppered with gray dog hairs and crumbs from the floor. He sucked his thumb and sniffled, allergies flaring up again. One of the dogs came up and curled beside him.

  Brynn and I went to my parents’ room because I couldn’t fuck her in the same place she slept every night with my brother. What had been my bed was now their bed; a bed for two people who’d committed their lives to each other. I could feel him there between the sheets with us, sad and hurt, and it made me want to cry.

  We stood in the doorway of my parents’ room and didn’t look at each other. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and it wouldn’t be the last. In order to do it, I let Milo drift until he was a far-off spot in my mind, a hazy blot on the horizon that I could pretend was something else entirely. Not my brother. Not any part of me. Brynn leaned into me and let her head fall on my shoulder. Time was always too short. All we had were afternoons, little minutes between work shifts.

  Will I ever get tired of this? I asked the question aloud, though I already knew the answer. You couldn’t get sick of sustenance when you were starving.

  What happens now? She looked out the window, hand pressed against her belly. I curled around her back and put my hand over hers. It wasn’t warm enough anymore without the blankets, but I didn’t care. We didn’t say anything, just listened to the rain lessen until there were only drips pinging off the window’s metal awning.

  I stroked one finger down her abdomen. Bunny, bunny, I wished, mouthing the words into her damp neck.

  3

  At the back of the shop we kept a storage bin that housed leftover animal parts. It was the stuff my father called bits and pieces, things we kept around as supplementary material when there was a rush and we needed extra scraps.

  Just in case, he said when I asked why we’d ever need a single duck foot, webbed yellow-orange and black. I’m not gonna throw out something we could use.

  Thrift was something I’d incorporated into my own work process. Bills, a word spelled out in all capital letters blinking neon in my skull, kept me awake at night. If there was an opportunity to cut costs, I was willing to consider it.

  Parts disappeared and reappeared whenever an especially large workload presented itself. The cabinet held an odd jumble: severed deer hooves with the ankles still attached, rabbit feet with too many toes, mismatched alligator jaws. We had feathers from cardinals, finches, herons, crows, and jays—ruffled and slick, downy and spiked. There were horns of all colors and shapes, antlers, bone segments, fur swatches, disconnected tails. The bin had clear compartments, every drawer labeled with its contents in blue masking tape. Looking at it from far away, you could almost convince yourself you were looking at a real cabinet of wonders.

  It was a good place to go for gag taxidermy parts, and with my father gone, gag taxidermy paid the rent. I pinned antlers to rabbit heads stuffed with foam cuttings, shellacked frogs propped at miniature card tables, boiled a million alligator skulls, mouths stuffed with pointy teeth painted blue and orange for UF football fans. I turned ducklings into mermaids, fish tails shimmering green-gold. The parts bin emptied until I was digging out ratty stuff that had been in the drawers as long as I could remember. A coral snakeskin disintegrated in my hands, looped round a spool that had once held reams of fuchsia lace for one of my mother’s sewing projects.

  It was always the same old, same old. Even looking at the bin depressed me. I was bored and unhappy and whenever I got that way I started thinking about sex. Lucinda Rex had been on my mind a lot. It was exactly what I shouldn’t be doing, fixating on a woman I barely knew, much less a customer. But while I worked, my mind wandered where it liked. It had been a long time since I’d been attracted to anyone in that kind of way. I went out to bars and met women, ones I never saw again after those blurry, drunk nights in hotel rooms or dirty apartments, but they weren’t like Lucinda. She was the kind of woman I knew might hurt me if I gave her half a chance.

  Often I found myself comparing the limber body of a deer with the long line of her legs or the strong cord of her neck. Disassembling an ancient rack of fuzzy pinned moths, I wondered what noises she might make if I licked the tender spot below her ear. Whenever I thought that way, I ruthlessly shut it down—usually by jamming my thumb against the edge of the flesher. Lucinda wasn’t messy like Brynn, but there was a hard quality to her that scared me. They were both women who’d break your heart and smile afterward. It was easier to head to some bar out of town and find someone faceless. After a few beers, I couldn’t tell the difference between my hands and theirs.

  But lately after I fucked those no-name women, I always thought about Lucinda. Her dark hair, her slender wrists. At night in bed, dreams of Brynn slid into a miasma of Lucinda until it was like I was sandwiched between their bodies. I woke up early, getting to work before the sun came up so I could try to shake free the images sliding through my brain like a looping projector reel.

  Want and need. Two words from my dad’s letter that meant so much and so little. I never knew what I wanted. And I didn’t want to need anything. Better to need nothing; nothing never hurt you when it left.

  I was alone a lot at the shop most days, but one afternoon Bastien took Milo’s truck and stopped by with Lolee on their way down to the lake. The amoeba count had been high that summer. Signs were posted all over Central Florida warning about the danger of dunking your head. The lakes and reservoirs were death traps, bacteria ready to crawl inside ear canals and turn brains to mush. August sun cooked the lakes in town until they felt like warm baths. The smell coming off every body of water was sulfurous.

  My niece had a towel looped around her throat like a scarf and wore my mother’s wide tortoiseshell sunglasses. She looked like a miniature Brynn, hip cocked and head tilted. The sun leaking through the door made her hair glow white.

  “You wanna go?” Bastien sipped orange Gatorade out of a plastic UCF tumbler. He’d attended a single semester, dropping out after racking up hundreds of dollars in credit card debt.

  “I’m trying to clean up in here.” I hadn’t done much, just swept a dust ball the size of my own head into the middle of the linoleum. There’d been one customer in all day and they’d bought only a LOVE MY BEAGLE magnet. It had been a hard sale for a buck fifty.

  “I could do it. Stay and watch the shop.”

  He poked at a stack of trade magazines, half turning to show he wasn’t interested either way.

  Lolee hung from the door, dragging back and forth so the bell chimed every few seconds. “We can take out the float.” The sunglasses fell low on her pug nose and she mashed them back up with her palm. “You can pull me around, like when I was little.”

  “You’re still little.” Brynn and I had taken Lolee out a lot on the float the summer Brynn ran off. We’d take turns sluicing it through the reeds, muck and algae coating our legs up to our knees. Brynn bemoaned the heat as she wiped runny mascara from beneath her eyes, told me over and over again that she couldn’t wait to live somewhere with weather that occasionally dropped below eighty degrees. Two months later she took off for someplace even hotter than Florida with a stranger she’d met at the dry cleaner. I found his picture once online. A guy who was short, muscular, and balding. He looked nothing like the Morton family. I didn’t show that picture to Milo. As bad as it made me feel, I wasn’t sure what it would do to my brother. His self-esteem seemed like a fragile thing; a hollowed-out bird egg.

  “Where’s your father?” I asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be raising you?”

  Milo was never around. No parent-teacher conferences, no report card signings, no trips to the spring
s or Disney World. Did he avoid his daughter because she looked too much like Brynn? I saw her mother in the wide set of Lolee’s eyes, the dimple in her chin. Looking at my niece sometimes felt like pressing on a bruise. The pain was there but still pleasurable, a reminder Brynn had existed and loved us.

  “Please, you never do anything with me.” Lolee pouted, long hair nearly scraping the linoleum. The bell over the door jangled and shrieked. “Please, please.”

  “Fine. Just . . . stop doing that.”

  I showed Bastien the old yellow key box behind the counter. Told him the phones routed to the back of the shop unless you picked up by the second ring. There was a customer expected at three and they’d paid in advance. The mount was stored in the back beneath a tarp to ward off dust.

  Its black eyes gleamed in the fluorescent light as I flipped back the plastic sheeting. Bastien nodded as I pointed out the torque of the buck’s neck and the opened mouth—a request from the customer. Its tongue sat behind a row of teeth I’d scrubbed with denture cleanser. The deer had been shot in the jaw and I’d had to partially reconstruct the bone, padding out half of it with wiring and felt. Some of the teeth I’d borrowed from another mount, still stuffed away in freezer storage. I’d nicked myself with the blade digging at the wiring, and some of my blood had wept into the fur. Occasionally when I sent out a piece like that, with little bits of me in it, I felt as if a part of me were leaving for a better life somewhere else.

  Lolee and I left Bastien there in the shop and walked down the street to the lakefront a few blocks away. She trotted ahead in her neon-yellow bikini top with the black piping, T-shirt already pulled off and slung over her arm. I held her towel for her, listening to her flip-flops slap obnoxiously against the asphalt. It was blisteringly hot. Sweat itched down my neck before we’d even made it a block.

  At the waterfront, speedboats swept across the mirrored surface, tubes bouncing off each other and rocketing into the muggy air. Wake splashed into the reeds and lapped against the shore, leaving behind slimy trails of algae. The air was fragrant with grill smoke.