Mostly Dead Things

by Kristen Arnett

  Blood kept leaking from the cuts, making it difficult to see what I was doing. A shard stabbed into my thumb, near the nail. I hissed and shook my hand. More blood flew off and spattered the cabinet.

  He pulled away and stuffed his fists into the hem of his shirt. Blood dotted the tops of his sneakers. There were stains on my pants.

  Still not sure what to do with my hands, I picked the wreath up off the floor, plucking flower petals from their green plastic stems. “We both loved Brynn and she’s gone. Left us for some person she’d only known for a month. This happened years ago, and we’re still not over it.”

  “Okay, I get it.” He tried to laugh, but all that came out was a rusty croak. “We’re unlovable.”

  Once I started talking, everything spilled out: fetid and stagnant, a backlog of sewage. “Dad killed himself because he couldn’t deal with his body breaking down. He couldn’t stand being weak. So he did something horrible.” I pulled more petals and let them drift onto the floor. Cornflower blue, bright pink. The fuzzy little heads of baby’s breath. “Instead of talking to somebody, which would’ve taken actual courage, he shot himself.”

  With both his hands buried in the hem of his shirt, my brother looked like a shamed little kid. “You don’t know that’s why.”

  “Yes, it’s exactly why.” I sighed and set down the wreath again, this time on the broken top. “He left me a note.”

  Maybe I knew Milo better than I’d thought I did, after all. I could tell he wanted to read it. I could see by the twitchy way his eyes darted from my face and back down to the floor that he wondered if there was anything about him in that letter. And there were two things I could do: I could tell him the truth, that it didn’t mention him at all, or I could do the other thing. I could say the thing he needed to hear.

  “He said he was sorry. He said he wished he’d been a better father. That he loved you very much. That he was proud of you and of the kids you raised.”

  “Yeah, right,” Milo replied, looking down at his bloodied hands. “Let me see it then.”

  “It’s gone. And we don’t need a fucking letter to tell us that.”

  Milo sagged so slowly he seemed to be deflating. Then we were both sitting on the floor. I drew my legs up to my chin. Milo sat with his hands clenching and unclenching in his shirt.

  “Brynn’s never coming back,” I said, letting the words roll around in my mouth, like foreign objects. “She’s gone. We act like if we wait long enough, she’s going to come back again and things can be how they were.” I rubbed my chin back and forth across my knee until the jeans chafed the skin. “But that’s stupid. It’s never gonna happen. She left because she didn’t want the same things we wanted. She didn’t want us.”

  Remembering it was bad enough; talking about it felt like chewing tinfoil. Milo wrung his hands in his shirt and the bloodstains spread.

  “What does it say about me that the only person I’ve ever loved never loved me?” he asked. His voice sounded very young. If I’d closed my eyes, we could’ve been teenagers again.

  “That’s not true.”

  “She only ever loved you.” Sweat beaded along his hairline and dripped down either side of his face. “She didn’t love me, and we had a kid together.”

  Sitting on the floor should have felt awkward, but it was comfortable. Picking fuzz off the baseboards. Swirling prints into the dirt of the linoleum. I signed my name with a flourish. Drew a heart, then a star.

  “Why did we have to love the same person?” Milo whispered.

  “I don’t know. We just did.” Reaching over, I pulled his hands from the hem of his shirt. The blood had clotted. I examined them in the weak light. Glass was still trapped in the cuts, little slivers that glimmered like ice. “I think a better question is why we still love this person so much we can’t love anyone else. She’s gone. It’s over.”

  He let me hold his hands as I began to pick out the glass again. “Did you and Brynn have sex when I was married to her?”

  There was no use lying. “Yes.”

  Tiny slivers transferred from his palm to my fingers. I was stabbing myself with the shards. Our blood mingled, skin rubbing together.

  “I knew it. I mean, I knew that you were.” He laughed. “She and I didn’t have sex very often.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about it.”

  “I knew that you guys were together, even in high school. I didn’t care. I just wanted her.” Our blood darkened as it dried. It looked like menstrual blood, clots forming between our fingers. He looked up from our bloodied hands. “I saw you guys together. Lots of times.”

  “When?” It was hard to think back, all the places that she and I had been together. In my room, in her car. The couch at my parents’ house. Outside, propped against the tree in the backyard.

  “Lots of times. You guys weren’t very careful. Dad even saw you once, in the shop.”

  “That’s embarrassing.” I wondered what my father had thought, seeing us there. He’d never once asked me about Brynn. If she was my girlfriend. “I didn’t think anybody knew.”

  “Everybody knew, Jessa.”

  The room was stifling. Every breath I took seemed to contain a quart of dust. I coughed, then coughed again. My eyes burned from the dryness.

  Something was under one of the cabinets. I leaned down and reached beneath as far as I could. My fingers brushed against something that jangled. I grabbed it and pulled it out. When I held it up in front of us, dust fell from the matted fur of a stuffed animal. The bell was still shiny and trilled when I shook it to dislodge the fuzz.

  “Cat toy.”

  Milo winced. “You think there’s still a cat up here?”

  “Probably not a live one.”

  He dragged it around on the floor between our bodies, making patterns in the dirt. “You’re a lesbian. How come you never got any cats?”

  Grabbing it back, I beat him over the head with it until dust pillowed the air. “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

  Coughing, he waved a hand in front of his face to dispel the cloud. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Yeah. You’ve said stupider.” I lay back on the floor, exhausted. “I think this place will work.”

  “We’re gonna have to gut it.”

  I spread my arms and legs, knocking into Milo. “We’ll have Lolee help. Child labor, right?”

  “It’s what Dad would’ve done.”

  Scraping my arms back and forth across the dirty wood, I pretended I was a dust angel. I’d never seen snow once in my life. That seemed very sad to me. I’d never traveled anywhere, or seen anything. Never left the United States. I didn’t even own a passport. I wondered where would be the best place to see snow. Maybe I’d take Lolee with me. “Dad always made us work,” I said. “He thought it was good for us. Built character.”

  “He always made you work.” Milo reached for my leg and I kicked at him until he quit. “I didn’t have to do half that shit. You’re the one who liked it. You’re the one who always wanted to be there.”

  “I still do like it. It’s what I know. It’s comfortable.”

  “Can you hear yourself?” He tapped at the bottom of my boot, prompting me to kick again. “You sound like you’re sixty-five years old. Like you’re describing life at a retirement village.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.” I rolled over onto my side. There was something else beneath the case. I pressed my face closer to the opening between it and the linoleum, dirt grinding into my cheek. I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Something dark and bundled. A mystery shape. “I like being comfortable.”

  “Maybe get a little uncomfortable and find a date.”

  “I don’t want a date who makes me uncomfortable.” I reached beneath the cabinet again, but my arm was too short to grab whatever it was. Huffing, I flopped over onto my back. The fluorescents were half-lit and spotty, flickering weakly.

  “Is that what you like about Lucinda? It’s comfortable?” M
ilo tossed the cat toy in the air, little puffs of dust flying out every time it smacked against his palms.

  “What about Lucinda?”

  “You guys are fucking, right?”

  “Don’t be gross.”

  “I’m not being gross.” He threw the cat toy at me and it landed on my chest, rolling up to my neck, where it huddled like a scared live thing. I tossed it back.

  “We were seeing each other. Now we’re not.”

  “Why?”

  One reason was she was married. The other reason was I’d anonymously called her wife and told her about Lucinda cheating. Did I need another reason? If so, I had one: I’d cost her her business. I had to assume she was pissed about that. On my next throw, I looped it up high, getting as close as I could to the light fixture without actually hitting it. “I don’t know. I think I like emotionally unavailable women.”

  Milo arced it up the same way, coming even closer to the light. “You’re emotionally unavailable, Jessa.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “People aren’t as emotionally unavailable as you think.”

  I aimed the next throw at his head. He tossed it back just as hard. “I know they aren’t,” I said. “I’m just not sure what I want.”

  “Maybe think about it.”

  “Sure. When’s the last time you went on a date?”

  My next throw hit the light. Bits of cracked plastic rained down on us. I sat up and tried to avoid debris falling into my eyes. I picked pieces out of my braid, remembering too late that my fingers were shredded from helping Milo with his palms. My hair dug into the cuts and it hurt.

  “Shit. We need to clean up.”

  He got up and helped me to my feet, both of us careful with our wounded hands. “I bet we could pull this place together,” he said.

  I kicked the cat toy down the aisle, toward the doorway. I tried to yank the cabinet away from the wall, so I could see what I’d been reaching for. It was too heavy for me to lift alone.

  “Help me with this.”

  Milo grabbed the opposite side and we both pulled. It scraped hard against the floor and moved a half foot forward. He looked behind.

  “Found the cat,” he said. “You want it?”

  “I’ll have Bastien bring a garbage bag.”

  CATHARTES AURA—TURKEY VULTURE

  We weren’t the kind of family that went on vacations. Our father thought it was a holiday if he took a day off work; even then, I couldn’t remember a single time growing up when he’d willingly stayed out of his workshop.

  I’m happiest when I’m busy, he told our mother when she’d pushed a Carnival Cruise brochure on him one Saturday morning. He was stitching a coonskin cap at the breakfast nook, even after my mother had given him the side-eye and told him to keep his taxidermy out of the margarine. Can’t imagine being trapped on a boat with all kinds of awful people. Rather be here, in my own house, with people I kinda like.

  So we played around the neighborhood during our summers off, making the lake our vacation spot. We rode our bikes through the cemetery, camping out in the tree house when it got cool and the roaches finally fled. And when I turned fourteen, my father brought me along with him once a week for our trek along the highways just outside of town. That’s where we searched for discount taxidermy treasures. We were looking for roadkill.

  We searched for animals that lay half in the crunchy dead grass, half in the road. We picked up squirrels and waterfowl, possums, armadillos, and snakes. Some had sat out too long and turned rancid; those we’d have to leave, unless my father decided that any of the parts were still usable: wings or beaks, legs or ears, possibly a tail if it was in good enough condition and the maggots hadn’t gotten to it yet.

  Morning’s best. Before the sun comes up and cooks the meat.

  That meant predawn on a Saturday. My father slouched at the kitchen counter, pounding strong black coffee while I forced down a bowl of Cheerios that stuck in my throat.

  I liked how barren the streets were that early in the morning. The truck smelled like gasoline and heated vinyl. Receipts slid along the dashboard with a satisfying hiss every time he’d turn a corner or switch lanes. It was mostly quiet, but sometimes he’d put on the radio, and other times we’d talk about whatever was on his mind, which was usually the shop and what kind of animals he hoped we’d find.

  As the sun came up, I’d surreptitiously watch my father drive the truck. I liked the specifics of his face. The creases near his mouth, the pockmark between his eyebrows. His skin was sallow, like mine, and oily, with a bristly dark beard on his chin and cheeks. His hair, still wet from his shower, dried into spikes that fluffed up birdlike along the crown of his head.

  We raced down the empty streets, passing all the places I knew so well. They looked different in the darkness of early morning, like people I’d never met before. Even our shop was a stranger as we passed, all the lights off, the woodsy front porch with its rocking chairs lonely and dimmed with shadows. It was always good to know that it wouldn’t be that way for long, that soon enough we’d pass all the same places and they’d look friendly and familiar again.

  Most of the time we stuck to the highways near town, but I always liked it when there wasn’t anything close and my father took us on the long drive toward Ocala. Fields flew past in green drags, rolls of hay stacked up like pecan pinwheels alongside pinpricks of black cows dotting the distance, peeking up through the mist.

  I’d like a cow. I pointed toward one so close I could make out its chewing mouth, imagining the cud lodged inside its cheek.

  To eat? He laughed, as if he hadn’t already made that joke a thousand times.

  As we passed the cows, all crowded safely together behind their fences, I thought how nice it was. How cozy and sweet to imagine that there were animals alive and kept in pens, not dead ones like we always dealt with. Then my father would remind me that the cows weren’t long for this world either.

  You gonna stop eating cheeseburgers? No more McDonald’s for Jessa-Lynn? No steak so raw the blood pools on the plate?

  I turned away and pretended to be upset, but I was smiling. Happy to have my father just to myself—knowing that we had these jokes, and these mornings together, and no one else got to share them. They were always going to be just ours.

  Then one of us would spot a dark shape in the road. My father braked, and both of us guessed what kind of animal we’d found. He was almost always right. My father could tell from fifty yards if it was a bigger animal, like a deer or a turkey, could even narrow down the smaller kill, tell the difference between a possum and a raccoon.

  See up there? Pointing through the windshield, he’d note the buzzards, circling overhead. How many are there?

  As I counted, he’d nod along. The more vultures, the bigger the body. The back of his truck was already fitted out with tarps, blue ones he’d gotten for free from one of his better-paying customers, who owned a construction service.

  My father decided our order of operations, different for each animal. He brought along garbage bags and nylon rope, the shovel from the garage, usually still coated with dog shit scooped from the yard. He always carried a small handsaw and a very sharp utility knife to separate the gristliest parts.

  It was best when the animals were small and still intact. Then we’d load them into black trash bags, me holding the bags open while my father scraped them up with the shovel. Worse were the ones that my father would have to dissect right there on the road, eliciting a foul stench that wouldn’t leave, even after we drove away. I could feel it on my skin, smell it in my hair and on my clothes. My father barely noticed when they were that rotten; couldn’t seem to make himself care about the smashed faces, insides spread out from where the tires had made surrealist art of their organs.

  Whole animals, shoveled into bags. If it was something like a possum or squirrel, then it was likely that we’d just leave them, although my father would always move them out of the road. He hated that cars j
ust drove over them, continually, as if they couldn’t see there had once been a live thing there.

  There were times he’d hand me the knife or the saw, and then point to the pieces we could use. Always tails of foxes, deer antlers, hawks’ wings. The few times we’d seen an alligator, my father would take only the head—tourists loved the gator skulls and paid good money for them, so we took them even if the flesh was falling from the skulls in mealy clumps. They were always worth our time, regardless of decomp.

  Skinning gators is pointless work. My father stood with his boot pressed into one’s back, anchoring the body while the blade sank into the rolls of its neck. The gator’s head flapped up and down while he sawed at the gristle and bone, as if nodding along with what my father was saying.

  Wouldn’t someone buy the skin?

  I couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t want the entire alligator. I could see us stuffing and mounting the eight-foot monster someone had hit with a car, spun out only a few feet from the edge of the grass. There was a look of surprise on its face, the look of a predator that had not understood there was a larger object that could blink out its existence without a hitch in the motor.

  Too much work. Hard to get at the skin without ripping through the fat. He leaned over and ran a gloved finger along the ridges of its spine. It resembled dinosaurs from our textbooks, prehistoric, wandering around since the dawn of time, long before people like us had come along with cars to crush the life from them.

  Couldn’t you just price it really high?

  I’m gonna finish sawing off this head. He gestured toward the truck. Go get my knife out of the glove box. You’re gonna skin that while I finish this. Then we can talk about it.

  The hunk of meat was heavy, but it didn’t have the stench of rot on it. I found the knife, buried beneath folded maps of Florida and fast food restaurant napkins. Then I leaned against the warm grill, digging the sharp, flat blade into the flesh while my father finished up.

  It was rough work. So gristly, the flesh unlike that of the mammals we regularly skinned—deer with their coarse hair, wild pigs, raccoons with thick fatty deposits in their stomachs. The gator’s skin was nearly melded to the pink, tight muscle beneath, so brightly hued it resembled fresh tuna. Every time my knife slipped below, it poked through the skin I was trying to preserve. By the time my father had stuffed the gator head into a black garbage bag, I was only a quarter inch into the tip of the tail.