Mostly Dead Things
Page 28
It was our single collaborative effort. I’d asked for the specifications of the animals—how my mother wanted them posed, how she saw them standing or leaning, what their limbs should look like. After that work was done, I gave them to her and let her take the reins. It was bizarre, to see how she’d taken the animals and anthropomorphized them, but I was starting to understand. At least a little bit. So much of who my mother was and who she was becoming was lodged in the past. It made her happy to make those pieces because she felt a wild kind of freedom that she’d never had access to before.
Vera Leasey, recently back with her husband from a two-week Norwegian cruise, leaned in and snagged a bite of strawberry off my mother’s plate. “This setup right here looks really artistic. Saw some stuff like it when we went off ship. Europeans are very particular about their art.”
“Maybe I should go on a cruise,” my mother said.
“Oh, you definitely should! They got a lot of singles’ cruises too.”
Lolee took my mother’s empty plate, and I followed her inside the shop. It was a relief to escape the sun and all the gathered people. I felt a little queasy, but I always felt queasy when I did new things. Every day lately made me feel like I was gonna puke, and that seemed like it was better than before. Like maybe I was actually living my life.
I brushed back Lolee’s hair from where it had fallen at the side of her face. The cut looked very cute on her, even though I thought it made her look too old. It brought out the angles in her cheekbones. She looked very much like her mother.
Milo came in and tapped his watch. “Come on. Let’s get this started.”
Inside the new place was festooned in black bedsheets, which covered up the windows and gave the place a more intimate feel. The path to the back was lit with a variety of lights we’d culled from everyone’s Christmas stash. Overhead blinked white, red, and green, twinkling. We’d taken out the rusted stairs in the back and replaced them with a new set. I followed up after the guests, my mother leading the way.
The chorus of oohs and gasps that came from the group was satisfying to hear. My mother preened under the attention. She stood to the side, watching everyone take in the displays. There was a lot for people to look at.
“Oh, Libby . . .” Vera leaned into the first box, a panorama of two caveman-styled possums making love next to a papier-mâché woolly mammoth. “This is so gorgeous.”
My mother had put every single work together, with the exception of the one in the case at the back, a space she’d gifted to me. The group walked along silently, peering into the cases every few steps—pointing out the set designs, the scenery. The backdrops and the lighting. The animals in their provocative poses.
A hand settled on my waist. I nestled my fingers between Lucinda’s and we walked along behind the group, enjoying the reactions of the people we knew and even the few stragglers who’d seen the signs and come in off the street.
“You’re going to keep it open year-round?” Lucinda put her mouth very close to my ear. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“Most of it,” I replied. “Come see my piece.”
In the back corner stood a case separate from the others. It was a large one, a six-foot-tall curio cabinet that I’d replaced with a glass front. Inside stood my peacocks, all three just as beautiful as when I’d stuffed them, still mounted on their branch. Behind the peacocks, a replica of my parents’ house, framed by a rendering of the lake and scrub pines done in felt and velvet. We looked at it together, Lucinda and I, and I let my head fall down onto her shoulder. I looked at the birds, and I couldn’t look away from the biggest, the brightest. The center star.
We left with the others and went downstairs to eat more pie. I gave Lucinda the last piece of strawberry, and we watched the cars drive past in the street until it was time to close the shop.
“Do you think this’ll float?”
Milo looked down at the Styrofoam wedge we’d taken from a refrigerator box. On it sat the three birds. It wasn’t dark yet, not completely, but the sky had taken on the violet tinge of near-dusk. We were out on the edge of the dock. I knew I was taking a chance, coming back at night when I’d already gotten in trouble twice before over it, but it seemed like the right place to perform a Viking burial.
“It only has to float for a second,” I said. “As long as we get the thing lit, that’s all that counts.”
“Right.”
Already we’d killed a six-pack, and we were working on our second. We’d taken the birds from their display and brought them out to the lake, carrying them down together, one of us at either end.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Milo ran a hand along the fringe of feathers that fluffed up from the back of the biggest bird. “Maybe you should keep it. Put it in the apartment or something.”
I picked up the accelerant I’d bought at the gas station and spritzed a healthy amount over top of them. “Nah. We’re gonna roast ’em.”
“I guess.”
I looped a few more streams onto the birds, making sure to hit the tail feathers and the breasts. They darkened and wilted from the wet. Feathers drooped down over the head of the bird on the right until it looked as if it were wearing a hat.
“It definitely looks like you’re pissing all over them.”
“Shut up.”
Birds sufficiently doused, I turned to Milo and held out my hand. “Lighter?”
Digging through his pocket, he unearthed a gunmetal-gray one with his name on it—the one Brynn had given him for Christmas a year after they’d been married. My brother didn’t even smoke.
It lit on the first strike, glowing orange-red and warming my fingers.
“Put ’em in.”
Milo gently lifted the end of the Styrofoam and scooted it off the edge of the dock. It wobbled there in the water for a minute, churning up a light wake, and then settled flat. “Huh. Thought it would tip over for sure.”
We stared at it, bobbing there next to us. Then I took the lighter and leaned in, pressing the open flame to the neck of the center bird. Instantly the feathers caught; it was like watching a Christmas tree catch fire. Milo and I stood back and watched it spark light into the night sky and across the top of the lake. Pieces of it were already charring, fluffing off and breaking into the water, drifting overhead soft as down.
Milo raised his beer. I raised mine too. Then we drank the last of it. Behind us, I could hear the crunch of tires on gravel, see the purple smear of red and blue lights. We didn’t turn around, just kept watching the disintegration of the birds in front of us. It was very beautiful. I felt as if I could watch it all night.
“Could you handle this guy? He’s kind of a douche.” I set my empty on the bench beside the others.
Milo walked to the edge of the dock to intercept the officer. Instead of going with him, I sat and watched the last peacock glint out, shining orange glimmer into the water. The sky was purple and full of clouds. The sun looked like a slice of heart on the horizon, drifting out there in the dark. I kept my eyes on it until it swam away.
I am so grateful to everyone who helped get this book into the world. Thank you to all the lovely people at Tin House who believed in my work (and in me). I knew you were my family right away. Thank you to Tony Perez for his wonderful edits and his patience with my extremely bad jokes and all the wild swears in my emails. Thank you to Jakob Vala for his kindness and for the beautiful cover he designed. Thank you to my agent, Serene Hakim, who saw promise in my book and helped coax out the very best version of it. Thank you to Vermont Studio Center for allowing me time to work on this book and for feeding me dinner when I would have just had beer. Thank you to my reader, Willie Fitzgerald—my wonder twin, my best beloved dummy. Thank you to Vivian Lee for being an endless well of support while I struggled through my edits and for always knowing the exact right thing to say. Thank you to Mattie and to Emily, the better parts of me. Thank you to Maria Jones for all the beach trips and for letting me talk about the
book for hours even though you’d heard me say the same thing three thousand times. Thank you to Cathleen Bota, my Bota Mini, for her sweet kindness and her beautiful heart. Thank you to my 7-Eleven cashier. Thank you to everyone who put up with all my puns and still loved me anyway. I love you, too. I mean it. Thank you.
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED
BOOK OF 2019 BY
BUSTLE, BROADLY, THE BOSTON GLOBE, BUZZFEED, ESQUIRE, EVENING STANDARD, HUFFPOST, LIT HUB, THE MILLIONS, NYLON, AND THE WEEK
“Hilarious, deeply morbid, and full of heart.”
—BUZZFEED
“Precisely as strange, riotous, searing, and subversive as you’d want it to be. And, yes, its humor is as dark and glinting as the black plastic eye of a taxidermy ferret. . . . A celebration of the strangeness of life and love and loss, all of it as murky as a Florida swamp but beautiful in its wildness.”
—NYLON
“By the end of Mostly Dead Things, I loved Jessa-Lynn Morton; I felt as if I knew her. You will too. Though she seems to be constantly on the cusp of going under, she somehow remains steadfast, bobbing at life’s surface.”
—BROADLY
PHOTO © MARIA JONES
KRISTEN ARNETT is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter’s 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She’s a columnist for Literary Hub, and her work has either appeared or is upcoming in North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Copyright © 2019 Kristen Arnett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Arnett, Kristen N., author.
Title: Mostly dead things / Kristen Arnett.
Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005820 | ISBN 9781947793309 (pbk.)
ISBN 9781947793316 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3601.R5823 M67 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005820
First U.S. Edition 2019
Printed in the USA
Interior design by Jakob Vala
www.tinhouse.com
Cover Art: American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus Ruber, from The Birds of America by John J. Audubon, pub. 1827-38 (hand coloured engraving), Audubon, John James (1785-1851) / Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images