Zoochosis

The sight was grotesque — blood absorbing into the wood with an intense and metallic odor coating the air. His father’s heavy boots thudding against the ground as he walked around the garage, plucking knives off the wall and carrying them over.

Tim became curious, as he watched his uncle dump the guts out.

He looked over to his father cleaning a curved knife, “Dad, what do you do with the rest of it?”

He spit into a plastic water bottle before grumbling out, “The rest? We trash it. Unless the buck was big, then we’d probably stuff its head and mount it.” He pocketed another dip of tobacco in the side of his check, “But you’d a had to gut it differently to do that.”

“Is that how you did the deer head in the house?”

“Sure.”

~

For a moment, Tim contemplates cleaning off some of the dust that had accumulated over the years onto the trophies lining his shelf but instead turns his attention back to the papers strewn out on his desk. The office was the only room in the store lit and his hands were beginning to cramp as he fills out the month’s budget. The thought of a late dinner and seeing Stephanie starting to creep into Tim’s consciousness.

He stands, his knees and back crack with the movement. After patting his pockets to make sure the necessities were in them, he flips off the lights and locks the creaky door behind himself, making the same mental note he’s been making for weeks to lubricate the hinges.

Faces arranged in different expressions watch Tim walk to the front of the shop. Going to turn the lock, he realizes that the front door had been unlocked the entire time. Huffing out a sigh of indignation, Tim turns the lights back on to make sure nothing had been stolen, and text one of his apprentices to not leave it unlocked again.

September was reaching its end, and browned leaves flew around in heavy winds as Tim starts his old truck. Downtown lights and outside speakers decorated brick buildings and dying bushes, falsities of liveliness on a Monday evening being undercut by empty roads. The drive to his old house mostly made up of tall hills and gravel, and as Tim nears his driveway at the pit of the hill, a small animal darts out in front of his truck’s tire.

Feeling the bump of its body, Tim slows and pulls off to the side of the road. He climbs out of his car, a light layer of fog following his warm exhales as he walks in front of the headlights. The raccoon lay there with a mouth open in shock, the intestinal track spilling out onto its fur. Either miraculously or tragically, the animal was still breathing. Beady eyes look back at him, pleading.

Tim takes out his pocketknife, cradles its head in his calloused hand, and makes a large cut on the neck. The raccoon lets out a screeching, bubbling cry for a few seconds before going completely still, and completely silent. Tim takes the body back to the bed of the truck and lays it down with a soft thud.

Tim’s phone begins ringing in the cupholder, his wife’s name glares back up at him. While turning the truck around, he clicks accept. She asks where he is, he recounts his current events, and then tells her that he was going back to work. Tim doesn’t hear much else other than a sigh and the chime of a call being ended.

After carrying the body to the back work room of the store, Tim discovers the raccoon to be in relatively good condition- workable condition- and slips on a pair of latex gloves before examining it closer. Blood had matted together much of its fur, but the damage wasn’t irreparable.

Making a large incision from the breastbone down, Tim pulls out the rest of its innards and deposits them in the bucket next to him. Stripping the fur, more oftentimes than most, was the most tenacious part of the taxidermy process. Tim meticulously saws the fur off inch by inch, the tendons and muscles hold on as long as they can. The tile slab that the raccoon was stretched out on needed cleaned, it had needed cleaned for a while, as random chucks and streaks of fur, clay, paint, and blood were starting to become permanently dried onto the surface.

Tim’s phone starts to ring again, the sharp buzz against the metal desk it rested on startles him and he accidently cuts through a part of the fur. Irritated and a little sleep deprived, he snaps off his gloves and throws the phone down onto the front desk of the store.

Walking back towards the open door of the studio, Tim hears a soft creak behind him. He freezes in place. A sensation of anxiety crawls up his spine, akin to what he images as being hunted for sport. Tim’s palms had already begun to sweat by the time he realizes what a nutjob he was starting to act like. Regardless, his legs still shake a little as he moves to the corner of the store that had produced the noise. Nothing was there, just a small table holding up two taxidermized frogs climbing a clay tree stump. Their small faces, posed in expressions of curiosity and hunger watch over Tim as he crouches down to examine the area around them. Nothing but dust reveals itself. He shakes his head, and flips the lights back off before returning to the studio.

The raccoon’s skin had been hung up to dry, its internal remains were in a bucket to be throw out, and the clock read one in the morning. By that affect, alongside the eerie, high pitched ringing of loneliness and his own malnourishment, Tim decides to veto creating the clay model of the animal’s body and deferred to collecting his car keys.

After disposing of the remains, he walked to the front door. For some odd reason, the sickening, sweet smell of a newly decomposing body perforated the air. Confused, Tim turned on the lights again. The room lit up; nothing was there. He smelled his hands; they smelled of nothing but the bathroom soap. His soiled apron had been left on a hook in the back, and no animal in the store had anything left to rot. The inexplicitly of the smells origin struck another bout of anxiety through his system. Thoughts of forgotten tasks, trash left behind, or anything else his old, tired brain could conjure up consumed him.

Like a rabid animal, Tim paced around the cramped store at a maddened rate. The deer painted and ordained to the likes of a unicorn smelled of nothing. The pinned and framed bugs smelled of nothing. The prowling tiger smelled of nothing. Everything smelled of nothing. Yet, the smell only seemed to grow in its intensity.

A lone windchime blew against the window, making Tim begin to mirror symptoms of a heart attack. He felt as though every taxidermy in the shop was watching him too closely, like their gaze was penetrating every layer of his sanity and he had nowhere to hide it.

~

The following day, Tim noticed nothing of the unusual. Well rested and fed, he sat on the short stool behind the cashier desk. It was about noon and dark clouds loomed over head, blocking out most of the natural sunlight. Sarah, a skinny, blond art student at the nearby college was in the back working on the clay figure. Initially she had been a little put off by the idea of taxidermized roadkill, but Tim told her to do her job and she didn’t have much of a counterargument to that. There was music playing over the speakers, some pop country song his wife had put on the store playlist. It was beginning to bother Tim, the repetitiveness of it all made him itch to put down his sketchbook and tear the speakers off the wall.

The day went by slow, customers eager to touch but unwilling to buy. Eventually though, a young boy came in with his mother. As they approach the counter with wide eyes roaming around the room, an overwhelming scent of cigarettes and floral perfume took over all of Tim’s senses.

She coughs, and the woman’s face seems to be stuck in a permanent expression of disgust as she asks, “My son and his dad want a deer head for the house’s wall. Do you have any?”

Tim stares a little blankly at her, because even from his current position he can see at least four mounted heads on the shop’s wall.

“I do, they’re down over here.” He gets up from the stool and walks them over to a few of the heads littering the wall. He gestures to them, standing a little awkwardly before taking their closed off conversation as his cue to return to his creaky stool.

The two look for a while, before deciding on a relatively large buck head. They pay, and Tim and Sarah help them pack it up into the woman’s van. Tim attempts his best at a polite smile and a have a nice day! but the woman doesn’t even glace back at him before shutting the car door. The boy, though, offers a small wave back to Tim.

~

Flipping the sign closed, Tim goes back to his studio, leaving Sarah to finish up the closing chores. He tells her to lock the door behind her after she leaves. Tim returns to his raccoon, as the mold was now done drying he could begin fitting it to the mold. The process is extraneous and meticulous, and by the time he has it as perfect as possible the rest of the store’s was dark, with only the radio and wind accompany him. His wife calls, he tells her he’ll be home shortly, and returns to painting the bright green irises of the small creature.

Initially, it’s faint enough that the radio covers up the soft sound of whispering, but eventually it rises enough in decibels for Tim’s aging ears to catch it. Incoherent, effeminate voices startle Tim, causing his brush to slip and ruin the pupil he had been working on. Enraged, he yells out Sarah’s name. No response. He puts down the brush and walks over to the radio, which had now gone to nothing but static, and flips it off.

He walks into the main part of the store slowly, a hunting knife in hand, and roams his eyes around the room. There’s no one there, but the whispering seems to grow louder. He wanders around for a moment, before gathering that the voice was seeming to come from the unicorn horse positioned in the store window. The horse’s black eyes watch with a parted mouth as he moves around it, looking for signs of the intruder.

For a moment, the whispering stops and Tim’s heartbeat slows.

Until it starts again.

Louder, comprehensible words right next to his left ear. Tim looks around, knife shaking in his iron grip. Then it dawns on him, the horse! It was the horse speaking to him. He lowers his head, moving his ear closer to the unmoving mouth.

It shrieks, startling him enough to fall backwards onto the window’s ledge. The horse remains still but continues to speak to him, the sound coming from every direction.

In a gentle, motherly voice with soft eyes she speaks, “where have you gone, Tim?”

Born a skeptic, Tim tries to blink it all away, gasping for air, his owlish head swiveling around on its neck.

But each second he doesn’t respond the voice mounts in volume, the softness now replaced by a demonic tone yelling at him, “Where have you gone? Where have you gone? What have you done to me?”

Then, the raven perched on a suspended branch begins to crow at him. He hunches over in the corner, knees pulled to his chest rocking silently as tears spill over. Like a toddler with its favorite stuffed animal, Tim grips the knife tighter as the zebra parallel to the horse begins speaking over the other two.

“Repent, repent, repent,” it squeals.

Then the chorus starts, it seems all the animals in the dark store begin to chant at deafening volumes, repent Tim, repent!

“How?” He shouts out.

They go quiet for a moment, the lights flicker.

One of his favorite taxidermies, a beautiful parrot with stunning feathers, responds, “show us your skin, Tim.”

His hand felt possessed by something sinister as he lifts the hunting knife. The animals resume chanting. Show us your skin! We have let you see ours, now you must show us yours!

Tim’s whispers out in between sobs, “Why?”

The zoo ignores him, the continuous, overlapping voices cry out secrets of forgiveness, disease, death and evil. He feels the words reverberate around his soul, feeling the sickness corroding his insides. Tim begins clawing at his neck, stubby nails doing nothing to relive him of the pain he feels swelling up inside it.

“Please,” he begs, “please stop.”

The horse watches him, the only silent one out of the myriad of screeching.

The sweetness seeps back into her voice when she whispers out, for him and him alone, “give us your skin, Tim.”