“I am a moderately successful writer, and if I want to buy an ethically taxidermied mouse I should not have to justify it to anyone.”
This was what I was screaming as Victor glared at me, dripping rain water all over our foyer. In truth, we weren’t really arguing about whether I was allowed to spend money. We were arguing about the fact that the taxidermied mouse I’d bought had been lost. The delivery website said it was left on the porch, but it was nowhere to be seen. I suspected burglars, but even imagining the small compensation of their mystified faces as they opened the box containing a dead mouse wasn’t enough to make me feel less upset. Then I’d noticed that the tracking page had transposed my street number, and so I sent Victor out into the dark and rainy night to go find the neighbor who was probably very confused about who had mailed him a dead mouse. Victor had been a bit flabbergasted at my request, but after yelling for a bit about . . . I don’t know; I wasn’t really paying attention. Budgets, maybe? . . . he finally threw on a coat and went out in search of the mouse. He returned twenty minutes later and told me that the address didn’t even exist, and that he’d asked the people at the houses near where the address would have been and none of them had seen any packages. He was wet and frustrated, and I assumed that accounted for how irrational he was being as I pushed him back out the door to check with all the neighbors on the block.
“You didn’t even tell me you’d bought a taxidermied mouse,” Victor yelled, and I said, “Because you were asleep when I found it online, and it was so cheap I knew it would be gone if I didn’t buy it immediately. I didn’t want to tiptoe into our bedroom at three a.m. to whisper, ‘Hey, honey? I got a great deal on a stuffed mouse that died of natural causes. Can I have your credit card number?’ because that would be CRAZY. And that’s why I used my credit card. Because I respect your sleep patterns. But then I forgot to tell you about it, because I bought it at three a.m., when I was drunk and vulnerable. Just like you with all those choppers you keep buying on infomercials. Except that this is better, because I’ll actually use a taxidermied mouse. That is, I would have . . . until—crap—until he went missing,” I ended in a whisper.
“Are you . . . are you crying?” Victor asked, stunned.
I wiped at my eyes. “A little. I just hate to think of him out there in the rain. All alone.” My voice trembled, and Victor closed his eyes. And rubbed his temples. And sighed deeply before staring at me and walking back out into the rain. Forty minutes later he walked in with a tiny wet box and a look that said, “I will disable your computer when I go to bed from now on.” But I rushed up and gave him a dozen kisses, which he gruffly accepted as he dried off with the towel I handed him.
“It was at the abandoned house at the end of the block,” he said. “Apparently someone just dumped everything that didn’t have a proper address there. There must’ve been twenty-five packages lying on that porch.”
But I wasn’t paying attention, as I was too busy pulling Hamlet von Schnitzel from his watertight baggie.
“What. The fuck. Is that?” Victor asked.
It was pretty obvious what it was. It was a mouse dressed as Hamlet. His Shakespearean ruff collar held up his wee velvet cape, and he seemed to be addressing the bleached mouse skull held nobly in his tiny paw. I held it up to Victor, squeaking, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well.”
Victor looked at me worriedly. “You have a problem.”
“I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM.”
“That’s exactly what people with problems say. Denial is the first sign of having a problem.”
“It’s also the first sign of not having a problem,” I countered.
“I’m pretty sure defensiveness is the second sign.”
I placed Hamlet von Schnitzel in a glass bell jar to protect his little ears from Victor’s hurtful accusations. But I had to admit that I didn’t completely understand my recent obsession with odd taxidermy either. It worried me. I still didn’t understand my father’s fascination with dead animals, and I refused to buy any that weren’t terribly old or didn’t die of natural causes. I still shooed spiders and geckos out of the house with a magazine and a helpful suggestion of “Perhaps you’d like some fresh air.” I considered myself an animal lover, donated to shelters, and never wore real fur, but it clashed with the other side of my personality, which was continually browsing through shops, always on the lookout for beavers in prairie dresses, or a diorama of the Last Supper made entirely with otters. Victor was right: I needed to stop. I told myself that I was finished and I vowed that I would not end up like my father, surrounded by the soulless, unblinking eyes of dead things. And with a little willpower I vowed to conquer my curious and terrible obsession.
APRIL 2011: