When the movie was over, we made a frozen pizza in the microwave because we were too lazy to preheat the oven. Brynn pinched pieces off and threw bits to my mother’s Pomeranian, Sir Charles. He gagged the fourth one up on the living room rug next to the quail family of four my dad and I had stuffed two years prior.
We should go out. Brynn was in a Garfield nightgown that she’d had since the fourth grade. It only skimmed the tops of her thighs. Garfield’s face was so stretched out over her breasts that he no longer looked like a cat. When she leaned her hip against the kitchen counter, I could see part of her ass hanging out in pink polka-dotted boy shorts.
Milo’s bedroom was down the hall from the kitchen. I could just make out his lean shape in the glow of the light from his ceiling fan. He was almost fifteen and already six feet tall, lanky to the point of emaciation. I knew he liked Brynn, knew he liked her because he looked at her the way I did. We talked less as a result, both of us shying away from our unwanted feelings, not willing to disclose the emotions we both wanted to shed like peeling, sunburned skin. Brynn stretched, arms pulled over her head until Garfield’s face elongated into a Halloween ghoul, and his door clicked closed again.
Brynn wanted us to take my father’s beer and drive to the shop. Brynn wanted us to drink the beer and look at all the taxidermied animals. Brynn wanted us to play hide-and-seek there with all the lights off. It was my birthday and what I wanted was Brynn.
I rode in the front seat of her hatchback while the other girls huddled in the back. We rolled down the windows and let in the humid night air. Bugs approached the car at forty miles per hour, catching the headlights and smashing liquid on the windshield. Brynn smoked and gave me puffs from where her red lips left heart prints. She pulled into the lot and parked up front. We got out and each had a beer, then immediately opened seconds. I let us in the back door, lights off. Feeling along the wall, everyone stumbled behind me, except for Brynn, whose small hand had found the center of my back. Fingers spanned my spine until I swore I could feel all the metacarpals and tendons. When I finally had her, I’d map her skin. Undressing her, I’d know her joints, her frame, intimately understand the mechanics of her body; what it felt like flush with mine.
Lights flickered to life, fluorescents strobing spastically. Suzanne screamed loud enough to maybe wake the boar, half-undressed on the metal table in the center of the room. Its face sagged forward, opened from below, unencumbered of its tusks. Those sat upright, placed side by side like yellow daggers. The boar’s naked frame peeked out. Its bones were so human, so like our own. The skeleton was sad and small without the weight of muscles and fat to flesh it out.
I pointed the others to the front of the shop and told them to drink the rest of the beer. Said there were candy bars and bags of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky under the counter, hidden in the cubby next to the cash register.
My father’s tools were put away, except for one small knife sitting out on the countertop. I set down my beer and picked up the blade. More than anything, I wanted to show Brynn how capable I was. I knew she’d never see me as someone she wanted, not the way that I wanted her. I was too much girl, too much of the same. But I could show her my worth in different ways.
I’d bring the animal back to life. It would stretch into a run, craning its neck, arched and triumphant. Or I could make it look coy and sweet, a cartoon animal. I’d create anything, everything. My hands commanded the flesh, brought life back from the grip of death. I had that power in me.
This is what you like to do? Skin these things? She ran a hand down the boar’s back leg—down its thick femur, scraped and bleached. Then she brought the thumb of that hand to my mouth. She pressed it there for a second, like pushing a pause button, and then leaned into me with an exhale of yeasty breath. When we kissed, smashed up against the metal table, I didn’t care that the knife fell, or that her beer tipped over and spilled onto the boar’s feet.
Her eyes were slit and sleepy, cheeks dimpled. It was a soft face like a powdered doughnut, all sugary-sweet. Our mouths met again. My heart thumped wildly in my chest, scrambling behind my ribs like a burrowing animal. I wanted to stroke the hair on her arms, mark the wide mole on her neck, skim the bony collarbones visible from the top of her nightgown. She brought my hand below its trailing end, swept it up her legs, sticky, damp with sweat and tacky from the humidity. Pressing my fingers forward into the vee of her crotch, I found the warm, snarling heart of her. I let my fingers jut there, mouths still eating at each other. Rubbing through the cotton, so much like my own.
There was nothing to say, and that seemed right. I tucked into her, through the underwear, both of us breathing hard, listening for the sound of our friends in the other room. When one of them knocked something over, Brynn and I jumped apart. She reached for her beer and nearly tipped it over again before draining the last sip. My own mouth was dry, but I couldn’t drink any more. We went into the front of the shop, with our friends. Turned off the lights, played hide-and-seek. Brynn and I hid behind the bear with its shaggy coat. Our bodies like shadows. Hands finding each other in the dark. Lips grazing. Every time we parted I could smell the imprint of her on me: her spit, my spit, hands full of the scent of her.
When we crawled into bed at 3:00 AM, Brynn said good night and then turned to face the wall. I rolled onto my side and watched the clock, but instead of the numbers, I just kept seeing everything I wanted stretched out in front of me. All of it set out neatly, laid cleanly and precisely. Easy to navigate as the skeletal structure waiting for me back at the shop. I just had to set the bones the way I wanted them and it could all be mine.
2
Milo scrounged for quarters in the center console of his truck, unseating crumpled fast-food napkins and dried oak leaves. “I hate all this shitty construction.”
The gallery was one of the new places that had recently cropped up. There were vintage furniture stores and craft beer bars in what used to be a strip mall. Newcomers renovated the beat-up sections of the downtown area, painting walls and repaving streets with brick until everyone’s tires bounced at speeds of over fifteen miles per hour. It wasn’t new to me. It was what Central Floridians did: pave over everything so they could forget what had been there before. Theme parks and chain restaurants were built over homes and libraries. Banks took the place of family-owned businesses. There were highways built over historic areas; places where you wouldn’t know something had ever happened unless a person told you or you read about it in a book. The park where the Seminole once lived had been razed to build carnival space, which in turn had been repurposed as a power building that eventually became a Publix. No one ever seemed to remember what came before. A kind of local amnesia, my father called it. That particular portion of Morse held an old appliance store with a run-down ACE sign papering most of the front window, a co-op that sold locally grown food, and the gallery.
Though all of the buildings were brick, Lucinda Rex’s place was painted a flat slate gray. Nothing hinted that it was even a business, other than the front door, where REX was etched in glass, as if a dinosaur might be housed on the premises.
“Is it okay that you’re missing so much work?” I asked. “Are they going to fire you?”
He shrugged and finally dug free some loose change. “If they were gonna fire me they’d have done it by now.” Six quarters nestled in his palm alongside a couple of straw wrappers and an old french fry. “I’ve worked there so long now I don’t think they even remember I get paid.”