Taxidermy

This is ecology: knee-deep in leaves half-rotten, clad in marsh suspenders: shoes and pants one big rubbery thing. There’s something horrifying about having feet like this. It’s 2008 and my size six Sketchers are housed within someone else’s waders and I rock forward in my boots with each suckling step. Reeds grow taller than me and I’m in a corn maze in 2011, slick mud patches gliding me forward. I’m a brain humming with the desire to know things. To get to the heart of the maze I need to follow the signs, wooden stakes marked with laminated clues driven into the carefully plotted field to guide me toward something. This year’s theme is presidents and state capitols, and I’m leading my family, making turns at Montpelier and Fireside Chat. I’m the smart one and need to prove it. I run ahead and reach the edge of the field, something I’ve never done before, and it feels like a fourth-wall break, the edge of the matrix: I’m peering out over a pumpkin patch picked clean, a thin stand of white oaks bordering the patchwork field. The cornfield’s empty behind the rental house. A thin stand of white oaks marks the irrigation ditch and I’m at the back of the machine shed, where the grass of our lot knits into corn furrows. It’s 2002 and the field is so empty and open that suddenly I know we’re going to be bombed. I’m five and bad guys are out to get me. I am gripped with the steel logic of this possibility and run away from the field and toward the dairy cows’ wet murmurs and into Dad’s brick wall legs. I look up at him through glass tears and ask if bin Laden’s going to kill us, and he says No, Missa, he’s not here, he doesn’t even know where we are and lifts me onto his shoulders. Oh Missa Lue, Missa Lue, Missa Lue. The hills roll so far I don’t know what’s past them. The skinny oak grove is the one in Mom’s oil painting above the sagging brown couch. No, that was a study of Monet, a copy of his fields of oats and poppies, but along Claude’s blue horizon I can see Highway 33 cutting the hills. I should know the difference between Argenteuil and Mayville. I should know to call 920-477-0799 and not 911 but the cops show up and I don’t know how it happened. I should’ve known I’d get too hot wearing a hoodie in the marsh, sweaty in those waders that made me feel like I was drowning, and that I’d feel faint if I skipped breakfast. And I should’ve known that swaying at the edge of unconsciousness was reason enough to ask a teacher if I could sit down, that Hannah Schmidt was lying to me when she spotted me leaning against the cabin wall and said Morissa, you’re not allowed to do that, and I should’ve known to take off my hoodie but I didn’t, I should’ve known she would slip the marked woodchip into my hood, because of course she would, it’s Hannah Schmidt who carries a bible to class and thinks she can do no wrong, and of course it was me. How else would it have gone? It’s 2008 in the sixth grade camp cafeteria and the teachers are asking who has the marked woodchip and it’s silent until Hannah Schmidt yells Morissa has it, and everyone looks at me and I reach back into my hood and feel my fingers make contact with wood and time slows, voices become humming locusts, and I walk through the sea of sixth graders as an automaton to the stage, and I watch my hand pull a popsicle stick from the jar and I read the Sharpied words act like a chicken, my punishment for failing to guard myself, and the teachers’ faces contort into mortified masks. Not her, not her. But of course it was me. It couldn’t happen any other way. I ball my fists into my armpits and flap my wings feebly and in my soft voice, the one that everyone shouts at to speak up, you’re so quiet speak up, I bawk like a chicken, and I look out over the sea of students and they all turn their thumbs down. That wasn’t good enough. You didn’t save yourself. Kiss the moose. So I kiss the taxidermy moose head on the flat of its nose, walk back to my table amid squeals of disgust and delight, and exit myself. I see the picture from above, fold the moment into a square, and hide it somewhere. It’s 2012 and my parents are sitting my sister and me down to tell us our cousin is dead, struck by a truck on his bike ride to school. I know the words as they’re tumbling out of Dad’s mouth, like something I heard in a dream, like I’ve met this moment before, a paper plane dislodged from memory’s chronology. The next day in the locker room I cut my sobbing short, slap myself out of it, wipe my tears because it’s time to go to class. Smile, do my work. Avoid my reflection, because I know if I see myself I’ll return to my body and feel it. It’s 2022 and I haven’t left my house in three days and I feel like a too-small crab rattling in its shell, I am so lonely, I’ve never been so lonely. It’s 2015 and Nikki puts a gun to her head and I don’t know how to cry. It’s 2016 and I sit down on the couch and Dad says Bruce is dead and I don’t know how to cry. I’m in the living room at his funeral and Dad’s friend Hobnob is pouring shots of Glenlivet and gives one each to my baby sister and me, and Dad says to Bruce and we throw them back. It’s 2020 and I don’t know how to talk about Bruce, so I talk about the moose and my therapist Kevin asks what I wish happened afterwards. I tell him I just wanted someone to say something to me. I wanted someone who witnessed it to stop pretending it didn’t happen and acknowledge out loud that it was fucked up. It’s 2008 and I’m sitting at the cafeteria table, rattling, and my best friend is staring carefully at me, eyes wide with fear and pity and regret because she doesn’t know how to talk to me. Kevin pulls up a chair and the cafeteria chatter forms a cocoon of sound around us. How are you doing? he asks, and I tell him I don’t know. That was really tough, he says, and I feel the tears welling and nod. It’s okay to feel these big emotions, and you’re brave and I’m proud of you. You went up there, you didn’t even cry like the other girls would’ve, it sucks but you did it and I’m proud of you Mom says when I come home that night and I lie bent over her lap, my throat strangling itself, her warm hand rubbing my shuddering back. You don’t have to go back tomorrow, she says but I know I have to, I know my absence will prove my weakness. I know this as I look into the void rectangle of my open closet door, and it’s 2018 and my aunt Bernadette sleeps in my bedroom and the next morning tells me she saw Nikki standing in my closet doorway. It’s 2022 and I wake up from a dream of clouds. I saw Bruce looking at me with his eyes, warm and brown like Dad’s and Bernadette’s and mine, and I was too shocked to speak, and I heard Bernadette’s voice entering to my subconscious to mediate: What do you want to ask him? It’s 2023 and I’m driving alone in a car that’s not mine across the Puget Sound on a bridge that threads broken islands together, and Video Games by Lana Del Rey is playing on the radio, and it’s 2016 and Video Games by Lana Del Rey is playing from a burned CD Mom made to soundtrack Bruce’s living room funeral. I’ve just thrown back a shot of scotch and didn’t taste anything, didn’t feel any fire, didn’t feel the swell of alcohol, just the prick of water behind my eyes and a throat that keeps trying to close. I don’t know who has Bruce’s dog. I don’t know who has Bruce’s body. They thought he was building bombs. When we go through his stuff in the weeks after the funeral I see a cardboard box he labeled “Nikki’s pretty dresses” and I find one I’ve seen her wear in pictures, a red and white polka-dotted dress I decide to keep in my closet. Dad and I go to the police station to pick up Bruce’s impounded truck, an old white thing rusted so bad I can feel the heat of the engine through the footwells, but he rigged it up with a pricey set of subwoofers, so when Dad and I park in the driveway we find a sleeve of CDs and stick Hellbilly Deluxe in the disc player and crank it so loud to test those babies out, and when the whole truck quakes with Dragula’s thundering bass we look at each other and laugh at the sheer force of sound. He turns the truck off and holds the keys in his palm, and the simple ring runs through a hole in a wooden cylinder with a smooth oval at the top. I ask what it is, and neither of us know, Dad says I wonder if it comes apart and there’s drugs inside, but we twist it and look for seams and find it all solid, a single piece of rosewood. It’s 2016 and when Bruce comes over my dog hides from him. Bruce collapses into tears on the living room couch while I’m doing my homework and he looks at me and says I’m sorry and I don’t know what else to say besides it’s okay. I should hug him but I don’t. When he leaves my dog avoids the corner of the dining room, walks past the shed with his tail tucked between his legs. I hear my parents’ sharp whispers: I think Bruce is hiding drugs here. Bruce tells people he has terminal cancer and Dad calls bullshit. Each time Bruce comes over he’s more erratic until Dad says Don’t come back. You’re putting the girls in danger. It’s 2016 and Bruce dies in the middle of a street. It’s 2016 and the cops say there’s bodycam footage. It’s 2016 and the cops say there was never bodycam footage. It’s 2018 and Dad drives home with Bruce’s black Mustang on the trailer. I look through the window. Bruce replaced the knob of the gear shift with a 20-sided die, and the inside is too clean. Nikki died in that passenger seat, Dad says. None of us go inside. It’s 2018 and the people from the bank have come to repossess the Mustang Bruce knew he’d never have the money to pay off. Mom and I watch it happen from the front porch. We want it gone, it sits under the cedar trees like a grim shadow, but as the truck tows it out of our driveway, she starts to cry. Bruce loved that car is all she can say, and we hold each other and never see the Mustang again. It’s 2022 and I’m sitting at the table, fiddling with the keyring, run my fingers over that wooden post, and something suddenly clicks inside me: it’s a tuning peg from Nikki’s violin. It’s 2015 and my parents have gone ahead of my sister and me in the funeral receiving line to hug Nikki’s parents, and she and I panic and rush through the line to catch up, say I’m sorry without stopping. It’s 2023 and I’m driving alone across the Puget Sound and the radio sound swells and my eyes are rivers. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Morissa Young is a writer and editor. In 2024, she earned her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has work forthcoming in NELLE and Frozen Sea.