Unnatural Creatures

12

MEGAN KURASHIGE is a dancer who sometimes writes. I wish she would write more, but that would mean she would dance less. Here she shows us some unnatural creatures made by hand.

There’s a strange collection in the Museum of Natural History, an exhibit of rogue taxidermy, hoaxes created by the enterprising to fool people into believing in monsters. Or are they hoaxes?

IT WAS A HOT, BLUE DAY IN AUGUST when Matthew and I went to the Museum of Natural History for the air-conditioning. I wanted to go to the movies, but Matthew’s mother had told him, at breakfast, that she was cleaning up another scandal in the Zoological Gallery. There was even an article in the paper about it. Matthew had cut it out before he got on the train and we began our argument while he was trying to retrieve the piece of newsprint from his back pocket.

“It’s cheaper than the movies,” he said. “I’ve got my mom’s pass, so it’ll be free, actually. It’s air-conditioned. We can stay all day.”

I made a face. Once, when we went to the beach, Matthew spent the whole afternoon crouched by a single tide pool and, while I walked up and down the sand, slowly burning, he watched a tiny crab eat its way through the arm of a dead starfish. It was like watching a horror movie in slow motion, but Matthew thought it was the most interesting thing in the world.

“The movies are air-conditioned,” I said.

“Yeah, but we’ll only be there for an hour and a half. Two at the most.”

The train’s ventilation system had given up, and the air was piling into a thick, damp haze. By the time Matthew rescued the newspaper article from his pocket, the paper was limp and so wrinkled that he had to stretch it across his knee before I could see what it was.

UNNATURAL SPECIMEN SMUGGLED INTO MUSEUM, it said. Beneath the headline, a grainy, black-and-white photograph showed a stuffed raccoon with a pair of soft, gray wings folded over its back. The photograph had been taken through glass and the photographer’s reflection partially obscured the subject, but the raccoon’s face was clearly visible, its lips flared in an artificial snarl. A caption under the raccoon’s feet called it “an audacious hoax.”

“Where’s the article?” I asked.

“I just cut out the picture. That’s the interesting part. My mom says they got the article wrong anyway. It wasn’t actually in any of the exhibits, just glued on the wall next to one. Don’t you want to see it?”

“Not really.” The museum was the kind of place that tracked cold little fingerprints down the back of my neck. Quiet spaces full of dead things, all posed like they were happy to be that way. “And didn’t your mom say that they got rid of it already?”

“But we have her pass. We can go in the back and have a look around. Besides, it’s my turn to choose.” He took the pass out of his pocket and tapped it against his nose, still sunburned from the weekend before, when I made him spend hours at a carnival so we could ride the Ferris wheel at sunset.

“Fine,” I said. I had made a mistake the weekend before and kissed him while we were pressed together in our gondola, surrounded by a red-and-orange sky, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. We sat across from each other in the train with our knees pulled up so they wouldn’t touch. I crossed my arms and Matthew laughed, leaning in so close that I could see an eyelash that had come loose and was hanging askew on the top of his cheek.

The museum was cool and full of shade and, after coming in from the street where the sunlight reflected off the pavement, my eyes couldn’t decide where to look.

“Let’s go straight there,” Matthew said. He already knew the way. We sped past cases of dried insects pinned to canvas, down a hall decorated with topographical maps, through a dim room of enormous brown bones, and across a rotunda lined with dioramas. Groups of people trundled in front and behind us, all heading the same way. The kids were all shouting the same thing.

“The raccoon!”

“The raccoon!”

They crowded the doorway of the Zoological Gallery, pushing their way into air that had a mothball tinge, a dusty, faintly chemical prickle that crawled up noses and into brains.

“The raccoon!”

Matthew laughed and grabbed my hand. We slid along the crowd’s edges, around a corner, and into a small room that could have been a closet, emptied of everything except a pair of Australian platypuses, displayed with a nest of eggs, and a stumpy man whose green hat had a clump of feathers tucked under the brim like a fisherman’s lure.

“Anybody there?” the man asked.

“Nobody,” Matthew said. “Except for us.”

“Good.” The man lifted a piece of white card out of a paper bag. He lifted a stick of glue. He coated one side of the card with the glue, making lavish swoops and curves, and then flipped it over, pressing it down on the plaque that described the Platypus, or Ornithorhynchus anatinus, and smoothing it out with his fingers.

“You can’t do that,” I said. The glue bulged around the sides of the card and the man smeared it with his thumb.

“Why not?” the man asked. “Don’t you ever get tired of looking at things the way they are?”

Matthew pointed his two fingers at me, like a gun. He was always telling me the same thing.

“You can’t do that,” I said, “because someone else did all the work to figure out what those things are, and to name them, and to write it down so everyone else can know what they’re looking at. And now you’re messing it up.” I pushed Matthew in the shoulder and the gun wavered, wilted, fell away.

“You could at least read it,” Matthew said.

I read the card. The print was very small.

THE STORY OF JENNY HANIVER

A long time ago, there was a girl named Jenny Haniver who lived at the edge of the sea. She lived with her mother, who was old and blind, and with nobody else. Jenny could sail, and she could fish, and her eyes were the same color as the sea.

At some point, a man fell in love with Jenny. They would have married and lived to be happy and old. They would have had children and grandchildren and, on their last day, sailed out of life together.

But before that could happen, the man was swept out by a wave. He would have drowned, but Jenny was an excellent swimmer and she saved him. Afterwards, she died.

Jenny’s mother wrapped her daughter’s body in silvery fish. She sewed them together with hair that she tore from her own head. She popped their eyes with a silver pin and whispered secret words into their fishy ears.

Jenny Haniver swam away without saying goodbye. The man watched until she disappeared, and he watched for many days after that, but she was something else, something new, and she never came back.

I looked at the platypuses again when I finished reading. The man had replaced one of them with a shriveled, dry thing that had a bulbous head, a narrow, bony chest, and a brittle fish tail the color of dust. Next to it, the platypus looked just as strange, a creature sewn up from different parts.

“This is Mr. Jabricot,” Matthew said. “He works with my mom.”

Mr. Jabricot pressed his chin into his chest. He clasped his hands together and bent his head over them, smiling as if he were taking a bow. “Your mother is an excellent woman,” he said. “A woman of unimpeachable character. It’s to her credit that she would never suspect any of her employees of doing something like this. Not you though. You would tip a place upside down before settling for something as easy as that.” He turned to me and held out his hand. I took it, but instead of folding his palm and shaking, he tapped the backs of my fingers with his thumb. “Clever. Moderately pretty. Pragmatic. Did you like the story?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for sad endings, not then. I waited for Matthew to notice that the conversation was getting strange, that it might be a nice time to leave, that we were loitering in a small room with a man who had just defaced a museum exhibit with some paper and glue and a thing that, in the best light, would still look like a fish stranded in the desert; but Matthew was looking at the thing next to the platypus, checking it for seams.

“It’s a sad one, I know,” Mr. Jabricot said. “But, most stories are if you follow them long enough. Do you know what we call a Jenny Haniver these days?”

I pictured a girl, once dead, swimming off in a new skin made of fish, also once dead. She flicked her tail, buoyant, seaworthy. “A monster?”

“No, not a monster,” Mr. Jabricot said. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together, as if he were trying to feel the quality of his thoughts. “Sometimes it’s close, but not exactly. A Jenny Haniver, in this modern era, is what we call the art of the rogue taxidermist. A special creature summoned from the skins of animals that are plainer and more likely. Bits of monkey, bits of fish, all you have to do is suggest and people will build their own loop of possibility where mermaids chase after ships and sing to drowning sailors.”

“We should go,” Matthew said. He whistled, blowing air across the back of my neck. It was supposed to be a signal, secret code for when we couldn’t talk, but Matthew was always changing the rules about what things meant. “My mom’s picking us up.”

We sat on the train. It was still hot. Matthew cradled the Jenny Haniver in his lap. Crisp, bright sunlight fell through the windows and broke across the fake creature, picking out its pinched, desiccated face and crumbling tail.

I couldn’t believe he took it.

“Easy,” he said. “I held it behind me and when we walked out, I held it in front of me.”

“But, why?” I asked.

He wanted to see how it was made. He wanted to find all the seams and split them open, pry off the draping and reveal whatever it was hiding. Mr. Jabricot, he said, was a genius and Matthew didn’t understand a half, a quarter even, of the things he did. He held out the creature while he talked and I took it because otherwise he would wave it around, dragging eyes to our corner where I balanced a piece of stolen loot across my knees, surprised by its lightness and clean perfection. If there were seams, they were invisible. Up close, the thing looked like no one could possibly have made it. It looked more dead than dead.

“Don’t take it apart,” I said.

Matthew stopped talking. We both stared at the creature, beautiful and dry and impossible. “I won’t do it today,” he said. “And we’ll have to keep it at your house. If my mom finds it, something bad will happen.”

“She’ll find out about Mr. Jabricot.”

“She’ll ban us from the museum.”

“She’ll ground you.”

“She’ll say I’m a bad influence.”

“She won’t let us be friends.”

We ran out of bad things before we got to my stop.

My parents didn’t notice the Jenny Haniver. I carried it to my room while Mom was in the kitchen and Dad flipped from one version to the next of the evening news. We had a nice dinner: pasta and ice cream, a conversation about plumbing and neighbors that drifted past me, stuffed with people I didn’t really know.

“How’s Matthew?” Mom asked. She reserved washing the dishes for time to talk about things she thought were important. She scrubbed tomato sauce off a plate.

“He’s fine.” I stacked glasses.

“You’ve known each other for a while.”

“Yep.” I wiped a bowl dry and thought about the creature tucked under my bed and the way Matthew had looked at it, like it was the sort of thing he saw every day, like he knew how the pieces went together. Old hat. The usual.

“Well,” Mom said. She turned on the garbage disposal and let it roar through the kitchen. “I hope you guys are having a nice time.”

In the middle of the night, the creature woke me up. I could feel it lying there, under my bed, sending woozy thoughts of upside-down waves and vast, wet shadows with rows of sharp teeth seeping up through the mattress and into my sleep. I got out from under the covers and bent over until my knees touched the floor.

“Go to sleep,” I said.

I climbed back into bed and felt really dumb.

In the middle of a dream, one that involved the underside of waves and shadows with teeth, I carried the creature to the bathroom. It needed water, it told me. I shut the door, turned on the light, and filled the bathtub.

Not too cold, it said.

And I said, please?

It splashed water on me when I dropped it in, a pale shape that sunk and then darted sideways, growing fatter and more graceful as it made circles around the tub. Its scales were sleek silver gray, its body streaked and dabbed with black from the top of its head to the tips of its pliable, swishing fins. As it swam, the black drifted up and became a cloud of swaying hair. The creature rolled over in the tub and spouted water at me from newly plump cheeks.

This, it said, is the equivalent of laughing. At you. You should see your face.

In the middle of a dream, one in which I was wiping water off my face, Jenny Haniver draped her arms over the side of the tub and asked me if I believed in monsters.

“There are so many different kinds,” she said. “You have the ones that look like what we are, like me, and then you have the other ones. It’s hard to decide which are more dangerous. I guess you could make an argument either way.” She lifted one arm off the tub and held it up as if she were admiring the softness of her skin. Then she reached out, pinched a few strands of my hair, and tore them off my head.

“Ow!” I said. This was more than I signed up for. I was going to kill Matthew, if I ever saw him again. I was going to throw him from the Ferris wheel, have him eaten by crabs, feed him to the platypus, turn him in to the museum, turn him in to his mother, leave him alone—all alone—with a dried-out bit of fish and bit of monkey, freshly reconstituted into a beautiful monster.

Jenny Haniver took something thin and sharp from her own hair. A needle, curved at one end and straight at the other. She threaded it with a strand of my hair and pointed to her side where a split had appeared, a seam bursting open even though there was nothing coming through.

“It wears out,” she said. “That’s a good thing to remember.”

When I woke up, the bathtub was empty. It smelled like fish and there was a clump of long, black hair caught around the opening of the drain. Puddles dotted the floor. I cleaned everything up before my parents could get out of bed.

Matthew’s voice flew out of the phone and hit me in the ear. “You have to get over here! Mr. Jabricot has something new that he’s going to try. He says we can be there. We can help. We can be the first people to see it. Do you even know how amazing that is?” I could hear him breathing hard into the phone, blowing big, whistling breaths down the line at me. I was pretty sure this wasn’t secret code for anything, except for the fact that Matthew, if left unattended, would collapse from the thrill.

“What about the Jenny Haniver?” I asked. How do you tell your friend that his stolen treasure walked itself out while you were sleeping? Or dragged itself out, on two arms and a flopping, shredding tail? How are you supposed to tell anyone something like that?

“Don’t worry about it. Mr. Jabricot knows everything. He thinks we’re hilarious.” Matthew laughed and I could hear someone else laughing behind him. “Come on. Hurry up.”

How are you supposed to talk to the person who you used to think was your best friend in the world? “Sure,” I said.

Mr. Jabricot let me in through a plain door on the back side of the museum. It opened onto a bland corridor and I followed Mr. Jabricot into it, past doors that were mostly closed. He was wearing his green hat again and a brown tweed jacket with felt patches over the elbows. He looked like a teacher or a librarian and, for some reason, the similarity made me want to laugh.

“So,” he said, “Jenny Haniver. What do you think about her story now?”

“It’s the same thing,” I said. “She gets sewn up. She turns into a monster. She leaves.”

“I think you’re lacking some inspiration.” Mr. Jabricot made two scolding clicks at the back of his throat. “Or, you’re lying. The moral of the story is: you can’t see anything unless you look at it inside another skin. Your friend can’t figure that one out, but I assume you’re smarter than he is.” He patted my shoulder.

I decided that I had been lying, but hadn’t realized it until he made me consider the possibility. I was about to apologize, but Mr. Jabricot opened the door at the end of the hall. The room inside was cold and smelled of plaster, chemicals, and the sharp, uncomfortable scent of strong disinfectant. There were shelves full of tools and bottles and boxes piled with soft scraps that looked like fur. Matthew was sitting on the edge of a long table, poking through a tray of mismatched glass eyes.

“This is Mr. Jabricot’s office. My mom never comes here. She says it’s creepy.” Matthew held a flat gold eye with a slotted pupil up to his face. “I think it’s the most gorgeous room in the world. Every time I come here, I feel like the excitement is going to punch me in the face.”

I sat on the table next to him. Mr. Jabricot moved around the room, returning boxes to shelves and sweeping a dry paintbrush across the bared surfaces. Fur and dust drifted to the floor.

“You really work here?” I asked.

“Of course. I take care of the collection. Patch up moth damage, reset loose eyes, paint on the stripes and dapples when they start to fade. Everything else, I squeeze in around the edges.”

“Like the Jenny Haniver?” I asked. “And the raccoon?” I wondered if the raccoon had been put away in a storage room, or thrown away, or if it were somewhere outside, prowling the halls on nimble, dark-nailed feet.

“Yes,” Mr. Jabricot said. “And this new thing I’m working on. The one I was hoping to show you.” He moved toward a cabinet at the side of the room, but Matthew was off the table and ahead of him, pulling the doors open and gathering in his arms a mound of sable, a sliding, ruddy pile of fur that fell in sheets to the floor and ended in something that dragged and clattered. He held it up to me and then spun around, sliding his arms in, ducking his head under, and coming up again, dressed in a fur coat.

“It’s a manticore,” he said. He smiled so hard that his face went shiny where it stretched over his cheeks and his chin.

He just looked like Matthew in a fur coat. A fur coat with one set of paws dangling from the cuffs and another flopped on the floor. It had a sad, crooked tail with a spike tied to the end of it and a fluffy collar that rose all the way to his ears.

“You look silly,” I said. Matthew rolled his eyes.

“A manticore,” Mr. Jabricot said, “has the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail of a dragon.” He held up a needle, curved at one end and straight at the other, and threaded it with a strand of something long and dark. Matthew held up his own needle and they began stitching him up, one from the top and one from the bottom.

“It has a terrible voice, like a dozen trumpets,” Matthew said. “It has a mouth full of teeth, three rows of them, like a shark.” As they stitched, the coat shrank. It clung to his back, wrapped around his legs, and pulled his shoulders over so he was bent, then kneeling, then standing on four paws. The claws scraped the floor.

They stitched and stitched. I told them to stop.

Stop, I said. It’s stupid, whatever you’re doing. I don’t believe it, I said. Why is that tail lashing? I can’t believe how stupid I was to come. I’m going to close my eyes and when I open them, I won’t be here, you won’t be here, none of this will have happened.

They didn’t hear me.

A manticore’s voice sounds exactly like a dozen trumpets, if a dozen trumpets were playing twelve different jazz scores and all the musicians were deaf and stranded at different points in time.

I opened my eyes.

The manticore was standing on Mr. Jabricot. Its claws pierced the brown tweed of Mr. Jabricot’s coat and its tail swung in an arc that shrank the world down to nothing but the poisonous spike tracing the edge of it. The manticore knocked Mr. Jabricot’s hat from his head, and I could see that the top of Mr. Jabricot’s head was balding, a circle of tender, shiny flesh ringed by short hair as plain as the coat of a mouse.

“Oh no,” Mr. Jabricot said. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

The manticore’s mouth was full of teeth, three yellowing rows of them, and it ground them together as it studied all the soft and delicate parts of the man lying beneath its claws. The twelve trumpets screamed and Mr. Jabricot covered his ears.

The teeth looked terrible shoved into Matthew’s face. They stretched his mouth so wide that his lips couldn’t close over them. They crowded his nose and pressed his chin back to accommodate their three rows, turning Matthew’s face into a different shape. It wouldn’t have been able to laugh, or smile, or twist its lips up at one corner over something it found more interesting than anything else in the room. It didn’t look like Matthew at all.

“Spit those out,” I said. I reached out and grabbed the manticore’s fur. I pulled it toward me, or maybe it pulled me toward it. I couldn’t be sure because Mr. Jabricot struggled up from the floor and ran from the room. He was sobbing; I could hear it underneath the trumpets screaming and doors slamming and the voices of people coming down through the halls. I worked my fingers into a seam, already wearing out and pulling apart. I ripped it and the manticore bit my arm.

“Stop that,” I said. The manticore ignored me, so I ignored the teeth sinking into my arm, the smell of blood, and the aching, blinding pain, and found another seam and ripped that one too. The manticore was unraveling now. Its fur peeled off in long strips. Its teeth fell out, one by one. It let go of my arm and ran for the door, howling in a brassy voice that sounded less and less like a roar.

My arm was bleeding, so I sewed it up. There were needles in a cupboard and I used a piece of hair from my own head. It hurt more than I thought it would, but less than having a manticore’s teeth stuck in your arm. It healed in a week and when my mom asked what happened, I said I had been scratched by a cat.

“Do you need an antibiotic?” she asked.

I told her that I didn’t think so. It wasn’t anything dangerous and, besides, it was almost healed.

Matthew was grounded. They found him in a closet in the museum, asleep in the wreckage of a very expensive specimen, a half-lion, half-tiger skin that Mr. Jabricot had been commissioned to mount as part of a display on rare hybrids of the world. His mom made a formal apology to the museum board and tried to quit her job out of embarrassment, but they begged her to come back, with the condition that Matthew would never go into the museum again.

I haven’t decided what I am going to say to him yet. I think he still might be my best friend.

The scar on my arm is very faint and narrow. It’s about the width of a piece of hair and curves three times between my shoulder and my elbow. Sometimes, on hot and quiet afternoons, I’ll go outside alone and look at it in the sun.

On the rare occasion, I sing.

A trumpet, just one, sounds sweet when it finds the right tune. If you’re lucky, a monster does too.