Post by Robin on Mar 17, 2006 9:13:43 GMT -8
I'm not sure where this is going, only that I think it may have bought a one-way ticket towards corny horror book town, but I sort of like how it's written. So here goes.
Note: I know that Oklahoma isn't the "black person state." I just have it in there until I can remember what state is supposedly home to all the black people. I'm not really trying to be racist, but these people kind of are, so...yeah.
-----
Lane Emerson, who was, at the time, seven years old, sat in the back of his parents’ van, slurping on an orange crème popsicle. He was ill at ease traveling in such a strange, different, barren land as Oklahoma, and his face showed the marks of such agitation: in his boredom and attempts to comfort himself, he had smeared the orange Popsicle all over his face. His lips and chin were sticky, and for some odd reason, the tip of his nose was shiny with the sugar in the Popsicle. His mother, Anita Emerson, caught sight of him in the vanity mirror that she had brought down to check her teeth in, and frowned.
“Lane,” she said, half-cooingly, half-scoldingly. “What did you do to your face?”
With the almost proud brazenness of the very young, Lane replied “I smeared my ice cream on it. I was bored.”
“Lane,” she clucked. “Let me clean you up. You want to look nice for our trip to the museum, don’t you?”
As she fished in her purse for a napkin with which to clean her son, Lane stuck out his chin impudently.
“I don’t want to go to a dumb terxidermy museum anyways,” he replied. “Who wants to look at dead animals all day? Boring!” He drawled the last word and looked at his mother with a smile on his face.
Anita smiled back, and tousled his sandy blonde hair before licking the napkin and dabbing at the stickiness on his cherubic face.
“It’s taxidermy, honey, and it’ll be fun,” she said as she cleaned off his face. “You’ll get to see tigers and lions and zebras!”
“I got to see them at the zoo,” Lane said. “And they were moving. The zebras made sounds like on ‘The Lion King.’” He attempted to imitate the whooping sound that zebras make, and his mother’s face crumbled into a crinkle, adoring expression.
“Yes, but these ones won’t stink, and you get to be in an exciting new place! The zoo was just in New York, Lane. This museum is in Oklahoma. You’ll get to eat exciting foods from Oklahoma.”
“Exciting foods like what?” Lane asked. “Fried chicken and chitins?”
“Honey!” Anita exclaimed. Her pretty blue eyes were wide with shock. “Where did you learn that?”
“Daddy says it all the time,” Lane replied.
Anita cast her shocked gaze to her husband, Tyson, who was laughing silently.
“You know it’s funny, ‘Nita,” Tyson replied. “Oklahoma is the heartland of hicks and black people.”
Despite herself, Anita began to laugh a little, herself.
“Alright, alright,” she grumbled after a spell. “It is funny. You just better not go around saying it in front of all the ni-“
Tyson burst into full-out laughter, taking his hands off the wheel to clap his wife on the back. The car swerved a little, and Anita, with one hand clapped over her mouth, reached for the wheel with her free hand.
“Watch the road!” she told Tyson.
“You were going to say… the n-word!” he laughed. “You were going to say it!”
“I was,” Anita said indignantly, “But I, unlike you, have the self-restraint to not say things like that in front of our baby boy!”
Her words served more to cement their family ties together than they did to preserve them. Tyson and Anita had never really fought. Their relationship had begun as every healthy adolescent’s should: because they had a sexual interest in each other. Anita had been pretty enough - was still pretty enough - with her pretty blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair, and her skin with not even one spot of acne. Tyson hadn’t been such a bad looking man either: he had had sandy blonde hair like Lane’s and dark brown eyes. His hair, of course, was graying at the temples, but it was hard to see, since his hair was blonde, and also because, on sunny days, the sun shone right through the gray hairs and rendered them invisible. In High School, he hadn’t had those gray hairs, and Anita hadn’t had stretch marks on her stomach along with a long scar from her Cesarean section on her belly button. She had had a flat, white stomach, and long, coltish legs, as well as a firm ass and tits. Their relationship, started sexually, had no unstable emotional pillars that could crash down. They had learned a while back that “true love” did not exist: only desire did. Something grounded in a human instinct so basic that even animals have it cannot die, at least not for a very long time. Anita and Tyson had learned this long before their friends and siblings had begun to divorce each other because of emotional conflict and issues with interests. They had started their relationship because they both wanted the same thing, and so they spent their relationship wanting the same thing: a good life for their son. Working together for this, they couldn’t screw up.
Oh, they loved each other; there was no doubt about that. Their relationship simply went deeper than emotional roots: deep down into the most basic codes of instinct, if you will.
Lane was still clutching the stick of his Popsicle, and he looked with consternation at his parents. As young as he was, he didn’t understand the subtle wordplay that his parents were undergoing. To alleviate his confusion by stopping their conversation altogether, he interrupted with a child’s age-old irritation tactic.
“Are we there yet?”
Anita and Tyson shut up almost immediately. Tyson cleared his throat, and Anita peered at herself in the vanity, grabbing her hair up with one hand and putting it up into a bun. Irritated now, Lane spoke up again.
“Are we there yet?”
Distractedly, embarrassedly, irritably, Anita spoke to Lane without looking back at him. “No, honey. We’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Oh,” Lane replied. “Okay, then.”
Throughout the rest of the trip to the museum, Lane kept up his serenade of “Are we there yet”’s.
When they finally made it to the Taxidermy Museum, all of them were very relieved. Tyson and Anita were relieved because they wouldn’t have to listen to Lane asking them if they were there yet, and Lane was relieved because his throat was getting sore from so much complaining.
They got out of the van as quickly as possible, wiping the creases from their travel-wrinkled clothing and shaking all over to rid themselves of the slight, but annoying, stiffness and numbness that prolonged car rides bring.
They were surprised to find that there were two other cars in the parking lot, and a throng of people were gathering at the ticket box in front of the museum. It was manned by a tiny, wizened old woman with sagging skin and shriveled breasts that hung down to below her ribs.
Anita gave Lane’s face a quick once-over with a napkin that she had dampened with saliva, and then shoved the wad back in her purse. It was a scuffed brown leather thing, floppy and easy to carry. She slung it over her should, looked down herself to make sure she had nothing on her robin’s egg blue blouse, and then straightened her shorts.
Tyson sighed impatiently.
“Done primping, my queen?” he asked, holding out a hand and bending his knees mockingly.
“Why yes, Lancelot,” she said in a breathy, airy, faux British accent. “You can escort me back to the castle, now. I am tired of adventuring.”
“As you wish, my lady Guinevere,” he replied in a voice nearly as breathy.
“As long as we’re granting wishes,” Lane said impudently. “Can I have some ice cream when we get in?”
“You just had ice cream, Lane,” Tyson told his son.
“Yeah,” Lane agreed. “But that was a Popsicle. Popsicles are different than ice cream.”
“He has you there,” Anita laughed. “Come on, let’s go and get our tickets.”
Tyson and Anita each grabbed one of Lane’s hands, and, swinging him along, they went up to the ticket window, where one family was ahead of them. It was made up of a father, three young women, and a little boy. They were all red-headed. The girl who looked the oldest had enormous bosoms that must have stuck out from her chest twelve inches. It was apparent that she was not wearing a brassiere. Nobody in the Emerson family could help but notice the huge Lynyrd Skynyrd decal on her shirt. Lane, too young to notice the sexual connotations of what he was seeing, only to understand that a girl old enough to be his babysitter was walking around almost as scantily clad as he did when he was two years old, snickered. The other girls in that family were no less voluptuous looking. The one who appeared to be second-oldest was wearing a form-fitting, black Led Zeppelin shirt and very ripped jeans. The youngest girl was wearing another shirt bearing a band’s name, but none of them could read it, because she was nearly hidden behind her two older sisters. The youngest, the boy, appeared to be a little older than Lane, and he was walking around in a small circle behind his family.
They waited for perhaps ten minutes, and by then Anita was tapping her sandaled foot impatiently. Tyson, taking her hint, spoke up.
“Uh…excuse me, sir,” he said. “But is there any chance you could hurry things up a bit?”
The father turned around, and he had a weary expression on his face. “No, I’m sorry. They won’t take my credit card,” he said. “And I don’t have any cash.”
“Oh, I can loan you some,” Tyson said immediately, reaching into his wallet. “How much do you need?”
The man started to protest, but sighed. “Forty dollars,” he said. Tyson took two twenty dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to the man.
The man hesitated for a moment, and then took the money, giving it to the woman in the ticket stand and receiving five tickets in return.
Tyson moved up and bought three tickets, and then they walked into the museum. They could only see the back of the red-haired man’s eldest daughter’s white shirt in the nearly total dark of the dim, cool museum as their eyes adjusted to the dark.
******
Lane, having the youngest eyes there, adjusted to the darkness quickest. At the sight of a bear with snarling teeth in front of him, he made a whimpering noise and reached for his mother’s leg. Confused, Anita reached down to pat his head comfortingly, and looked around for a light switch. Just as she had begun to think that the museum was simply dimly lit, the whole room was illuminated. It reminded Anita of God’s light: if you looked upon him without him having any disguises to mask him, you would be maddened by the glory of him.
She squinted as her pupils contracted to pinpoints to protect themselves from the new, bright light; a vague shape was starting to take shape in front of the three families.
“Welcome to the Oklahoma Museum of Taxidermy!” the figure boomed, and they all clapped and laughed as they realized what was going on.
“What a great entrance!” the red-haired man who Tyson had loaned money to laughed. “It was like something out of a carnival, not out of a Taxidermy Museum!”
The man, for it was then very easy to see that the figure was indeed a man, smiled as he waited for the applause to die down.
“Once again, welcome to the Oklahoma Museum of Taxidermy,” he said. His voice was quite pleasant to listen to: mellow and smooth as butter, and the Emersons found themselves lulling into a very convincing, pleasing sense of security. “My name is Dennis Perkins, and I will be your tour guide today. I hope you enjoy your stay.”
In the inquisitive nature of a child, Lane found himself examining tour guide, Dennis. He was a tall man, taller than Lane’s father, and with a face holding a wide, guileless smile and friendly brown eyes. He was absolutely plastered in promotions for the museum: his hair was obscured by a red cap sporting the decal “Friends of OMOT;” he was wearing a white shirt that had a picture of a snarling lion on it and said “Oklahoma: Home of Taxidermy;” he had on long khaki shorts with a fanny-pack that matched his hat. He looked like the host on Fear Factor, not a person that one would expect to see as a tour guide in a museum. Lane’s mind dimly registered the possibility that perhaps the museum was like Fear Factor: the memory of the fear from the snarling bear was not far from his mind, but he brushed it away. His mom and dad wouldn’t take him to a place where he would be scared out of his wits. Other parents would. His best friend, Tommy, had parents who would do that to him. But Lane knew that his parents were too kind for that: they loved him too much to do something like that to him willingly.
Lane wasn’t allowed to observe Dennis long, however, because the little red-headed boy, the one who seemed to be about Lane’s age, had raised his hand, as though he was in school. When Lane thought about it, they almost were in school. They were in a place full of educational things, and there was a vaguely threatening man who was going to teach them about all of it. In any case, Dennis pointed to the little red-headed boy, and asked him what his name was.
“My name’s Casey B. McLaughlin,” he said with the pompous confidence of the young. “And I have a question.”
“Well, what’s your question?” Dennis asked. His voice was like a waterfall: it went up and down and was full of something kind, like laughter. Despite his fears about this man, Lane was comforted by it.
“Are we going to see anybody making these things?” he gestured around to the scant amounts of preserved animals around them. Anita and Lane Emerson shivered in unison at the little boy’s air of casualness around all these vaguely disturbing creations. They didn’t feel like there was anything to fear about the place, but it seemed as though these creatures should be given more…respect. This feeling was shared in part by Tyson Emerson, although he was less disturbed by it than they were. He had his masculinity to protect, after all, and talking about giving respect to dead animals would be like a kick in the ‘nads.
Dennis laughed. “Of course we are!” he said. “Nobody wants to come to a museum just to see a bunch of dead animals. People want to see how they’re made, don’t you all?” The small sea of heads in front of the Emerson family moved up and down, like a lull in the tide.
“And,” Dennis added. “You probably want to get down to business, huh?”
The heads nodded more quickly.
“So let’s go!” Dennis said. “What’s the use in waiting?” With that, he waved his arm in the air, gesturing them to follow. The three families followed after him eagerly. Dennis had a talent for making crowds excited about things people usually aren’t excited about, like a high school cheerleader. The school’s football team may have lost every game of the season, but if you get a talented enough cheerleader out there, she can get them excited about anything, even a game that the team is more than likely to lose.
******
Dennis led the group through a doorway that led into the first section of the tour.
“Now, this first section we’re looking at is just small animals. Some people find this the most boring part of the tour, but that’s just not true.” He smiled. “The smaller the animal, the harder it is to preserve. It takes fewer materials, but it’s easier. It takes less time, and it’s easier to handle. A hand-sized animal like a chipmunk would be a lot easier to preserve than oh, say, a human.”
A murmur of unease rippled through the crowd. A woman from the first family, one that was made up of simply two women and a man, raised her hand.
“Well, what’s your name, young lady? Heck, while you’re at it, tell us who your friends are. There’s no use going through here not knowing each other.” Dennis said. He had a wide grin on his face.
The woman, who was short and stocky with a head full of short brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a face like a cauliflower, replied: “I’m Sadie Garrison.” Pointing to her blonde woman friend, she said “She’s Penny Weber, and the man over there is Michael Griffin.” Penny waved, and Michael gave a nod of recognition. Penny was a rather pretty girl, with honey blonde hair that she had pulled back in hair clip, and with eyes so blue that even the people farther back in the crowd could tell they were blue. Michael was average looking, with reddish-brown hair and copper brown eyes.
“So what’s your question, Sadie?” he asked.
“Well,” Sadie said, and she spoke with the smacking pride of many African American women, “I was wondering if you actually did taxidermy on humans?”
Many people in the group laughed, Tyson and Anita included. But the children, Lane, Casey, and the others, even the eldest daughter of McLaughlin, shivered involuntarily. With the survival instinct of the very young, they felt chilled and violated at the thought of being killed and stuff with preserving chemicals. They knew, of course, that the very idea of performing taxidermy on humans was absurd, and they understood that that was why the adults were laughing. It simply occurred to them more than it did to the adults that such an act was incredibly wrong, in the same way that they understood that the idea of a monster living in their closet was asinine and yet still feared the possibility of a demon lurking in there.
After Dennis wiped tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes, he gave one last guffaw before answering Sadie.
-----
And that's all I have for now.
Note: I know that Oklahoma isn't the "black person state." I just have it in there until I can remember what state is supposedly home to all the black people. I'm not really trying to be racist, but these people kind of are, so...yeah.
-----
Lane Emerson, who was, at the time, seven years old, sat in the back of his parents’ van, slurping on an orange crème popsicle. He was ill at ease traveling in such a strange, different, barren land as Oklahoma, and his face showed the marks of such agitation: in his boredom and attempts to comfort himself, he had smeared the orange Popsicle all over his face. His lips and chin were sticky, and for some odd reason, the tip of his nose was shiny with the sugar in the Popsicle. His mother, Anita Emerson, caught sight of him in the vanity mirror that she had brought down to check her teeth in, and frowned.
“Lane,” she said, half-cooingly, half-scoldingly. “What did you do to your face?”
With the almost proud brazenness of the very young, Lane replied “I smeared my ice cream on it. I was bored.”
“Lane,” she clucked. “Let me clean you up. You want to look nice for our trip to the museum, don’t you?”
As she fished in her purse for a napkin with which to clean her son, Lane stuck out his chin impudently.
“I don’t want to go to a dumb terxidermy museum anyways,” he replied. “Who wants to look at dead animals all day? Boring!” He drawled the last word and looked at his mother with a smile on his face.
Anita smiled back, and tousled his sandy blonde hair before licking the napkin and dabbing at the stickiness on his cherubic face.
“It’s taxidermy, honey, and it’ll be fun,” she said as she cleaned off his face. “You’ll get to see tigers and lions and zebras!”
“I got to see them at the zoo,” Lane said. “And they were moving. The zebras made sounds like on ‘The Lion King.’” He attempted to imitate the whooping sound that zebras make, and his mother’s face crumbled into a crinkle, adoring expression.
“Yes, but these ones won’t stink, and you get to be in an exciting new place! The zoo was just in New York, Lane. This museum is in Oklahoma. You’ll get to eat exciting foods from Oklahoma.”
“Exciting foods like what?” Lane asked. “Fried chicken and chitins?”
“Honey!” Anita exclaimed. Her pretty blue eyes were wide with shock. “Where did you learn that?”
“Daddy says it all the time,” Lane replied.
Anita cast her shocked gaze to her husband, Tyson, who was laughing silently.
“You know it’s funny, ‘Nita,” Tyson replied. “Oklahoma is the heartland of hicks and black people.”
Despite herself, Anita began to laugh a little, herself.
“Alright, alright,” she grumbled after a spell. “It is funny. You just better not go around saying it in front of all the ni-“
Tyson burst into full-out laughter, taking his hands off the wheel to clap his wife on the back. The car swerved a little, and Anita, with one hand clapped over her mouth, reached for the wheel with her free hand.
“Watch the road!” she told Tyson.
“You were going to say… the n-word!” he laughed. “You were going to say it!”
“I was,” Anita said indignantly, “But I, unlike you, have the self-restraint to not say things like that in front of our baby boy!”
Her words served more to cement their family ties together than they did to preserve them. Tyson and Anita had never really fought. Their relationship had begun as every healthy adolescent’s should: because they had a sexual interest in each other. Anita had been pretty enough - was still pretty enough - with her pretty blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair, and her skin with not even one spot of acne. Tyson hadn’t been such a bad looking man either: he had had sandy blonde hair like Lane’s and dark brown eyes. His hair, of course, was graying at the temples, but it was hard to see, since his hair was blonde, and also because, on sunny days, the sun shone right through the gray hairs and rendered them invisible. In High School, he hadn’t had those gray hairs, and Anita hadn’t had stretch marks on her stomach along with a long scar from her Cesarean section on her belly button. She had had a flat, white stomach, and long, coltish legs, as well as a firm ass and tits. Their relationship, started sexually, had no unstable emotional pillars that could crash down. They had learned a while back that “true love” did not exist: only desire did. Something grounded in a human instinct so basic that even animals have it cannot die, at least not for a very long time. Anita and Tyson had learned this long before their friends and siblings had begun to divorce each other because of emotional conflict and issues with interests. They had started their relationship because they both wanted the same thing, and so they spent their relationship wanting the same thing: a good life for their son. Working together for this, they couldn’t screw up.
Oh, they loved each other; there was no doubt about that. Their relationship simply went deeper than emotional roots: deep down into the most basic codes of instinct, if you will.
Lane was still clutching the stick of his Popsicle, and he looked with consternation at his parents. As young as he was, he didn’t understand the subtle wordplay that his parents were undergoing. To alleviate his confusion by stopping their conversation altogether, he interrupted with a child’s age-old irritation tactic.
“Are we there yet?”
Anita and Tyson shut up almost immediately. Tyson cleared his throat, and Anita peered at herself in the vanity, grabbing her hair up with one hand and putting it up into a bun. Irritated now, Lane spoke up again.
“Are we there yet?”
Distractedly, embarrassedly, irritably, Anita spoke to Lane without looking back at him. “No, honey. We’ll tell you when we get there.”
“Oh,” Lane replied. “Okay, then.”
Throughout the rest of the trip to the museum, Lane kept up his serenade of “Are we there yet”’s.
When they finally made it to the Taxidermy Museum, all of them were very relieved. Tyson and Anita were relieved because they wouldn’t have to listen to Lane asking them if they were there yet, and Lane was relieved because his throat was getting sore from so much complaining.
They got out of the van as quickly as possible, wiping the creases from their travel-wrinkled clothing and shaking all over to rid themselves of the slight, but annoying, stiffness and numbness that prolonged car rides bring.
They were surprised to find that there were two other cars in the parking lot, and a throng of people were gathering at the ticket box in front of the museum. It was manned by a tiny, wizened old woman with sagging skin and shriveled breasts that hung down to below her ribs.
Anita gave Lane’s face a quick once-over with a napkin that she had dampened with saliva, and then shoved the wad back in her purse. It was a scuffed brown leather thing, floppy and easy to carry. She slung it over her should, looked down herself to make sure she had nothing on her robin’s egg blue blouse, and then straightened her shorts.
Tyson sighed impatiently.
“Done primping, my queen?” he asked, holding out a hand and bending his knees mockingly.
“Why yes, Lancelot,” she said in a breathy, airy, faux British accent. “You can escort me back to the castle, now. I am tired of adventuring.”
“As you wish, my lady Guinevere,” he replied in a voice nearly as breathy.
“As long as we’re granting wishes,” Lane said impudently. “Can I have some ice cream when we get in?”
“You just had ice cream, Lane,” Tyson told his son.
“Yeah,” Lane agreed. “But that was a Popsicle. Popsicles are different than ice cream.”
“He has you there,” Anita laughed. “Come on, let’s go and get our tickets.”
Tyson and Anita each grabbed one of Lane’s hands, and, swinging him along, they went up to the ticket window, where one family was ahead of them. It was made up of a father, three young women, and a little boy. They were all red-headed. The girl who looked the oldest had enormous bosoms that must have stuck out from her chest twelve inches. It was apparent that she was not wearing a brassiere. Nobody in the Emerson family could help but notice the huge Lynyrd Skynyrd decal on her shirt. Lane, too young to notice the sexual connotations of what he was seeing, only to understand that a girl old enough to be his babysitter was walking around almost as scantily clad as he did when he was two years old, snickered. The other girls in that family were no less voluptuous looking. The one who appeared to be second-oldest was wearing a form-fitting, black Led Zeppelin shirt and very ripped jeans. The youngest girl was wearing another shirt bearing a band’s name, but none of them could read it, because she was nearly hidden behind her two older sisters. The youngest, the boy, appeared to be a little older than Lane, and he was walking around in a small circle behind his family.
They waited for perhaps ten minutes, and by then Anita was tapping her sandaled foot impatiently. Tyson, taking her hint, spoke up.
“Uh…excuse me, sir,” he said. “But is there any chance you could hurry things up a bit?”
The father turned around, and he had a weary expression on his face. “No, I’m sorry. They won’t take my credit card,” he said. “And I don’t have any cash.”
“Oh, I can loan you some,” Tyson said immediately, reaching into his wallet. “How much do you need?”
The man started to protest, but sighed. “Forty dollars,” he said. Tyson took two twenty dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to the man.
The man hesitated for a moment, and then took the money, giving it to the woman in the ticket stand and receiving five tickets in return.
Tyson moved up and bought three tickets, and then they walked into the museum. They could only see the back of the red-haired man’s eldest daughter’s white shirt in the nearly total dark of the dim, cool museum as their eyes adjusted to the dark.
******
Lane, having the youngest eyes there, adjusted to the darkness quickest. At the sight of a bear with snarling teeth in front of him, he made a whimpering noise and reached for his mother’s leg. Confused, Anita reached down to pat his head comfortingly, and looked around for a light switch. Just as she had begun to think that the museum was simply dimly lit, the whole room was illuminated. It reminded Anita of God’s light: if you looked upon him without him having any disguises to mask him, you would be maddened by the glory of him.
She squinted as her pupils contracted to pinpoints to protect themselves from the new, bright light; a vague shape was starting to take shape in front of the three families.
“Welcome to the Oklahoma Museum of Taxidermy!” the figure boomed, and they all clapped and laughed as they realized what was going on.
“What a great entrance!” the red-haired man who Tyson had loaned money to laughed. “It was like something out of a carnival, not out of a Taxidermy Museum!”
The man, for it was then very easy to see that the figure was indeed a man, smiled as he waited for the applause to die down.
“Once again, welcome to the Oklahoma Museum of Taxidermy,” he said. His voice was quite pleasant to listen to: mellow and smooth as butter, and the Emersons found themselves lulling into a very convincing, pleasing sense of security. “My name is Dennis Perkins, and I will be your tour guide today. I hope you enjoy your stay.”
In the inquisitive nature of a child, Lane found himself examining tour guide, Dennis. He was a tall man, taller than Lane’s father, and with a face holding a wide, guileless smile and friendly brown eyes. He was absolutely plastered in promotions for the museum: his hair was obscured by a red cap sporting the decal “Friends of OMOT;” he was wearing a white shirt that had a picture of a snarling lion on it and said “Oklahoma: Home of Taxidermy;” he had on long khaki shorts with a fanny-pack that matched his hat. He looked like the host on Fear Factor, not a person that one would expect to see as a tour guide in a museum. Lane’s mind dimly registered the possibility that perhaps the museum was like Fear Factor: the memory of the fear from the snarling bear was not far from his mind, but he brushed it away. His mom and dad wouldn’t take him to a place where he would be scared out of his wits. Other parents would. His best friend, Tommy, had parents who would do that to him. But Lane knew that his parents were too kind for that: they loved him too much to do something like that to him willingly.
Lane wasn’t allowed to observe Dennis long, however, because the little red-headed boy, the one who seemed to be about Lane’s age, had raised his hand, as though he was in school. When Lane thought about it, they almost were in school. They were in a place full of educational things, and there was a vaguely threatening man who was going to teach them about all of it. In any case, Dennis pointed to the little red-headed boy, and asked him what his name was.
“My name’s Casey B. McLaughlin,” he said with the pompous confidence of the young. “And I have a question.”
“Well, what’s your question?” Dennis asked. His voice was like a waterfall: it went up and down and was full of something kind, like laughter. Despite his fears about this man, Lane was comforted by it.
“Are we going to see anybody making these things?” he gestured around to the scant amounts of preserved animals around them. Anita and Lane Emerson shivered in unison at the little boy’s air of casualness around all these vaguely disturbing creations. They didn’t feel like there was anything to fear about the place, but it seemed as though these creatures should be given more…respect. This feeling was shared in part by Tyson Emerson, although he was less disturbed by it than they were. He had his masculinity to protect, after all, and talking about giving respect to dead animals would be like a kick in the ‘nads.
Dennis laughed. “Of course we are!” he said. “Nobody wants to come to a museum just to see a bunch of dead animals. People want to see how they’re made, don’t you all?” The small sea of heads in front of the Emerson family moved up and down, like a lull in the tide.
“And,” Dennis added. “You probably want to get down to business, huh?”
The heads nodded more quickly.
“So let’s go!” Dennis said. “What’s the use in waiting?” With that, he waved his arm in the air, gesturing them to follow. The three families followed after him eagerly. Dennis had a talent for making crowds excited about things people usually aren’t excited about, like a high school cheerleader. The school’s football team may have lost every game of the season, but if you get a talented enough cheerleader out there, she can get them excited about anything, even a game that the team is more than likely to lose.
******
Dennis led the group through a doorway that led into the first section of the tour.
“Now, this first section we’re looking at is just small animals. Some people find this the most boring part of the tour, but that’s just not true.” He smiled. “The smaller the animal, the harder it is to preserve. It takes fewer materials, but it’s easier. It takes less time, and it’s easier to handle. A hand-sized animal like a chipmunk would be a lot easier to preserve than oh, say, a human.”
A murmur of unease rippled through the crowd. A woman from the first family, one that was made up of simply two women and a man, raised her hand.
“Well, what’s your name, young lady? Heck, while you’re at it, tell us who your friends are. There’s no use going through here not knowing each other.” Dennis said. He had a wide grin on his face.
The woman, who was short and stocky with a head full of short brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a face like a cauliflower, replied: “I’m Sadie Garrison.” Pointing to her blonde woman friend, she said “She’s Penny Weber, and the man over there is Michael Griffin.” Penny waved, and Michael gave a nod of recognition. Penny was a rather pretty girl, with honey blonde hair that she had pulled back in hair clip, and with eyes so blue that even the people farther back in the crowd could tell they were blue. Michael was average looking, with reddish-brown hair and copper brown eyes.
“So what’s your question, Sadie?” he asked.
“Well,” Sadie said, and she spoke with the smacking pride of many African American women, “I was wondering if you actually did taxidermy on humans?”
Many people in the group laughed, Tyson and Anita included. But the children, Lane, Casey, and the others, even the eldest daughter of McLaughlin, shivered involuntarily. With the survival instinct of the very young, they felt chilled and violated at the thought of being killed and stuff with preserving chemicals. They knew, of course, that the very idea of performing taxidermy on humans was absurd, and they understood that that was why the adults were laughing. It simply occurred to them more than it did to the adults that such an act was incredibly wrong, in the same way that they understood that the idea of a monster living in their closet was asinine and yet still feared the possibility of a demon lurking in there.
After Dennis wiped tears of laughter from the corners of his eyes, he gave one last guffaw before answering Sadie.
-----
And that's all I have for now.
