Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

"A Havahart," David says dryly, then chuckles.

I hold up the bank deposit slip. It says the squirrel drowned. "Aaaaah! I was teaching it how to swim," David says. "That's the way I killed it. I put it in the fishpond, and it didn't swim." "Teaching it how to swim" is a taxidermic euphemism for drowning, which results in less darning than bullet holes. At certain times of the year, squirrels are classified as pests and can be legally "liquidated" (Bruce's word; David says "killed") on your own property. That's what David did.

Psychologically, the first cut—scoring the belly with a razor blade—is the worst, and I feel like a medical student making her first incision. Bruce guides me to the middle of the chest bone, but my untrained hand is unsteady, and I'm terrified that I will cut too deeply and rupture an internal organ. The razor blade is dull. We exchange it for a sharp one as a violin concerto on the radio builds to a crescendo.

After I score the chest, David hands me a rosewood scalpel that he made for Bruce on the occasion of the tiger he skinned for Great Adventure amusement park. It's engraved TO DBS FROM DAD, 1974. (Bruce's first name is actually David.) "There you go, Petunia," he says.

With the scalpel, I cut through the scored skin, then work my way to the outer edges of the body, loosening the pelt, which I peel off the animal's delicate rib cage. The ribs are as tiny as a leaf's veins; they protect the internal organs, now fully exposed. "You want to go to the outside of that pink meat," Bruce instructs. My latex gloves are wet and covered with tiny hairs; hardly any of them are gray, because a gray squirrel's hair is mostly bands of black and white. Slippage—when hair comes off in clumps—is a taxidermic nightmare. The few strands on my gloves do not constitute slippage. "Very good on this side. Gee whiz, look at that! You can go down on the right. I don't see any holes," says Bruce.

The squirrel is now lying on its side, both knees skinned and exposed, its sack of organs a tiny water balloon. "I'm really proud of my knees," I say, surprising myself. Then I turn the squirrel over to skin its back, feeling the scalpel run against the ridges of the spine. I skin the body, then the legs down to the delicate ankles. Soon the entire skin easily lifts off the back. I reach an impasse: disarticulating the hind legs by cutting the ball joint out of the hip socket. "Use the scissors, but don't cut the skin. Are you able to feel that joint? It's right there. Now cut down here. Use your finger like a pencil," says Bruce.

Mum-Mum I am not. I puncture the lower intestines (I can't tell one organ from another), and something resembling soupy baked beans spills out. "Oooooh! Something just fell out of the body!" I shriek in horror. I'm beside myself, repulsed and disheartened. I put down the scalpel and look to Bruce for help. He deftly sutures up the gash in seconds. "Just like ER!" he says.

"I can't stand it! I don't want to look at thaaaat!" David mocks. His taunting eggs me on, makes me want to finish the job and not wimp out.

Somehow, I manage to sever the ear skin from the ear canal and then loosen the nose and the lips. "Stay close to the skull. You can trim the meat off later," David coaches. It's impossible to discern skin from cartilage from skull. "Stay close to that bone. Stay right by the skull. Come over toward me a little. Not your body—your knife!" says Bruce.

"That's where your thumbnail would come in handy," says David. "You don't wear gloves when you prepare a steak!"

The single bulb dangling from the ceiling is not sufficient for this intricate work. Before I disconnect the eyelids from the eye orbit in the skull, we measure the milky eyes: ten millimeters. Then Bruce turns an eyelid inside out and demonstrates how one severs such delicate tissue. Now I have to "turn" the other one. I can't! "C'mon! It's your initiation!" David wails.

"Feel it!" coaches Bruce.

The eye is still connected to the skull by a film that must be cut through. If I puncture the eye, the aqueous humor will squirt out. For a visual person, nothing is more revolting than slicing an eye, and the opening sequence of Luis Buñuel's 1929 film Un chien andalou floods my memory like a nightmare. So does high school biology, when I nearly fainted while dissecting a sheep's eye. This requires more stamina than both of those things combined.

"Don't worry about puncturing the eye! The eyelids are what you've got to worry about," says David.

My forearms are covered with blood. Somehow, I manage to cut the membrane between the eyelid and the eye. Nothing squirts out. David pours me a cup of instant coffee with powdered Coffee-mate. The Coffee-mate resembles borax and arsenic, but I no longer have qualms about drinking and eating in the workshop.

"You're doing fine. You'd be out of here if you were having trouble," Bruce says.

"That's why we didn't get you a vomit bag," David says with a laugh. "I figured if we didn't have a vomit bag, you wouldn't vomit."

Finally, I detach the last foreleg from the body. The skinned squirrel rests in a heap on the table. Bruce says I can tidy up and go home right after David and I prepare a "sketch sheet" to use as reference: an outline of the extracted carcass (posed) that we will use to determine the form of the artificial body.

My cell phone rings. It's my mother, preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Can I pick up a large roasting pan and string beans? Of course, right after I sketch my flayed squirrel onto a piece of nonglossy paper.

David hands me a reference file filled with nature photographs of squirrels to inspire a