The Unfinished World Read Online Free Page A

brave, just the once. He takes instruction from Louise, and he is, at first, an excellent pupil. His sculptor’s hands have always learned to wing their way through solid substance, and at first, soft rabbit skin is much easier to carve than clay.
    But then he vomits into the bucket where the guts go, runs from the room, lays his hot face against the pillow and weeps. For himself? For the hare? Louise does not know. She knows she should go to him, but she is her father in so many ways and when she cannot fill a space with words, she will not fill it at all. She cannot help but scorn his softness.

    Louise is working on a blue finch when Clarence enters the room, hands gray as a corpse’s with packed-in clay. Are you having any luck? he asks politely. He knows she hates doing birds-in-flight. She can never get the feathers to lie as they should.
    Louise sighs and puts her brush down gently. Smoke, she says, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. She packs them and peels open the top, slides one out and slips it between her lips in a graceful way Clarence always admires. He wonders, sometimes aloud and sometimes not, why his pretty, interesting sister has never married. She just smiles enigmatically in a way meant to discomfit him, meant to grab him by the apron strings and tie him tight to the fluttering strips of heart she still has left.
    Clarence, she asks, cigarette dangling, when is Tony coming next?
    Thursday, he says. He’s dropping off another dog for the Big Man.
    Louise laughs. Do we have to call him the Big Man, just because Tony does?
    I don’t know his real name, says Clarence. Don’t even know what he looks like. Big Man is fine with me. I met his wife, though. She came up with Tony last time. She’s a rhinestone. Must be half his age. He smiles, a soft, happy smile.
    Louise doesn’t like that smile.
    Their working theory is Russian mafia, but really they have no idea who the Big Man is. He found Louise, and he’s brought in a few hunting trophies and paid plenty for them. He also keeps dozens of whippets, and when they die he likes to immortalize them in his vast, unseen mansion.
    Be careful, says Louise, and blows smoke in Clarence’s face. She leans back and watches it swirl across the air between the two of them, catching and distorting his kind features like a fog. You be careful with the Big Man’s things.

    Louise’s father first taught her how to preserve and make dreams of the dead. But before she was allowed to touch an animal for reconstruction she was made to learn the basics: anatomy, sculpting, painting, tanning. She learned the long history of taxidermy, even took the train with her father to the Museum of Natural History in the city, so that he could show her the work of the best artists in the country.
    She studied Carl Akeley, William T. Hornaday, Walter Potterand Edward Hart, Roland Ward and the specimens he preserved for Audubon. She learned how to cast a form, how the life in eyes died so you had to make new ones from glass, how to glue on whiskers, and how to extract and reattach teeth. She even learned the best way to clean a skull, how to breed the kind of bacteria that would eat all the meat right off the bone. She paced the woods with her sketchbook, storing the kinetic movement of bodies in dead ink, in her living hands. She got used to the smell of blood, the smell of guts, the smell of the meat that had to die before the body could live again.

    Shouting outside. Honking. Tony the Tiger and his crew again. She throws a bed jacket over her slip because she has suddenly remembered something: Clarence is sick today. She normally lets him deal with Tony but she will have to do it herself. Her mouth is a moue shape at the thought.
    Now she descends the stairs, bridelike in flimsy white, flashing bits of pale skin shot through with green rivers of blood. She fishes around in her jacket pocket to find the key to the carriage house, where the exhibit is