The Taxidermist's Toolbox

My name is Gladys, I'm twenty-four, and I do taxidermy in my spare time. If that sounds weird to you, fine, but keep it to yourself, because my ex already had plenty to say about it and I'm not in the mood.

Here's how I ended up hauling a toolbox full of dead animal parts into the women's bathhouse on a Friday night.

A month ago, Dom and I had been broken up for about three weeks when he cornered me by the dish pit at The Gilded Finch and asked what I'd been up to. I made the mistake of telling him the truth. I said I'd been working on a squirrel mount, a full-body pose, and I was planning to enter it in the staff talent show. Dom laughed so hard he had to grab the prep counter. Then he said, "A squirrel in a tuxedo? Gladys, you couldn't get a date before me and you're not getting one after. At least the squirrel's dead."

Something like that. I don't remember his exact words because I stopped listening around "tuxedo."

Anyway. The talent show was Danielle's idea. She's the head chef, twenty-six, been running that kitchen for five years, and she's engaged to some guy she met when she was twenty-three. She got it in her head that morale was low because we were all working double shifts during tourist season, and a talent show at the Salt & Steam Bathhouse, which the restaurant shares a building with, would fix everything. She rented the lounge for the night. There's a little stage in there, normally used for nothing, honestly, and a cold plunge pool nobody was going to touch in October.

So that's where I was, Friday night around six, standing in the bathhouse lounge with my toolbox, my squirrel, and a grudge.

The squirrel's name was Reginald. I had sewn him a tiny tuxedo jacket myself, out of black felt, with white lapels. He was mounted mid-stride on a piece of driftwood, one little paw raised like he was about to give a speech. It was, and I don't say this lightly, the best thing I had ever made. I was going to win that talent show, or at least beat Dom's act, and I was going to make him eat every word.

I set the toolbox down on one of the wicker lounge chairs and started unpacking. Foam pad for the display table. Backup pins. A small brush for the fur. I was arranging Reginald's driftwood just so when I heard the kitchen door swing open behind me.

"I'm not here," said a voice. "I was never here."

I turned around. A woman about my age stood there in kitchen whites with her apron half untied. Short, sturdy, dark hair escaping from under a cap, dark circles under her eyes that could've won awards. I'd seen her around the kitchen but we'd only exchanged hellos. Susie, I thought her name was. She was one of the prep cooks.

"It's my night off," she said, seeing me look at her. "I mean, it's not, but I'm claiming it. Danielle said we could use the bathhouse after the show, and I have been on my feet since ten this morning. I just want to sit in the steam room until I stop having opinions about root vegetables."

"Sit wherever," I said. "Just watch the squirrel."

She looked past me at Reginald and her whole face did something complicated. "Is that... is that a squirrel in a suit?"

"Tuxedo," I said. "Jacket. The pants are implied."

"He's beautiful," she said, and then she tripped over the vacuum cord somebody had left stretched across the lounge floor.

I want to be fair to her here. It was a stupid cord, it blended into the floor, and anybody could have done it. But when I saw her go down and grab the lounge chair for balance, and I saw that chair tip, and I saw my toolbox sliding off it toward the tile, I stopped being fair and started being twenty-four years old and furious at the world in general and Dom specifically.

"Are you serious right now?" I yelled, lunging for the toolbox. I caught it before it hit the ground, thank God, but in the scramble I knocked Reginald's driftwood sideways and he toppled face-first onto the display pad, little paw bent under him like he'd fainted.

Susie picked herself up off the floor. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I didn't..."

"He almost landed on his face! Do you know how long I spent on his face?"

"On his..." She blinked at me. "You spent time on his face?"

"Yes! Glass eyes don't set themselves, and his whiskers took me two evenings." I stood Reginald back up and checked him over with the little brush. One whisker bent. Fixable. I took a breath and let it out slow, because honestly she looked like she was about to cry, and it wasn't really about her anyway. "Okay. Okay, I'm sorry I yelled. You didn't do it on purpose. The cord's in a dumb spot and I should've moved it."

"It's fine," she said, but her voice was shaky. She sat down hard on the other lounge chair and rubbed her shin. "God. Sorry. It's been the worst week. We did two hundred covers tonight and the walk-in was acting up and Danielle had me hand-cutting squash for the risotto for like three hours, and now I've nearly killed a squirrel."

"He survived," I said. "Better than most of his kind, honestly. He came to me already dead. Road out by the county line, two summers ago."

"That's... okay, that should be gross, but he's kind of charming?" She leaned over and looked at Reginald properly. "Look at his little raised paw. What's he doing?"

"Giving a speech. About infrastructure, probably. I haven't written it yet."

She laughed, and it turned into something halfway to a sob, and then she pressed her hands over her face. "Sorry. Sorry, I don't do this, I just..." She took a breath and dropped her hands. "Long week. Ignore me. I'm Susie, by the way."

"Gladys."

"The squirrel's Gladys too?"

"Reginald," I said. "The squirrel is Reginald. Keep up."

Before either of us could say anything else, the lounge doors banged open and Danielle came through them with a clipboard and a lanyard and the energy of a woman who had organized something and was going to enjoy every second of it whether we liked it or not.

"Performers!" she called out. "Lineup is posted. Carmen's running the judging, she's around here somewhere. Order is: Dom first, because he begged, then Robin with the fire spinning, which I cleared with the bathhouse, do not ask me again, Robin, then Gladys with the... " She looked at her clipboard. " 'Reginald Speaks.' Which I have questions about, but I've decided to trust the process. Then the dishwasher quartet, and Carmen's closing us out with a couple of songs."

"Wait," I said. "Wait wait wait. When do I go on?"

"Twenty minutes. Why?"

Twenty minutes. I looked at Reginald. Reginald looked back at me with his glass eyes, and that's when I saw it. His throat. Bare. The little black felt bow tie, the one I had stitched by hand, the centerpiece of the entire tuxedo, was gone. Not crooked. Gone. I must have left it in the apartment, or it was still in the box at home, or, I didn't know, but it wasn't on him and he looked naked without it. He looked like a squirrel who'd lost his pants at a wedding.

"The bow tie," I said. "Danielle, the bow tie is missing. I can't send him out there like this."

"It's felt, right? It's a piece of felt. Improvise."

"You can't improvise a bow tie, Danielle, it's structural."

Susie stood up off her chair. "There's a craft store two blocks from here. It closes at eight."

I checked my phone. 6:47. "Can you... would you come with me? You know where it is. And you can hold the squirrel."

Susie looked at Reginald, then at me, and something in her tired face shifted. "Yeah, okay," she said. "He's not walking home alone."

Danielle wrote something on her clipboard and waved us off like we were slowing down her show. Susie grabbed her jacket from a hook by the door, and the two of us headed out into the cold with a taxidermied squirrel and twenty minutes to sew a bow tie.

The craft store had exactly one kind of black felt and a teenager at the register who didn't blink at a taxidermied squirrel being set down on the counter while Susie counted out quarters. On the walk back Susie carried Reginald against her chest like a football, both hands wrapped around him, and told me about the walk-in cooler and the squash and a guy she'd dated briefly who turned out to be married. I told her about Dom, briefly, since we were trading. She didn't laugh at the taxidermy thing, which put her ahead of him already.

Back in the dressing area behind the stage, which was really just the bathhouse supply room with a mirror propped on a filing cabinet, I threaded a needle while Susie held Reginald steady. The new bow tie was rougher than the first one. The stitches showed. But when I tied it off under his chin and stepped back, he looked like himself again.

"There he is," Susie said.

"There he is." I set him on the driftwood base and turned him so the raised paw caught the light. "Twenty years from now, when I'm famous, this will be the piece they write about. The emergency bow tie."

"You're going to be famous for taxidermy?"

"Somebody has to be."

The show had already started while we were out. We could hear Dom through the wall, doing standup that was mostly jokes about the dishwasher quartet, who were apparently taking it personally. Susie leaned against the doorframe and I paced, because the narration for the act had been loose note cards in my head all week and now I had to actually say it out loud with people watching.

"You could practice on me," Susie said.

"You'd be the only audience member who's seen the piece up close. You might be biased."

"I've seen a lot of squirrels. I grew up with woods behind the house. I'm a tough crowd."

So I did the opening bit for her, Reginald on a folding table, me in my one good blazer, deadpan: "Ladies and gentlemen, Reginald has prepared remarks." And she laughed at the right spot, a real laugh, not a polite one, and something unclenched in my chest that had been clenched since Dom told me the hobby was "a red flag, honestly" three weeks ago over pasta I had paid for.

Then Robin went on with the fire spinning, which was genuinely great, and my stomach dropped into my shoes.

"I'm next," I said. "I'm right after the fire."

"You're next," Susie agreed. "After Dom, who bombed."

He had bombed. We'd heard the silences between his jokes stretching out longer and longer. Carmen was judging from a folding chair near the stage with a legal pad, and every time Dom had paused she'd written something down and didn't smile, and I felt bad for him for about four seconds and then remembered the pasta and stopped.

When it was time, Danielle appeared in the doorway with her clipboard. "You're up. What do you need?"

"A table and a spotlight and mercy."

"One of those is possible." She carried Reginald's base out for me, which I hadn't asked for but appreciated, and I heard her introduce the act: "Next up, one of our servers from The Gilded Finch, Gladys, with 'Reginald Speaks.'"

The lounge was fuller than I expected. Bathhouse regulars in robes, restaurant staff crammed along the back, Carmen with her legal pad. I set Reginald on the table, checked his bow tie one more time, and started.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Reginald has prepared remarks."

Dead silence. A guy in a robe near the front leaned forward.

"Mr. Squirrel thanks the academy, the bathhouse, and the fine people of the county road where he was found. He wishes it noted that he came to this engagement already deceased, so any criticism tonight will bounce off." Somebody laughed. A real one. I kept going. "Reginald's platform is simple. More nuts. Fewer cars. A constitutional right to raise one paw. He will not be taking questions, because he is dead, and also because he has prepared remarks."