Chapter 14
I stand with my face pressed against the display window and peer into Town Taxidermy.
In the darkened interior of the store I can just make out a bear standing up on two legs and a deer with a massive set of horns.
The store doesn’t open for another hour, but the arrangement I have with the owner isn’t even for today, I just wanted to have a look since I was driving past.
It strikes me that it’s such an odd profession, to re-create something that once was.
Although actually, a few months ago, when I spoke to the taxidermist who runs the place, he insisted that what he did was not re-create but create something.
That it isn’t an actual re-creation but a fiction.
Something that tells a story by putting it in a certain context in which it can be felt, and for that reason can sometimes feel truer than the cold, isolated facts do.
And that was when it struck me that this is precisely what I’m doing in this book I’m writing. I’m a taxidermist.