The man on the other end of Houston’s local suicide hotline said his name was Blain. He had the nasal voice of a Texas weatherman - its kazoo-like lilt and swampy, Gulf Coast slowness. “I guess you know why I’m calling,” I said. Blain said he did not know and why didn’t I tell him. I told Blain that my life was falling apart. I told Blain how clichéd it was that I just said that, and I was a poet and hated clichés. I told Blain that every citizen in my former city—Richmond, Virginia—and my current one—Houston, Texas—was now aware of the affair I’d had before the breakup of my seven-year relationship. That the day after the blowout in which my newly minted ex, Carrick, kicked me out of our apartment, I’d defended my dissertation in a circle of English professors at the University of Houston in a pursed-smile stupor…
The skin of a dead starling is hardier than you’d think. It’s tissue-fine yet lizard-like—wheat-colored chainmail for an airborne knight. During my first class at Prey Taxidermy, in downtown Los Angeles, I could see in the slit breast of my specimen a mix of delicacy and toughness, the bird’s firm insides cool from the freezer and as flush as a plum. Allis Markham, the owner of Prey, is a wisecracking thirty-two-year-old with fair skin and dyed-black hair. Around the studio, she wears a ponytail and simple button-up with rolled sleeves, but in a glamorous portrait on Prey’s website, Allis poses between two taxidermied housecats like a deadpan 1940s pin-up star - carmine lipstick and a dark rockabilly pompadour. In 2008, Allis (pronounced “Alice”) quit her marketing job at Disney, where she earned a six-figure salary, to attend the Advanced Taxidermy Training Center in Montana. In her studio on the fourth floor of an arts building on Spring Street, Allis offers a range of weekend workshops for an array of misfits, hipster-craftspeople, Hollywood-types—and the plain old morbidly curious, like me. I decided to take Allis’s recommended course for beginners, Birds 101…
I was a senior in high school, in May 1999, when my mother told me the curly-haired boy who’d once sung with me in our church’s children’s choir admitted to murdering his older sister in 1995 and burning down the family house. In a plea bargain with the D.A., Matthew Harper had received thirty-five years without parole for bludgeoning his sister with a rolling pin; stabbing her in the back with a large kitchen knife and penetrating her heart; then setting the house on fire as their mother and grandmother slept. For a number of seconds I sipped my coffee without speaking. “Matt?” I finally asked. I hadn’t thought about the Harper tragedy in years; and Matt’s full name now sounded like a stranger’s. “Matt who played David in David and Goliath?” The same fourteen-year-old boy I remembered singing the lead part in the Junior Choir’s rendition of David and Goliath as the biblical hero who slays the ogreish Philistine warrior with a rock from his slingshot later murdered his sister, Anne Harper …