Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (best story books to read .TXT) 📗

I’d only seen a frog once before, but it had been dead for a few days. Luke had brought it home in a plastic Tupperware box. As a taxidermist, Luke already knew how to capture life in a curled lip or curious eye. Whenever the police got a report of a fallen sparrow or rabbit caught under the wheels of a car, a museum got the cadaver. If it was something unusual, it’d go to a research institute then a national museum, but if it was a species they already had in the archive, the remains went to a regional museum. And so Luke became a precious thing, a keeper of the secret way to open up a skin, clean out the rot and swell a belly.

By the time the bodies were brought in, they were usually already in a pretty bad state of decay. Being frozen stopped them getting worse, but whenever Luke laid a stiffened corpse under the lamps on his dining table, I had to turn away. No matter what the species, they were always dark and twisted things. So I’d turn to the TV’s latest breaking news on genetic chimeras or the natural history books on his side table, bright with the beautiful illustrations I preferred to the rotting things he cut, stuffed and stitched.

Luke was always baffled by this, and I think he thought (wrongly) that it was death I didn’t want to see. He’d beckon me over, saying, “Touch something real, Norah. This bird came from a bird. Once it’s behind glass, that’s it.” And so, once he’d worked his magic, I’d stroke the blue jay’s feathers for him, or the shafts rising from a hedgehog’s back. Those feathers felt different to the ones I’d caressed as a child. Never as smooth. Congealed, tacky, and when I pulled away, oil clung to my fingers.

These finds were so few and far between that each one could’ve been the last, and we both revered and dreaded the bodies laid on his altar. Years later, I’d wonder how few years in the grand scheme of things Luke’s hands had left to give life, and who else would be left to do it with as much love.

The frog in the garden reminded me of those cadavers. Beneath the duvet I pressed my clammy hands against my sides and tried not to blink in case I saw it again.

I did tell Art that I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and whether the fertilisers could’ve killed it, but he just smiled, and said, “Don’t worry about it. The company wouldn’t make something that helps one thing and hurts another, and then give it to us in a spray bottle.” When I kept worrying, he suggested I go looking for it between the pansies and marigolds, if that’s what I wanted to do. If I found it, I could drop a jar over it, bring it inside and check it over. We could even draw it together with our birthday gear. He grinned like it was a game, so I shrugged back with an air of coolness, with a slant of the lips to say, “If I come across it again, I’ll come across it. If it’s meant to be.” But I watched through the kitchen window anyway, clutched my mug of tea and pressed it hard against my lips.

The green lawn wavered like a hallucination through the pillars of steam. As I stood there, I looked ahead to weeks, months, and years of rooting around between the leaves with my trowel, pulling up tangles through the routine purge, utterly focussed on the functions of a life elsewhere. And then, without seeing, slicing through soft green flesh concealed between leaves, hearing the snap of little bones splintering under steel. Or perhaps I’d be sitting on the grass, palms flat to the earth behind me, and I’d feel what felt like a twig by a fingertip. I’d look down and find the frog dried, fossilised, limbs stretched and straining as if mummified just before leaping. What would I do then? If life ended in my square of earth to tend? It would be my fault, and I’d never know what more I should have done to help it survive.

I hoped the frog was gone. I wanted it to have disappeared to die elsewhere, in someone else’s garden. Where it came from I couldn’t even guess, but I couldn’t see how it would have long left. The sun was burning. Art had left a terracotta bowl full of cold water by the back step to lure it close, but he forgot about it as the days passed, and I stood by as the cool surface retreated to the bottom of the bowl, the last few glimmers of life soaking into its parched, orange skin.

Art lay in late, and usually slept through my waking. One Saturday I woke with the usual jolt, my hands in a lattice around the back of my neck. I opened my eyes, letting the light between the blinds bleach any dream-shapes still drawn on my eyelids. Art wasn’t there this time; he’d gone to London to deliver an afternoon lecture at a literary festival. One of those events arranged by a publisher to showcase their portfolio, just as much as their authors. Five days of talks, seminars, and schmoozing afterparties, everyone sucking in someone else’s story and twisting it to be their own. Finding a hook and reeling in an audience at all costs.

I’d heard Art’s script a few times through the wall of his study as I lay prostrate in the bath. Though muffled, it sounded a little like he was singing. His sentences dipped and rose in hypnotic rhythms, full of confidence. He seemed to be able to use his voice to mask everything else going on underneath. Listening to the words rounded with perfect clarity, I couldn’t hear Art at all. He was a stranger from another