Perfect Specimens | all falls down
I felt in my eyes a sudden dilation. My lungs gasped for air.
Wet-specimens are deathly afraid of light: the lose colour and break apart when a careless curator or imprudent assistant exposes them under sunlight for too long.
The sounds of heavy oak doors sliding open was like the sound of a waves dragging at the sluggish, fetid remains of a great fish. Such was my state of mind then: I drew analogies between things not even remotely related, and thought of everything at once or nothing at all. The physician later told me it was the laudanum that made things like this. Anyhow, the sound of that cabinet door opening was a droning creak that made me wince, however familiar it was to my ears.
The formalin rarely needed changing for the pythons and the other smaller reptiles. Just a simple re-jarring and sealing was all. Soft tissues tended to require much more attention, however, and the cadaver before me was all soft-tissues.
It was a dismal and windowless annex. Holding the light of the flickering lantern up to the casket, I could see just how much blood-product had saturated within with formaldehyde. Those amateur taxidermists at the operating table and their shoddy knifework were to blame. Even for the muscle ligaments which contain more tendon than blood, their hands somehow make it so that now I must put on the gloves and initiate the entire procedure again.
A simple task, really. Now. The baby pangolins from a previous exhibit demanded a transfer. From the looks of it there must have been a slight imbalance between the aqueous and the alcoholic parts: a common mistake, but an expensive one.
I tend to the wet specimens first. Rosalind, the frog-jars look too yellow, did you change the formalin solution? Rosalind, the pig embryo is not prepared properly; no no, not the first lot prepared for the public exhibit, the new batch from Thursday. Rosalind, why is the cottontail rabbit between the deer kidneys and the sparrows, and not with his fellows at the lagomorph aisle? Rosalind, the cow-liver needs attending to, look at how it floats in its container. Rosalind, the lecture at two requires five Pacific octopi of presentable quality as fast as possible. Rosalind. Rosalind. Rosalind.
Sometimes I imagine this dusty room to be filled with a very thick and brackish liquid: so that my breaths float very slowly to the top and pop like bubbles rising from a riverbed. I need no assistant. I fired them all. Better to trust in one’s own mind and one’s own hand. Better to preserve alone.
There came a sudden creak and a shudder from somewhere behind. The smell was instant, sour to the soul and utterly obtrusive. I whipped around to find my precious Sebastes Fasciatus lying on a bed of ice — no, shattered glass. My hands worked on command. No major injuries sustained on the specimen itself: a good sign. Tenaciously I lifted the corpse onto the table and set it next to a pile of eyes I just finished cleaning-up. Between my arms, I don’t think I could ever hold an infant as fondly as I cradled that dead fish. It was now a game of finding the correct sized jar before the flesh begins to loosen and fall apart.
I must have been distracted. I reached for a set of cabinet doors. I thought it was the storage for glassware.
With a final final yank the shutter-door squeaked open, and a beam of fire shot past the table and cut into my chest. I felt in my eyes a sudden dilation. My lungs gasped for air. Sunlight.
Crystallising and condensing something pulsated through my ligaments and along the rims of the eyes, entwining my tongue and numbing my throat until I there stood, erect, dry. Not a prayer utterable.
Sunlight, this inexorable, this warm, this superior…
I slammed the opening shut, and sealed the edges. I leaned against the table as the room was cast into the flickering candlelight once more. I felt that my heart was falling apart, branded with a token of alienation from the rest of my species.
I was dimly aware, that somewhere outside these walls there are games being played on the fields, operas sung in the theatre, people holding hands. Somewhere outside these walls there is another world, bright and wonderfully grotesque and utterly uncontrollable. Did my eyes, accustomed to gloam, look like the cold, pale orbs that float in the glass jars before me? Was I, too, something to be pickled and preserved?
