The Specimen Cabinet | before the coming storm
Rosalind, what are you.
Wet samples are deathly afraid of light: they loose colour and form and everything nice to them when a careless curator or naïve visitor exposes them under the sun for too long. I never blunder over such requirements.
The shuffling of heavy oak sliding open was akin to the sound of 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 which made forced a reaction from me, however familiar it was to my ears.
The formalin rarely needed changing for the pythons and the other smaller specimens. Yes yes, just a simple re-jarring and sealing would do nicely. The sheep brain that stocked in last week needed new formula however, the glass was so cloudy one would mistake it for vinegar or wine!
Holding the jar up to the light of the flickering lantern I could see just how much blood product had saturated within. The darned amateur taxidermists and their shaky knifework. Even for a brain which contains more grey matter than actual 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 demand a transfer this instant. From the looks of the container, there must’ve been a slight imbalance between the aqueous part and the alcoholic part: a common mistake that may cost the patrons a fortune in restocking.
You see, I tend to the wet specimens first: the needy little things always demand my attention. Rosalind, the frog jars look too yellow. Rosalind, the pig embryo is not prepared properly; no no, not the two-month old, the six-month one. Rosalind, why is rabbit №14 between the deer kidney and the sparrow jar, and not with his fellows? Rosalind, the liver needs attending to, look at how it floats after last night’s operation. Rosalind, the lecture at two needs the five Pacific octopi in best shape as fast as possible. Rosalind. Rosalind. Rosalind. Rosalind.
Sometimes I imagine the room as filled with a very thick, brackish liquid: so that my breaths float very slowly to the top and pop like that crackle a large insect makes as it burns in a campfire. I need no assistant. I fired them all. Better to trust in one’s own mind and one’s own hand, than the ones of a stranger.
Somewhere behind there came a creak and a shudder. The smell came before the sound: it was sour to the soul, and very obtrusive. Formalin is like that sometimes, and it is never quite the same describing it each time. I turned 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. With tenacity, I lifted the thing onto the table and set it next to the pile of eyes I just finished. 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, disrupting the form and breaking apart in the air.
It was then when I reached for the window: I thought it was my storage for the spare jars. And as the final yank broke through the thick-layered dust and cobwebs which accumulated for how long, and as the light touched the floorboards, I felt in my eyes a sudden dilation which made my chest contract and my lungs gasp for air.
Crystallising and condensing something pulsated through my ligaments and along the rims of the eyes, entwining the tongue and numbing my throat until I there stood, erect, dry. Not a prayer utterable. For a while that beating instrument in my chest slowed, as if an unquiet snowstorm has been brewing within.
That was one of the things I dreaded the most: Sunlight: this inexorable, this warm, this superior…
And then there was a knock on the door that broke me from my trance. I slammed the opening shut, and sealed the edges. Even so it was as if the light branded upon my heart a sign of utter alienation from the rest of my species. Somewhere outside these walls there are games being played on the fields and plays in the theatre and the hollering of merchants and the shrill cry of rocking babies and the stray sounds of bullets ripping through air and the wails of widows and silent, hollow-eyed children next to hole-ridden fields. Somewhere outside these walls there is another world, bright and wonderfully grotesque and utterly uncontrollable.
Forget the eyes on the streets which follow your figure during the morning and the evening. In them you have seen pity and joy and confusion and lust and greed, emotions suspended at the centre of the iris like the cold, white-fleshed heart which floats in a clear concentrate of formaldehyde held between the hands or on a shelf. Take your breath.
That is enough, Rosalind.
Rosalind. Rosalind. Rosalind. Yes, there are more things to be done.
