when a husband and wife agree about such things, it means a long and happy marriage is ahead.
12
MEGAN KURASHIGE is a dancer who sometimes writes. I wish she would write more, but that would mean she would dance less. Here she shows us some unnatural creatures made by hand.
There’s a strange collection in the Museum of Natural History, an exhibit of rogue taxidermy, hoaxes created by the enterprising to fool people into believing in monsters. Or are they hoaxes?
IT WAS A HOT, BLUE DAY IN AUGUST when Matthew and I went to the Museum of Natural History for the air-conditioning. I wanted to go to the movies, but Matthew’s mother had told him, at breakfast, that she was cleaning up another scandal in the Zoological Gallery. There was even an article in the paper about it. Matthew had cut it out before he got on the train and we began our argument while he was trying to retrieve the piece of newsprint from his back pocket.
“It’s cheaper than the movies,” he said. “I’ve got my mom’s pass, so it’ll be free, actually. It’s air-conditioned. We can stay all day.”
I made a face. Once, when we went to the beach, Matthew spent the whole afternoon crouched by a single tide pool and, while I walked up and down the sand, slowly burning, he watched a tiny crab eat its way through the arm of a dead starfish. It was like watching a horror movie in slow motion, but Matthew thought it was the most interesting thing in the world.
“The movies are air-conditioned,” I said.
“Yeah, but we’ll only be there for an hour and a half. Two at the most.”
The train’s ventilation system had given up, and the air was piling into a thick, damp haze. By the time Matthew rescued the newspaper article from his pocket, the paper was limp and so wrinkled that he had to stretch it across his knee before I could see what it was.
UNNATURAL SPECIMEN SMUGGLED INTO MUSEUM, it said. Beneath the headline, a grainy, black-and-white photograph showed a stuffed raccoon with a pair of soft, gray wings folded over its back. The photograph had been taken through glass and the photographer’s reflection partially obscured the subject, but the raccoon’s face was clearly visible, its lips flared in an artificial snarl. A caption under the raccoon’s feet called it “an audacious hoax.”
“Where’s the article?” I asked.
“I just cut out the picture. That’s the interesting part. My mom says they got the article wrong anyway. It wasn’t actually in any of the exhibits, just glued on the wall next to one. Don’t you want to see it?”
“Not really.” The museum was the kind of place that tracked cold little fingerprints down the back of my neck. Quiet spaces full of dead things, all posed like they were happy to be that way. “And didn’t your mom say that they got rid of it already?”
“But we have her pass. We can go in the back and have a look around. Besides, it’s my turn to choose.” He took the pass out of his pocket and tapped it against his nose, still sunburned from the weekend before, when I made him spend hours at a carnival so we could ride the Ferris wheel at sunset.
“Fine,” I said. I had made a mistake the weekend before and kissed him while we were pressed together in our gondola, surrounded by a red-and-orange sky, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. We sat across from each other in the train with our knees pulled up so they wouldn’t touch. I crossed my arms and Matthew laughed, leaning in so close that I could see an eyelash that had come loose and was hanging askew on the top of his cheek.
The museum was cool and full of shade and, after coming in from the street where the sunlight reflected off the pavement, my eyes couldn’t decide where to look.
“Let’s go straight there,” Matthew said. He already knew the way. We sped past cases of dried insects pinned to canvas, down a hall decorated with topographical maps, through a dim room of enormous brown bones, and across a rotunda lined with dioramas. Groups of people trundled in front and behind us, all heading the same way. The kids were all shouting the same thing.
“The raccoon!”
“The raccoon!”
They crowded the doorway of the Zoological Gallery, pushing their way into air that had a mothball tinge, a dusty, faintly chemical prickle that crawled up