The Taxidermist's Inning

The black bear stared at me with glass eyes, its mouth frozen in a permanent roar that felt almost mocking. I'd been working on it for three weeks—a commission from a widower who wanted his late wife's favorite hunting trophy restored. The irony wasn't lost on me. We spent our lives trying to preserve things that were already gone.

I'd turned off the baseball game two innings ago. The Mets were losing, and watching them collapse again felt too much like watching my own life replay itself on a loop. Besides, the radio commentary drifting from the workshop's cheap speaker kept mentioning how the team's longtime friend and first baseman had just been traded mid-season. No warning. No goodbye. Just gone to a city across the country.

That's when Ellie had called.

"We need to talk," she'd said, and those four words had carried more weight than the two-hundred-pound bear behind me. We'd been friends since seventh grade, survived bad haircuts and worse boyfriends, apartment living and suburban mortgages. She'd been the maid of honor at my wedding. I'd held her hand through her divorce.

"I'm moving to Seattle," she'd continued, and I'd actually laughed, thinking she was joking. But she wasn't. "And I've been seeing David."

David. My husband.

The bear's roar seemed to echo in the workshop's silence. I picked up my scalpel, my hands steady despite the whiskey I'd been drinking since noon. Some emotions didn't deserve to be felt. Some things deserved to be stuffed and mounted, preserved forever in a pose that looked noble but was really just death with better lighting.

I'd finished the bear by dawn. It looked magnificent—fierce and eternal and completely empty inside, just like everything else that used to matter. The baseball game had ended hours ago. The Mets had lost, as they always did. As I always would.

I poured the rest of the whiskey down the sink. Some things you don't preserve. Some things you just let rot.