Garret Corben buried his parents on January ninth, two weeks before their fiftieth anniversary. He was their only son, and had lived with them all his life. He was a loner, a loser, and a nobody, doggedly plodding towards forty-five with nothing to call his own.
He had worked occasionally, but people had expected him to do the most appalling things. He always quit when he learned that he would be required, for example, to show up for work at a specific time, clean and groomed. If his new job required him to speak with customers, or sit at a desk, or handle implements of labor, he would throw his hands in the air in disgust and walk out. It was not that Garret was opposed to doing any of these things for himself; it was just that he was aghast at the idea of doing anything at the direction of another human being. Garret never did what anyone expected of him.
It is natural for a person to mourn the loss of a loved one, and sometimes people turn to singularly personal distractions for comfort during their grief. But Garret had never loved anyone other than his parents, and so had never learned to grieve properly. Nor had he ever truly considered death, or what it might mean to die.
It may not then seem strange to find him on the afternoon of January ninth standing in the middle of the road and staring down at the grisly smear that had, only hours earlier, been a rabbit. It may not even be strange to see him kneel before the thing and stroke its jack-knifed body with such tender affection. Some may not even be surprised that he picks the thing up, peeling the tacky flesh from the blacktop by its ears, and drives the rest of the way home with it stretched across his lap. But no one, not even those who had known the Corbens and their peculiar son, would have expected him to find his life's purpose in this seemingly arbitrary act.
The house was paid for, and the car, and Garret received modest survivor's benefits that meant he would not have to worry about money. So long as he lived simply, he would live comfortably. Freed from such worries and the kindly but persistent concern of his parents, Garret found that he had ample time and resources to pursue his new hobby. Although hobby is not quite the right word for what he did. Obsession was closer to the truth, and compulsion closer still. He had never really noticed them before but now he saw them everywhere, and they beckoned him with broken wings and flattened paws. They cried to him with shattered jaws, and he could not resist.
The old house, a two-story farmhouse on forty acres of tree-covered land, was just outside of Edom in Van Zandt County. There were plenty of back roads and highways to scout. He came to know them well and grew expert in their navigation. He was a farmer of sorts. The roads were his fields. The asphalt was fertile, and its rows yielded to him. He would make his rounds every morning and harvest the night's crop with shovel, spade, and pliers. And when the trunk was full he would return home to process them.
At first he did not know what to do with them. His compulsion was to collect, and the gathering of their broken bodies seemed to satisfy the need that drove him. He put them in the garage, arranging them carefully on the worktables his father had used for decades. He would visit them to check on their progress and for the pleasure of their company. It was not a systematic gathering, and the bodies of rabbits were piled beside mounds of turtles (which were plentiful). The larger animals, dogs and coyotes and the occasional vulture, rested on the floor along the walls. Like went with like, but otherwise Garret took no care to organize his collection. The garage began to fill, and to reek.
He indulged his compulsion dutifully, and with grave dignity. He wondered from time to time what the purpose behind his actions might be. He understood on some level that the collection was not the end goal, but a preparation for some greater task. Until this purpose became clear to him he would collect, and the garage filled with the raw wet flesh of the dead.
They did not rot. The flesh remained supple and wet, slick with gore and opaque fluids that pooled in shallow runnels on the tabletops and floor. The insects shunned them. The cold February air tried to keep the smell in check, but there was so very much of it. It crept through the house, insinuating itself into the fibers of the carpets, curtains, and upholstery. It permeated the house and, inevitably, it permeated Garret as well. He fell asleep each night with the stink of them in his nostrils, a charnel house ambrosia that brought strange dreams.
Once they had lived in the Garden of Eden, and the first Man had given them perfect names. They became their names. Then the first Man was cast out of the Garden, and those animals that were faithful had followed. They shed their names at the Garden's edge. They forgot themselves and became feral and strange.
The dreams troubled Garret with their clarity and realism. He continued his work distracted by a kind of dreadful wonder, lifting their bodies into his trunk with reverence. These were the outcasts, the faithful kin. They had followed Man out from the garden and had forgotten themselves. In time, Man had forgotten them, too. They wanted to go home but did not know how.
Garret stood in his garage and looked at the collection. Here were rabbits and squirrels and skunks. There, dogs and coyotes and a solitary hog. Birds large and small: crows, cardinals, blue jays, mockingbirds, falcons, cranes, and massive turkey vultures. There were box turtles, snapping turtles, copperheads, cottonmouths, and water moccasins. They lay atop each other, snuggling together in mock hibernation. Garret understood what was needed. The understanding filled him with wonder and dread, but his hands twitched, eager for the work.
The car sat idle in the driveway for days at a time. Garret worked inside, now. He organized the bodies, cataloguing their parts as he went. There were hundreds of legs. Dozens of heads and tails and wings. Thousands of teeth and claws. Garret surveyed the dead, an informal census, and began to work.
He began with a simple creature, a turtle. He chose a large snapping turtle, big as a hubcap, and set it on his worktable. He watched it for long moments, waiting to see what it could become. When he understood, he pulled on his gloves and began to work. He removed the tail with a pair of shears, the legs and head with bolt-cutters. He set the limbs aside carefully so they would not get lost. From amongst the birds he chose six of the choicest wings: large pinions from the vultures. He cut into their shoulders with a penknife, slicing away skin and tendon until the wings twisted free of the body. He used rubber cement to secure the wings to the places where the turtle's legs, tail and head had been. He faced them all clockwise, smiling as he imagined the turtle spinning in the air as it flew. It was simple and crude, but it was done. It did not have a head. It did not need one. He named it Radshammer.
It was not taxidermy, what he did, but something else. Some bastard form of that craft, or a predecessor long forgotten. His tools were crude and inappropriate for the tasks he put them to. He worked with exaggerated slowness, taking great care with every piece of flesh so as not to damage them. But the methods revealed themselves to him as he worked. It was as though he were rediscovering some long dead art that wanted to be recovered. He was a blank slate, and it surrendered its mysteries to him willingly.
He gained new confidence in his abilities and turned his attention to a more ambitious project, a coyote. Unlike the turtle, the coyote would not stand how he wanted it to. He stripped the household appliances for parts. He used lengths of rigid metal salvaged from the dishwasher, sliding them carefully up the lengths of the coyote's legs to anchor in the meat of its flanks. Likewise he used a pair of metal rods to prop up the beast's head on its slender neck. It took some work, but Garret was patient, and the coyote stood precariously balanced on its dead legs as though some predator had startled it.
Once the coyote stood, he began the real work. There were many turtles in Garret's collection, and he set about separating their shells from their bodies with knife and pliers. The defrocked turtles looked sad and pitiful without their shells, but the coyote looked glorious. He used the shell of a baby snapping turtle for the skull, fixing it atop the coyote's head so that the dog's ears were pushed down and back, giving it a strangely whimsical expression. The shells of box turtles ran down the length of its back following the spine. They overlapped each other slightly, providing flexible armor plating. He used the bolt-cutters again to remove the tail, and replaced it with a three-foot copperhead that hung limp and pathetic across the floor. That would not do. He pulled a length of heavy copper wire from the refrigerator and shaped it into a tight coil with his hands. He threaded the copperhead onto the wire and reattached it to the coyote so it coiled around and faced forward. Its hinged jaws hung open, fangs extended as it snapped reflexively at whatever had startled it. He smiled at the creature, proud of his work. He named it Scathemutt.
He forgot the world as he worked, but the world did not forget him. A neighbor came by to check on him, and Garret turned him away sourly, irritated by the interruption. Through the slats of the kitchen window he watched the neighbor leave. He backed down the sidewalk warily, wiping at his nose and mouth. He made ugly faces at the house as he got into his car and drove away. Garret smiled wryly as he returned to the garage. A few days later a lady from his parents' church came by with a basket of muffins and jams. She held her handkerchief to her mouth as she spoke, and seemed more relieved than offended when Garret closed the door on her. He took the basket, though. He was ravenous.
These few distractions aside, Garret worked with tireless enthusiasm from sunrise to sunset, pausing only to sleep. It was a concession he made grudgingly, and only because he knew that his work would suffer if he did not rest, and that could not be allowed to happen. Besides, the beasts needed that time to rest and heal as well. They still bore the wounds that had killed them -- those did not heal -- but the wounds he gave them as he worked would mend as he slept.
He would dream of Pesticonti shuffling through the glades of the Garden, her possum-tail beard wriggling intelligently from her goat's maw, scouring the tall grass for insects. In the morning he would examine her to find that the fishing line he had used to stitch the double row of rabbit legs to her sides was gone, sublimating into the flesh of her flanks as she recovered from his ministrations. He had named her well.
Those that he finished no longer belonged in the garage. The garage was a workplace, a place of repair and healing. When he finished one, he would move it into the house where it could stretch its wings, or legs or tails. Scathemutt stood guard in the foyer, tail poised to strike at any intruders. Radshammer hung suspended from the ceiling fan in the master bedroom, turning lazy circles on low speed. Don-cooie and Bon-cooie coiled in the bathtub like a pair of massive anemone, their crown of turtles' heads resting atop their many coils. Cunning Perpsiko crouched in the cold ash of the hearth, a tiny armadillo poised to leap upon unsuspecting prey with those powerful reverse doglegs. There were many others, filling his home with their silent meditations. It became a new Garden of Eden, where the lost beasts were refashioned and given new names.
He ventured into town reluctantly, seeking the materials his inspiration demanded. New blades for his saws and razors, carpenters' nails and wood screws, glues and fishing line and sewing needles, and whatever else it occurred to him he might need. People avoided him, recoiling at the stink of him, staring and pointing and murmuring to one another. He did not notice. He did not care.
At home the Garden flourished. A clutch of Spatterpats nestled together on the couch; feline faces bobbing at the ends of serpentine necks as they watched the television. The rare Kumelle had taken up residence in the defunct refrigerator where his skunk's body perched slung between the racks on the hammock of his many tongues. Hunkerdin took her rest in the spare bed, her many heads seeming to chatter ceaselessly amongst themselves where the hog's teats had once belonged. It was an idyllic scene, but not one that was meant to last.
They came for him eventually. The stench and his odd behavior were enough to convince the townsfolk that something "just wasn't right" at the old Corben place. They came at dusk, the men and the older boys, some of the women, too. They came with guns and flashlights, a regular mob. He ignored them when they pounded on the door, and fought them when they broke it down and entered anyway. But he was only one man, and they quickly subdued him.
He was dragged out into the yard and held roughly down while the men searched his house. The men returned ashen faced and gibbering, informing their neighbors of the horrors within. They did not understand. How could they ever understand?
Garret struggled and fought and begged, but they put fire to the house anyway. He was quickly forgotten, then, as the flames cast strange shadows against the windows and out onto the lawn. Shadows with too many wings or heads or tails. Shadows that capered and mocked.
He fled, as that first Man had fled. And in his wake, a caravan of faithful beasts came out from the Garden and into the world. Radshammer and Scathemutt. Perpsiko and Pesticonti, the Spatterpats and all the others. They shed their perfect names and became feral and strange. God had only ever given the beasts one commandment: go forth and multiply.
Garret drove south. He wept, but not for long. He had lost much, but not everything. The house was insured. He would find a new home, somewhere else. And so he drove south. There were beaches to the south, and it occurred to him that beaches were very much like roads.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.