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Animals had always possessed a peculiar aversion to Ms. Harding.

It was one of those great mysteries, like the chicken and the egg, the existence of extraterrestrial life, or whether old Mrs. Mordecai’s hair was more blue or purple.  These things were hard to tell.  No amount of combing the past would ever turn up the origin of such an everlasting terror.  And even if it would, who would honestly take the time to explore the machinations of a woman like Ms. Harding?

I would.

Let me explain something about Ms. Harding before I go any further.  She was a young woman, not married, fresh from some fancy upstate college with a degree in Journalism that she never got around to using.  She worked mainly as an assistant in the local bakery, cleaning and… well, baking, I suppose.  I never truly delved into that stage of her existence because that was not the one I was interested in.  Then again, no natural human being could honestly claim interest in her at that time.  She woke, she worked, she returned home, she ate, she slept.  Such was the lust for life and living that coursed through Ms. Harding’s veins as she took conservative sips from conservative teacups and counted the number of steps it took her to walk too and from work.  It was important to regulate such things.

A word on animals.  They are intimidated by things large, loud, fast, sharp, or anything generally eccentric to their lives.  Some bolt at the gentle shutting of a gate, others could stare lazily off a warm front porch if the very sky was raining fire down on their backs.

A word on Ms. Harding.  She was not eccentric.

So it was a rather strange sight to see horses shy away from her as she walked to and from her house, to see dogs raise their hackles at her as she passed alleys, to see even the most bold of rats skitter away into gutters.  It became common knowledge that flocks of recently alighted birds signaled her coming, that the size of a terrified cat’s tail could be measured to judge her proximity to one’s location.  She always wore the same storm-gray coat too and from work, always carried the same plain burlap bag, always wore the same gentle perfume.

And yet they feared, despised her, fled from the mere mention of her.  I would never learn why.  I did not know this at the time, of course.  I did not know that the reason for all this madness was to be found only by will of God, because it seemed more and more as if He was the only who had the faintest idea.  Of course, I didn’t know that.  I thought that the answer could be found in Ms. Harding herself.

I saw her walking home one evening in her storm-gray coat and seized the opportunity.  She moved with short, hurried steps, as if she was one of those porcelain dolls with the stiff wire joints and frozen knees and a thousand places to go, if only her cage of a body would allow her to get there in time.  I tried to catch up, but she was too far away.  I came to a panting halt as she stopped at her front walk.  I started to call out her name, but thought twice as she bent down to examine something.

A bird had taken its final flight into her great bay window, it seemed, and was sprawled out on her sterile grass in a pool of feathers and pitying glances.  She stared at it for a while, then approached slowly, as if it might regain life and fly, squawking away like all the others.  It didn’t, of course.  I watched her pick it up and stretch out one of the wings, staring at the rows of feathers in well-controlled wonder.  Her lips moved with words, perhaps an epitaph or some lines from a poem that struck her as wise.  I fancied that it might have been something to the effect of The Emperor of Ice Cream, but looking back now, I doubt it.

Ms. Harding stroked its broken head a bit, ignoring the blood on her fingers.  Her movements were tentative, as if it might wake from the dead in horror of her touch.  But the bird stayed dead.  And Ms. Harding carried it inside.

Now, once something has died, there are only two things that one might rationally do with the body.  The first of these being burial.  Considering that Ms. Harding had gone inside with the thing, and inside wasn’t a terribly good place for things like burial, I had to move on to the second option: dinner.  She wouldn’t… eat the thing, would she?  Perhaps she had fallen upon harder times that I thought.

At that point, I left Ms. Harding alone.  Such a woman was more than I needed to deal with.  As time went on, perhaps in months, I found it easy to ignore, to forget.  There were other things to move on to, like scrounging up money for a haircut, or finding where my border collie might have run to.

But Ms. Harding wouldn’t leave me alone.  No, she wouldn’t.  All I wanted to do that afternoon was pick up a few apples from the grocer.  And yet, as I passed Ms. Harding’s house, she invaded my mind once more and left me speechless.

There was a new sign above her door, a roughly carved plank swinging jauntily in the breeze.  A bird clung adamantly to the upper edge of it, wings spread open.  Wings… immobile.  It was frozen, beak open in an expression of mindless bird-like joy.  The feathers were neatly in place across its breast, in militant rows that reflected the sun jauntily, grimly.  The sign itself read Ms. Harding’s Fabulous Taxidermy Shop.

Of course, this led to a slew of brand new questions, each battling for that prime spot at the front of my attentions.  But all I could manage to wonder at the time was how exactly taxidermy could be fabulous.

The door opened to reveal none other than the fabulous Ms. Harding herself.  She smiled at me lightly as I stood there, torn between the ogling of this terribly new sign and the ogling of the taxidermist herself.

“Why hello,” she said pleasantly.  “Can I help you?”

“Err…um…”  I had never been a winner with words, as they say.  “I never noticed your… shop before.”

“Oh, this?” she replied brightly.  “I’ve just opened it.  If you have any animals that need preserving, bring them right here!”  She spoke too fast, as if we were on some rigid time schedule instead of here in this warm summer afternoon.

There was a long pause, pregnant with questions.

“Well, do you?” Ms. Harding said at last, bursting it out like the popping of some monstrous blister.

“Pardon?”

“Do you have any animals that I could take care of for you?”

“Uh… not today, sorry.”  Her face didn’t fall, didn’t droop.  Her eyes maintained that eager, charged glint.  “So tell me, how did you get into a thing like taxidermy?”

“Oh, I saw a book at the library and figured I’d give it a try.  It’s a lovely pastime, it really is.”

No.  She was a young woman, bright and fresh from college.  A lovely pastime was knitting, riding horses, painting, taking walks with young men, gardening, anything but this.  Anything but this manipulation of bodies long deceased.

“Well, best of luck, I suppose.”  I found myself speaking slowly, avoiding quick actions that might make her jump me.

“Thank you!  Come back whenever you need me!”  I started off at as fast of a pace as I dared.  If I started running, she might chase.  “And tell everyone else about it!”

Needless to say, I avoided the house of Ms. Harding from that time on.  In retrospect, she wasn’t a terribly horrific woman.  There was nothing overtly threatening about her.  The only thing strange about her was her excessive enthusiasm for dead animals.  Whatever made her happy, I supposed.  If she enjoyed it, all the more power to her.

And Ms. Harding seemed to making a rather pretty penny off all these carcasses as well.  I had heard through extensive grapevines that local hunters brought their prizes in all the time, hauling deer and bobcats through her orderly white picket fence and leaving them to bleed obtrusively on the stark white boards of her porch.  One rumor claimed that a man had dropped off a full grown female black bear for taxidermy.  It also told that later, in a charming stroke of irony, he had been felled himself by a full grown male black bare, supposedly the loving and grieving spouse of the first.  So even though the town had no burning desire to make their beloved deceased puppies or kitties into lasting monuments, Ms. Harding pulled in enough to pad her pockets quite comfortably.

If it hasn’t been made patently obvious already, I am the inquisitive type.  I got it from my mother’s side, a bunch of explorers and scientists.  Curiosity didn’t kill just the cat, it also took out the dog and several sheep who were near enough to be hit by shrapnel.  This was a lesson that I had learned more than once in my younger days and was determined not to have to learn again.  Even so, I could not pass up the chance to hop the picket fence and peer into Ms. Harding’s window once I was sure she had left for work.

It was a rainy day and I saw no one else in the streets, so I stole the opportunity and decided to appease my curiosities once and for all.  A place like Ms. Harding’s Fabulous Taxidermy Shop really shouldn’t go unexplored for too long.  It’s unhealthy.  She hadn’t drawn the blinds, so I wiped off one of the rain-spattered panes and peered inside.

She had a bloody zoo.  Right there, in her living room.  Birds crowded the tops of bookshelves, squirrels spidered their ways up the walls, all frozen in the midst of what seemed to be a highly active time of dramatic claw placements and gracefully curved tails.  But worse of all were the cats, the dogs, all spread across the carpet in various positions of utter adoration.  They gazed up through slick glass eyes at whatever world lay behind their sightless handicaps.  Some had a single paw raised in anticipation of a handshake, others had their heads cocked adorably to the side.  But all seemed in complete love of something.  Even the bear, who I recognized from the rumors, had her great leathery paws outspread towards the ceiling, lips curved upwards.  I wondered if things really did grin from the holds of death.  It didn’t seem right.

It was just about then, when I was contemplating the bear’s enjoyment of the situation it had found itself in, that I spotted my dog.  The border collie, gone missing several months previous.  He as just as beautiful, just as stately as I had remembered, his coat brushed clean of burs or twigs.  But his eyes were a thousand miles away, dead and dull and glassy.

That murderess.  She killed my dog.  I went on like this for a moment in the depths of my head until rational thought kicked in.  Think about it.  Animals can’t stand to be anywhere near her.  How could she have possibly captured him?  They wouldn’t even stay close enough to be shot.  That was when I began to see the faint scents of tire marks on my dog’s fur.  And on the other dogs.  On the cats, too.  That was about the time I was violently sick in the bushes.  She was taking road kill?  A lovely pastime indeed.

Footsteps.  I turned to see Ms. Harding fast approaching, her nose buried in a cookbook.  I fled madly around the side of her house, panting heavily from the three seconds of exertion, and waited.  She hurried up her steps and went inside, closing the door softly behind as if not to wake a sleeping child.

This was one of those beautiful opportunities in life that one absolutely should not miss, and I absolutely didn’t.  I crept back around the front and peaked in the window.

There was Ms. Harding, standing in the center of her frozen admirers.  She was stroking each of their heads, petting snouts, rubbing behind their ears in that one spot that felt ever so good.  And speaking to them.

“Yes, that’s right, I missed you too!” Her voice was muffled by glass, but still audible.  “I know, don’t worry, mommy’s back now.  No, I can’t stay, I’m sorry.  I just forgot my purse.  Don’t worry, I’ll be back later.”  The animals responded to none of this, simply gazing at her in the utmost love.  “Be good and I’ll bring treats, I promise.  Love you all!”  She retrieved her burlap bag from a chair and the storm-gray coat from the claws of the great bear, who had been holding it in her flesh-tearing claws quite personably.

I hid back behind the house as she left, and then ran when I was sure she had gone.  My stomach churned and I thought I might be sick again, but all I could truly think of were the tracks of tires skating over my dog’s slick coat.  I would talk to her tomorrow, that was certain.  There had to be a reckoning.  No one did something like that to my dog, not even the fabulous Ms. Harding.

I was vaguely surprised to find myself banging lustily on Ms. Harding’s door that following evening.  The cynic buried at the back of my skull was sure I’d chicken out sooner or later.  But there I was, banging to raise the dead.  I was also surprised that she didn’t answer.  She seemed like the type to jump at the potential of customers.

“Hello?  Anyone home?”  I tried the handle.  Unlocked.  I cursed my sorry lack of common sense and turned it gradually, slipping inside.

It took my eyes a minute to adjust from the night darkness to the warm light of her living room.  When they were finally ready to do their job, I peered into the zoo room.

And there, on the floor, was the fabulous Ms. Harding, bleeding obtrusively into her blindingly white carpet.  There were deep gouges running all over her chest and stomach, and on her face was an expression of the purest, most angelic shock I had seen in all my days.  She was very beautiful in those few moments, and very dead.

I gazed at the scene for a while, taking it all in with a strange sense of detachment, then retrieved some damp cloths from the kitchen and wiped the great black bear’s claws free of blood.  They were ever so slightly lower then yesterday, the paws turned inward as if clapping rather than the servile tray-holding pose she held the day previous.  And the lips had fallen out of a smile into a grim, standoffish line.  I allowed myself to wonder what kind of fear, hatred, loathing, or what have you could call a creature back from the concrete holds of Death itself.  What woman was this, that not even something as solid as rigor mortis could stop some from seeking the most immediate revenge?  I pondered on the implications of this for a bit.  But only for a little while.

I gave my dog’s head a quick scratch and started for the door, throwing a final glance to the fabulous Ms. Harding.  If I knew any taxidermy, it would be fitting to give her a proper, permanent place amongst her subjects, but I never developed a taste for such things.  So I turned from Ms. Harding’s Fabulous Taxidermy Shop and found my way in the deepening, velvety folds of night.