She has the red stag’s head down. It’s bigger up-close than it seemed on the wall: antlers that must be a yard across, tapering branches swaying on her lap. They’d been casting weird shadows for years, now she grips them like handlebars. She’ll struggle to hold it for long, its backboard pressing on her thighs, but she needs to look the beast in the eye.

 

Who knows why her husband wanted it – a stag’s giant head mounted on their chimney breast. Only men could contemplate such things; stupid ones. She never had a say, of course, came home to see it hanging there: a junk shop find, he’d said. It oversaw the blazing row that followed, and many hundreds since. The bullying, the violence. Is that when it started? The stag alone had kept its dignity, gazing down on her despair for a decade.

 

Up close she could appreciate the taxidermist’s art. The eyes she knew were crucial, wide set, brown, and utterly convincing – the first place you look when you see a stuffed head. She’d met its gaze a thousand times, and found it oddly comforting; she felt it loathed her husband as much as her.

 

She put her nose to the fur and sniffed, half-hoping it would smell of something wild and outdoors, but it scarcely had an odour. She stroked its fur with her fingers, thick at the neck, shorter down the length of its snout, lightening in shade at the stag’s broad brow, the nose. She could imagine its interior, the look and feel of it: wood-wool packing in place of a brain, galvanised wire giving shape to the ears. This was a sick imitation of the thing it used to be, but something of its former self remained, at least for her. With that in mind she pulled at its antlers, heaved it to her lips by their thick bone branches, and kissed it softly on the forehead.

 

They’d been partners in misery these two, and now she eased the stag around to face the chimney breast, let it stare at the wall it had occupied. A shield shape remained on the plaster where light bleached the space around the stag head’s mount. She put her mouth to its ear, held alert forever by the taxidermist’s art, and whispered: That’s where he’ll go, when he’s finished.

 

 

 

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Paul McDonald is the author of over twenty books, covering fiction, poetry, and scholarship. His most recent books are: Allen Ginsberg: Cosmopolitan Comic (2020), Don’t Use the Phone: What Poets Can Learn From Books (2023), and 60 Poems (2023).

Visit the Paul McDonald Amazon Store – www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Paul-McDonald

 

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