Unnatural Creatures

“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 noses and into brains.

“The raccoon!”

Matthew laughed and grabbed my hand. We slid along the crowd’s edges, around a corner, and into a small room that could have been a closet, emptied of everything except a pair of Australian platypuses, displayed with a nest of eggs, and a stumpy man whose green hat had a clump of feathers tucked under the brim like a fisherman’s lure.

“Anybody there?” the man asked.

“Nobody,” Matthew said. “Except for us.”

“Good.” The man lifted a piece of white card out of a paper bag. He lifted a stick of glue. He coated one side of the card with the glue, making lavish swoops and curves, and then flipped it over, pressing it down on the plaque that described the Platypus, or Ornithorhynchus anatinus, and smoothing it out with his fingers.

“You can’t do that,” I said. The glue bulged around the sides of the card and the man smeared it with his thumb.

“Why not?” the man asked. “Don’t you ever get tired of looking at things the way they are?”

Matthew pointed his two fingers at me, like a gun. He was always telling me the same thing.

“You can’t do that,” I said, “because someone else did all the work to figure out what those things are, and to name them, and to write it down so everyone else can know what they’re looking at. And now you’re messing it up.” I pushed Matthew in the shoulder and the gun wavered, wilted, fell away.

“You could at least read it,” Matthew said.

I read the card. The print was very small.

THE STORY OF JENNY HANIVER

A long time ago, there was a girl named Jenny Haniver who lived at the edge of the sea. She lived with her mother, who was old and blind, and with nobody else. Jenny could sail, and she could fish, and her eyes were the same color as the sea.

At some point, a man fell in love with Jenny. They would have married and lived to be happy and old. They would have had children and grandchildren and, on their last day, sailed out of life together.

But before that could happen, the man was swept out by a wave. He would have drowned, but Jenny was an excellent swimmer and she saved him. Afterwards, she died.

Jenny’s mother wrapped her daughter’s body in silvery fish. She sewed them together with hair that she tore from her own head. She popped their eyes with a silver pin and whispered secret words into their fishy ears.

Jenny Haniver swam away without saying goodbye. The man watched until she disappeared, and he watched for many days after that, but she was something else, something new, and she never came back.

I looked at the platypuses again when I finished reading. The man had replaced one of them with a shriveled, dry thing that had a bulbous head, a narrow, bony chest, and a brittle fish tail the color of dust. Next to it, the platypus looked just as strange, a creature sewn up from different parts.

“This is Mr. Jabricot,” Matthew said. “He works with my mom.”

Mr. Jabricot pressed his chin into his chest. He clasped his hands together and bent his head over them, smiling as if he were taking a bow. “Your mother is an excellent woman,” he said. “A woman of unimpeachable character. It’s to her credit that she would never suspect any of her employees of doing something like this. Not you though. You would tip a place upside down before settling for something as easy as that.” He turned to me and held out his hand. I took it, but instead of folding his palm and shaking, he tapped the backs of my fingers with his thumb. “Clever. Moderately pretty. Pragmatic. Did you like the story?”

“No,” I said. I wasn’t in the mood for sad endings, not then. I waited for Matthew to notice that the conversation was getting strange, that it might be a nice time to leave, that we were loitering in a small room with a man who had just defaced a museum exhibit with some paper and glue and a thing that, in the best light, would still look like a fish stranded in the desert; but Matthew was looking at the thing next to the platypus, checking it for seams.

“It’s a sad one, I know,” Mr. Jabricot said. “But, most stories are if you follow them long enough. Do you know what we call a Jenny Haniver these days?”

I pictured a girl, once dead, swimming off in a new skin made of fish, also once dead. She flicked her tail, buoyant, seaworthy. “A monster?”

“No, not a monster,” Mr. Jabricot said. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together, as if he were trying to feel the quality of his thoughts. “Sometimes it’s close, but not exactly. A Jenny Haniver, in this modern era, is what we call the art of the rogue taxidermist. A special creature summoned from the skins of animals that are plainer and more likely. Bits of monkey, bits of fish, all you have to do is suggest and people will build their own loop of possibility where mermaids chase after ships and sing to drowning sailors.”