Stuffing Gilbert
by Coleman Bomar
"There's a company in Illinois that can stuff him," said Olivia. "We just put his body in a box with packing paper and he comes back looking like this."
She lifted her phone screen and showed Gilbert a taxidermied cat, posed sleeping and curled up. A bit below was the option to insert an air pump into the body for one hundred dollars, creating the illusion of breathing.
"Wouldn't he look good on the bed," she said. "His fur goes great with our satins."
Gilbert didn't tell her how much he enjoyed sleeping on the couch with an airplane pillow. He didn't tell her how the cat used to watch him every time Olivia left the room, like it knew his masturbation habits. He didn't tell her he was planning to leave before the cat died, but now that the cat had died, he was calculating the amount of time before a person could leave another person in good conscience after pet death.
"I'll get his body from the freezer," said Gilbert.
He wondered, with the right amount of drugs, alcohol, and maybe a chance frontal lobe injury common in serial killers, if she would ever want to put his own body in a box, send him to Illinois, and stuff him stupid. He wondered if she’d spring for the air pump. His beige skin went well with the living room carpet. It's hard to predict how drastically people can change. Gilbert laid the cat's cold body into a cardboard box lined with packing paper.
"I've never seen a cat look so alive," said Olivia. "It'll be like in the 1800s when families kept hair from a loved one's corpse and wove the strands into wreaths. Keeping prevents forgetting. It's almost romantic.”
She reached for his hand now cold by proxy. Three tears fell on matted fur and were absorbed. Gilbert calculated each tear as being worth roughly twelve hours. He decided he would leave behind a few fingernail clippings, or a lock of hair, or some dried skin shaved off his elbow in a glass cup. This was just in case she couldn’t bury him either.
Coleman Bomar (he/him) is a writer who currently resides in Middle Tennessee. His written works have been featured by and/or are forthcoming in Blink-ink, SOFTBLOW, Eunoia Review, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and many more. He enjoys cuffed jeans, Rupaul's Drag Race, and 90's grunge music.
