Making A Monument Out Of A Mouse

Making A Monument Out Of A Mouse
By Thomas M. Bailey

“’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house;
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

It’s a little after seven o’clock in the evening, and my wee little mouse has begun to drool. I can hardly blame her – after all, you would be as well if you were being pressed into newsprint on your stomach with a perfect stranger prying your skin away from your back with his shaking fingers and a disposable scalpel.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I’d first read of Jeanie M.’s stylishly macabre mouse creations a long time ago, in Jack Boulware’s San Francisco Bizarro, a useful tome for a Dallas resident at long last moving to the City of his dreams. To call them “cute” would probably identify one as a somewhat twisted individual, but frankly, that’s the word that came to mind when I first saw the little black-and-white photos of stuffed mice outfitted in adorably miniature vampire and pontiff costumes. Those beady little black eyes! The tail, held aloft and proud! Their tiny paws holding onto a staff or a stake or rosaries! And the whiskers, bristling! I’d immediately expressed interest in having one of these pieces of taxidermy on the mantle (delicately backlit), but alas my Significant Other of that epoch had firmly put her foot down, stating “No way” in no uncertain terms. After a spell, the little mousies crept into the back of my mind, where they languished, covered in dust, and then, ultimately, were forgotten.

Fast-forward a few years. With the S.O. having long since been gone, I was free to pursue my morbid little heart to wherever I decided to let it take me. Somehow, in a freakishly perfect little twist of fate—or whatever you would like to call it—I ended up performing some volunteer service at 826 Valencia, tutoring children in reading and writing exercises. It didn’t take me long to discover Paxton Gate, the curio shop right next door. It was love at first sight, providing, of course, one believes in falling in love with a store. Which I do. You could say that it’s kismet.

What a wonderful place! It reminded me somewhat of my late grandfather’s study in Southern California. It was cozy, slightly musty, and filled to the brim with enough bric-a-brac, curiosities, and downright cool stuff to drown David Attenborough . Okay, maybe not drown him, but at the very least allow a stiff whistle to escape from his lips and momentarily stun his badass naturalist self.

I lingered at first on the stately stuffed giraffe head near the entrance. Meandering along rows of skulls of coyotes, beavers, civets, muskrats, and minks, one comes upon the entire mounted skeleton of a domestic cat painstakingly situated in a Plexiglas box. Oodles of test tubes, beakers, magnifying glasses, needles, mounting kits, penis bones (raccoons, rats, and ferrets), shark teeth, trilobites, fossilized fish, Luna moth pupae, ostrich eggs, antique tin facades, skeleton keys, mounted arachnids such as scorpions and tarantulas, and a series of beautiful and gilded preserved insects such as giant Goliath beetles and a myriad of gossamer-winged butterflies. All said and done, some pretty nifty stuff for someone such as me. I was officially and immediately spellbound. There were just so many things to rummage through, little curio cabinets and old-school library-style drawers (think Dewey Decimal System!) to open and engage. A pack rat’s paradise, if you will.

I suppose I could just go on and on and on about the treasures and beautifully odd things to be found within Paxton Gate’s confines, but that isn’t really the point of this story. I believe I was discussing mice; so, naturally, let us return to the subject of this much-maligned rodent.

Anyway, there I was, amongst this cornucopia of natural greatness when I stumbled upon the stuffed mice display. Not just any stuffed mice, mind you, but the exact same stuffed mice featured in San Francisco Bizarro! Jackpot! I thought. There, in front of my own two eyes, were the stately statues in the depths of my subconscious! The vermin vampire! The persnickety Pope! Three-inch tall mice wrapped in straitjackets, staring in awe at a snake skeleton fashionably adorned with butterfly wings ! Victorian mice! Gothic mice! Mice reenacting The Crucible! How cool was that?

An argument could be mounted that I might have simply broke down and purchased one of these stuffed-rodent dioramas. That conception would, however, be absolutely false. I didn’t buy one, but at the same time decided to do that act one better.

I was going to make one of my very own. And to do that, I was going to have to skin a mouse. An already dead one, to be precise.

Dead mice and I go way back. For years, I owned two serious mouse-killing reptiles: Monty, a five-foot-long ball python; and the psychotic Rasputin, a four-and-a-half foot mangrove monitor lizard who didn’t so much eat mice as brutally terrorize and torture them first. My God, I must have gone through thousands of mice during their respective careers as warm-blooded prey addicts.

Rasputin had little to no difficulty dispatching his living, running or cowering victims. Whether by drowning, thrashing, breaking, or beating to a bloody pulp, this reptilian bully at times seemed to revel in punishing his mice to the nth degree before greedily gulping them down whole in four or five dramatic swallows. I once saw him grab one unfortunate mouse by the tail and slam it back and forth, from the aquarium wall to the decorative log and back again, over and over and over. It was like that scene from a Nicolas Cage movie where he dons leather gloves and proceeds to beat some poor kid to death, all to the tune of House of Pain’s “Jump Around.”

I’m no better. Monty’s style of killing was infinitely more “humane,” if such a word can be used in the service of predation. His method of feeding was always the same: A quick strike with the mouth, the addition of one or two loops of his body around the writhing meal, and then a slow and steady squeezing of the body until the lungs of the mouse collapsed and its squirming came to a standstill. At that point, after six or seven exploratory bites, Monty would find the head, disengages his lower jaw, and swallows the damn thing whole in a series of elaborate stretching exercises. It was absolutely fascinating to watch.

However, unlike Rasputin, who would never—in his wildest and most cold-blooded dreams—let a mouse’s teeth near his body, Monty’s form of extermination gave him no choice but to subject himself to potential nips of self-defense. Rodents’ incisors can pack quite a wallop, and so…there you go. Whilst dealing with particularly feisty and ill-behaved mice, I would have to be the Devil’s Advocate at times, playing Rasputin to Monty’s Monty. Gingerly holding the mouse by the end of its tail, I would have to swing its head somewhat roughly into the side of the glass – bonk – knocking it out cold.

Monty would then take over the dispatching duties. And I’d just watch.

Which brings me back to the point I was attempting with that supposedly out-of-the-blue reference to reptilian pets from long ago: I’m not squeamish when it comes down to putting cute and tiny rodents into a whirling hellhole of misery and death. Oh, I kid. It’s not that bad, but still there’s a portion of one’s mind that can’t help but think I just killed a fellow sentient being. But then another section of said consciousness rears itself and calls out, It was for food!

Taking dead mice and stuffing them to create inanimate dolls wearing period costumes does not, in most peoples’ books, constitute the “for food” argument. But do you think I was going to let a little fact like that rain on my parade? Not a chance! Because—get this—Jeanie M. herself was conducting mouse taxidermy classes at Paxton Gate!

Yes, it’s true. For eighty smackaroos, I could take a four-hour course in the secrets of stuffing dead feeder mice and—after said class—keep the finished product! After conferring with myself for a couple of days, I decided to take the plunge. I gave Paxton Gate a call and reserved myself a spot in the next class; the fact that I was taking the last position did not escape me. Apparently, there is no shortage of people here in the City By The Bay who would like to eviscerate dead mice and transform them into works of art. I guess that at that point, I was no exception. I wanted my own oeuvre de Mickey, and I wanted it very much, indeed.

By the time the twenty-seventh of September came about, I had begun to develop an odd flutter in the inner depths of my guts. I was on the onset of abject terror after having seen a series of photographs on a DYI website that, for all intents and purposes, completely demystified the gory nature of pulling the skin off of a mouse’s muscles and bones. “If you are going to wear gloves,” the instructions cheerily intoned above a picture of a scalpel positioned below the shoulder blades of a mouse, “then now is the time to do so.”

I suppose I could have pussed out at that moment, but the aspect of my personality that strives to do different and strange things wouldn’t let me. Color me however you like, but I felt I just had to do this course. It meant a lot to me, and damned if I was going to let some full-color pictures of severed ear canals do me in. The way I saw it, if there was going to be any pussing out, some incisions would have to be made first. This was an experience six years in the making, and I wasn’t going to miss my chance.

Absolute classic. So, with no further ado, I headed on down to the Mission one lovely early autumn day in order to learn how to skin and stuff a mouse. Paxton Gate’s back room was where the class was set to take place, with two long cafeteria-style tables covered with thick brown newsprint. There were, besides me, eight other students there to take the course (one having not shown up). However, seeing as we didn’t really chat with one another—nobody bothered to introduce themselves—they will not be introduced here in this article. Some things, I’m afraid, must remain a mystery.

So, before we begin, do we have everything we need? Let’s see…

• Lots and lots and lots of cotton balls
• Approximately 36” fine wire (26 gauge should do it)
• Approximately 8” thick wire (12-15 gauge’ll get ‘er done)
• Two [2:] small black beads (for the peepers!)
• Tweezers (or forceps, if you’re feeling particularly fancy and/or scientific)
• Newsprint/paper (Whilst this is not, per se, a necessarily bloody exercise, it can be a dirty one; lots of germs could be in your mouse. Flaying and dismembering it could release them into your house. Mysterious fluids oozed from orifices, liquefied fat from the clipped flesh and cartilage, and the occasional poop squeezed out from the anus—really now, are these substances you would like on your dining room table?)
• Needle/pins for sewing and, um, pinning. You can put ‘em in a cork!
• BORAX mix/corn starch – Quite literally, your best friend during this endeavor. It absorbs fluids and fatty stuff whilst you work, and on top of that helps to give you a grip. Use COPIOUSLY. It won’t let you down.
• Thread: No explanation needed. Things that are cut need to at some point be sewn back together. (I’d be willing to bet that that would sound great coming out of the mouth of Yoda.)
• Surgical/Nail Scissor: Snip, snip. Cut, cut. Some graphic noises will emanate from the trusty scissors’ work. Some odors will, too. Get used to it.
• Needle-nose Pliers: Used to ply, apparently. No, but seriously, they’re quite useful in pinching wire and twisting the future joints of your voodoo mouse.
• Scalpel: At last! Your chance to vicariously be an ER surgeon, or, at the very least, a burgeoning serial killer. Cutting, slicing, and scraping—a somewhat visceral experience, at any rate. Mine was of the disposable variety, complete with a green plastic handle; not quite the gleaming stainless steel instrument you might witness on “NIP/TUCK”, but it would do, nonetheless. A sharp X/ACTO blade will do just fine.
• One [1:] Bona Fide Dead Mouse: Let’s face it – this entire exercise would be moot without the mouse! It would be like a day without sunshine. A parade without floats. A restaurant without food. The Bush Administration without abject dishonesty (actually, that would be refreshing).

Now, in the immortal words of Ben Stiller, “Let’s do it.”

Of course, we all know as a matter of fact that mouse skins can’t just support themselves (for that they need alimony). Ha ha, I kid. Nope. For that, a lot of cotton puffs are necessary. How many, you ask? Good question. The answer is, “As many as are needed.” You have to eyeball (we’ll get to that later) the amount for both the head and the body, and press them solidly into a section of crimped wire in order to create your “dummy” or “voodoo” mouse. I don’t know about you, but I prefer the “voodoo” moniker, myself. In fact, seeing as so many implements of torture and abuse are being used in this exercise, I figured I’d name my little mousy “Bush.” Maybe I could find some pretzel crumbs and somehow indirectly cause another choking episode in the Oval Office. Ha ha, Secret Service dudes: I’m kidding.

The finished product is what the pelt will eventually encompass, replacing all the meat, bones, and organs of the deceased mouse. Some primping and squeezing and molding are necessary whilst (make sure you twisted the wire a few times between the head and the body! That “neck” must be poseable!) wrapping it in a lot of thread to maintain a certain “mouse-like” shape. Needless to say, it is a task easier said than done . There is much that needs to be performed before this cotton/wire/rodent cyborg resembles anything remotely “mouse-like.” Hell, even saying “mouse-like” was a stretch in my case. The finished product looked more like a cat toy—a shabby one, at that. Hemingway, my eight-year-old Himalayan, wouldn’t have even given it the time of day; providing, of course, that he didn’t parse out his time in either “nap-time” or “not nap-time” segments.

After amending said “voodoo” cat toy into a position in which you can pretend to try to mold it some more, you can then place it on the table next to your dead little friend to compare girth and width. This may sound a bit like a cockfight, but you must attempt to reign in any and all impulses to make pun of the situation. This is serious work, dammit.

Now, something has to take the place of those cute little beady black eyes; and what better to do so than with cute little black beads?

Seeing as I am an individual gifted with low blood sugar (and who really doesn’t eat all that healthfully, to boot), my hands have the tendency to shake from time to time. Imagine, if you will, my delight at not only having to thread the eye of a needle, but also to wrap miniscule loops around a 2mm black bead and “eyeball”, if you pardon the expression—and position it on the B’rer Rodent’s petite tete de coton. Pretty heady stuff, ha ha. Once those little black balls of plastic are attached to your wrapped ball of fluff, it’s time to fashion yourself a “tail.” It doesn’t get much harder than this.

Damn, this step takes not only finesse, but also patience, to boot. A whole hell of a lot of cotton is necessary as well, for this particular segment of the exercise is, to say the least, the most labor-intensive. And we haven’t even started cutting open the guest of honor yet! Yes, she is still lying there, most inert, waiting and peering at me sightlessly with her dead, half-open eyes. By the time I am finished with her, she will need not ever blink again.

When you finally do get around to separating the bone and muscle tissue from the confines of the scaly skin of the tail, something needs to fill the void. Voila! Wire and cotton. Who’d have thunk it?

Listen up. You want to take about ten to twelve inches of thin-gauge wire, fold it in half, and then crimp it tightly with your handy pair of needle-nose pliers. Pull a single cotton ball apart and take the wispiest section available, wedging it tightly into that crimped piece of wire. Now comes the tough part, threading with your fingers the miniscule strands of cotton in a spiral fashion down one end of the wire; using enough pull to cover the surface of the metal, but—mind you—exercising a certain amount of restraint so as to not rip the damn thing.

“Exercising a certain amount of restraint” gave me a certain amount of difficulty. Fifteen minutes into this sideshow of mind-numbing and unforgiving tedium, I had gone through many balls of cotton and my frustration was escalating in an alarming fashion. Frankly, I was ready to kill that freaking mouse. Well, providing, of course, that she wasn’t already as dead as something that was already really, really dead.

Okay, I’ll come out and admit it. Jeanie came along and helped me with my tail of woe – her being, of course, a woman who has readily admitted to performing roughly 500 “or so” of these operations a year; usually in the comfort of her home, in front of the television. Which makes perfect sense to me. This really isn’t something you can just take down to do at your local Starbucks. She was invaluable to my classmates and me, hovering about here and there making pointers and suggestions and sometimes even taking over briefly during a rough patch. She found me a beautiful wisp of frayed cotton and then, with her help, I somehow managed to perfectly align the strands and spin them down the narrow shaft of the wire, much like a taxidermy-obsessed spider would have—providing, of course, it had been even remotely interested in creating “voodoo” tails for deceased rodents.

Between you and me, the tail was a bust. Those frustrating minutes of twiddling and fraying and spinning that puff of cotton and some wire into a workable substitute for a mouse’s tail were to later become a complete waste. But I’ll get to that later.

Enough, I say, of the wire, the cotton balls, the string, and the beads! Let the dirty work begin. Enter the scalpel.

Mice, as we all know, are notoriously thin-skinned. Just you try to pass a joke around them and they go apoplectic! No, but seriously – their skin really is thin. I’m talking, like, paper-thin. To begin your all-important incision on the mouse’s back, all you have to do is just touch the damn thing with the point of the knife and—bam!—you are poking its vertebrae.

Remember how, at the beginning, I’d mentioned the decision one would need to make about whether or not to wear gloves? Well, that time had finally come for me and, yes, I did happen to have a pair of surgical gloves residing in the little grab bag next to me on the table. And, yes, I thought about it for a few moments. Surprisingly enough (even for me, of all people), I decided against it. Seeing as not even the tattooed old lady across the table from me (who was decidedly aghast at what she was about to do) bothered with them, I nixed the idea. After all, I didn’t want to look like a pussy, did I? No, I did not.

Now that I have the luxury of looking back on this entire experience, I kind of wished I had. But that, my friends, is another story.

To add insult to injury to my little rodent friend, I placed it upon the surface of the newsprint on its belly and lightly pounded it on the back with my fist. With its legs splayed out and the body flattened to provide a wider working area, I proceeded to begin my exercise in making a monument out of a mouse. “This is going to hurt you more than it will hurt me,” I whispered in one of its adorable little ears. With the first two fingers of my left hand I pressed down on its shoulder blades and began my incision.

As I have previously stated, the innate thinness of the skin made it difficult for me to tell if I’d actually cut through it at first. I have to admit that I was being pretty ginger about the process, almost as if I were afraid of hurting it. And then, as if by magic or something like that, the skin and fur parted like a curtain, revealing the white and pink of the muscle tissues lurking underneath the surface. Okay, I thought to myself. Don’t fuck this up. Holding the blade of the scalpel against the backbone of the vermin, I slowly sliced my way from the base of its neck all the way down to the edge of its tail, the mottled white and gray fur and skin parting in its wake like the demented opening of a zipper.

The cut was complete. Now, for better or for worse, it was time to peel. The odor wafted upwards towards my awaiting nostrils and, for want of a better word, it smelled intriguing. I felt a gorge rise within my throat for the first time (and not the last for this evening), and I impulsively grabbed a large pinch of the cornstarch and sprinkled it liberally within the mess I had just made. Whilst pushing the deceased creature into the surface of the table, a little bubble of what looked like spittle drizzled out of its agape mouth. I felt somewhat sorry for the little bugger, but at least he wasn’t alive and keeping a creature like Rasputin company. More than drool would be emanating from its mouth in that scenario, so in a way, it was a lucky little mouse.

So there I was, peeling. Difficult work, that. I somewhat likened it to trying to peel an abnormally shaped nectarine with slippery mouse-skin rind that kept threatening to tear between one’s fingers. I began to call my dead mouse “Abby Normal.” It was a fitting name. Did I mention that I was in possession of a girl mouse? I had a choice at the beginning of the session when Jeannie placed the series of thawed-out mouse cadavers upon the worktable: Boy mouse or girly-girl? The difference was certainly clear. Anatomically speaking, the testicles of a full-grown male mouse are freaking huge. For all intents and purposes, if you had a guy mouse blown up to the size of an average human being, the scrotal payload would be roughly the size of a tennis ball. Imagine that.
“Why are his balls so big?” one of the women wanted to know, a tremor of fear in her voice.
Jeanie replied, “Probably because they need to reproduce so much. Like rabbits, you know? Fucking all the time.”
“That’s a lot of spunk,” I said, as I ultimately decided on the fairer of the mouse sexes. Dealing with a scrotum and testes the size of mouse bocce balls seemed rather icky to me. As if the act of skinning the mouse didn’t. Hmm. I am a monster.

Actually, no, I’m not.

Anyway, as I was saying, peeling the mouse carcass was a rather difficult task. I found myself (not for the first time this evening) wondering if perhaps I had bitten off more than I could chew. I found myself reminded of a scenario I had seen a long, long time ago when I was in elementary school. Walking home one day across a soccer field, I came across a dog that had captured itself a gopher. Quite a prize for this particular mutt, I reckon, seeing how damn comfortable it appeared lounging in the afternoon sun, lackadaisically gnawing on that unfortunate creature. I’m telling you, it was a gory mess; the white of its broken bones and the mottled red and yellow organs squeezed from its body glistened. I remembered thinking to myself, Damn, that’s fucking gross.

Now that thought hovered uncontrollably in my mind as I sat at that table prizing the skin from the mouse’s back in miniscule spurts of progress. A little bit of skin would pull away from the muscle tissue, and I’d reach for a pinch of cornstarch and sprinkle like mad into the gradually widening slit (that was, I noticed uncomfortably, beginning to resemble a splayed-wide-open vagina in a Penthouse centerfold pictorial). Pull, pull, and sprinkle. Pull, pull, and sprinkle. This became my inner-mind’s mantra. My mousetra, if you will.

After what seemed like forever, I finally began to make some serious progress in the skinning portion of the evening. I had started along the line of the mouse’s backbone, and had slowly (excruciatingly so) made my way around the sides to the belly of the beast. I now held in my greasy and cornstarch-covered hands a partially flayed mouse, which resembled a particularly nasty doughnut. It was now time to turn all of its legs inside out. Good times!

I’ve always considered myself to be a somewhat chivalrous fellow, and it had always been a dream of mine to one day assist a lady mouse in removing her coat. I began with the two rear legs, holding each one in my fingers much as I would a cigarette. I simply pinched the edges of the slit and began to push the legs through. I found it surprising at how easily the meat and pelt separated. It rended so quickly, in fact, that my fingers almost slipped and dropped the mouse! I grabbed my scissors and clipped the bones at the femur—somewhat close to the hip . I then did the same to the other two legs.

There is something to be said about the sound of scissors clipping through the tiny leg bones of a mouse. It is a gruesome sound: clinical and final. I liken it to a wet snap, like cutting a sodden twig with gardening shears. I did not like this sound. It gave me involuntary shivers. You may recall my regalement of the building of the voodoo mouse-tail earlier on. You may even remember my having written, “The tail was a bust.” All true, I’m afraid. All true. So all I was left to deal with after my pint-sized amputations were the head and the tail. As far as the whole damn thing was concerned, I couldn’t wait to get rid of it. Talk about gory messes: It was hardly even recognizable, resembling a shapeless bundle of raw meat (liberally sprinkled, as it was, with cornstarch) that wept liquefied fatty tissue. Having completely thawed out, the odor of decay was simply unmistakable. As I said, I wanted to be rid of this thing like, yesterday. I began my work on the tail. “It’s like stripping a wire,” I was told. “It just comes right off.” How naïve I was back in the day. All I had to do was locate the base of said tail and cut through the connecting tissue and cartilage. That’s pretty much it. And then, having accomplished that, I needed to maintain a firm grip on the body (AKA the “gory and revolting mess”) and the tail and simply pull. It didn’t work out quite as well as I had planned.

Have you ever seen one of those executive “stress relievers?” You know ‘em, the rubber ones that, when clenched in some cubicle slave’s fist and squeezed (while, I’m sure, being imagined as the boss), their buggy eyes and ear-like appendages pop out in a comical and vaguely obscene fashion. Something like that. The body of the mouse, as I endeavored to strip the tail free from it, was becoming a perversion of one of those clutter-toys of the office warrior. I held onto the tail with my right hand, grasping the skinned carcass of the mouse in my left with as firm a grip as I was comfortable giving. How gruesome did the body of that mouse look as it expanded outward like an over-inflated balloon? I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. It was almost as if I were holding an armed pipe bomb just ready as all get-out to explode in my face—except instead of gun powder, bolts, nuts, screws, ball bearings, and the engulfing fury of light and fire, this would consist of blood, gore, intestines, and bone fragments. Not a pretty picture. I was rather alarmed, truth be told.

“Uh, Jeanie.” I motioned for her to come over and assist me for a moment.
“What is it?” she asked, looking down at my mutilation-in-progress.
I showed her the traumatic sight of the inflatable mouse. “It looks like it’s going to explode in my face,” I said. “Do they ever do that?”
“Nah,” she said. “Their muscles are too strong to allow that to happen.”
The words “too” and “strong” weren’t necessarily the first descriptions I would come up with to describe the muscles of a mouse, but hey, I figured. She’s done literally hundreds of these things. If it hasn’t happened to her, then I reckoned it wasn’t going to happen to me. That realization provided me with just a hint of comfort.

So with that in mind, I returned to the stripping of the tail. And then…

The tail broke. Well, the tail didn’t, but the skin of the tail did. Actually, the skin came off in scaly fragments that adhered to my sticky fingers like snake shedding. I was aghast; after all that hard work making the voodoo tail with Jeanie’s assistance, it just didn’t seem fair. Goddamn it. I showed my broken tail to Jeanie and she frowned, noting that, for some reason, “This batch of mice has had a tendency towards fragile tails.” Ah, that explains it. Faulty mice! Who’d have thunk it? I ended up keeping some of the larger fragments of my tail of woe to the side of my experiment, figuring that maybe – just maybe – I could jury-rig an alternative tail from the parts I salvaged. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you – Frankentail!

Have I mentioned my general distaste for and my impatient yearning to finally be free of the gory mess of the mouse’s body ? Well, although I had to concede the episode of the tail as a complete and utter loss, I still had the head to go. I was beginning to regard the mess in my hands with absolute contempt. I really wished to go outside to smoke a cigarette; but what with my greasy and sticky hands – fuhgeddaboutit. I was in serious resentment of this mouse.

Sick of farting around and taking what appeared to be way too long to finish skinning the damn thing, I decided to take the bull by the horns and take a no-nonsense approach into the final stretch . Gripping the body of the mouse somewhat tightly in my left hand, I scrutinized the position of the skin against the nape of the neck. With deft, careful strokes of the blade, I made a series of miniscule scrapes, pushing the skin away from the skull millimeter by painful millimeter. I got to the ears.

The general wisdom of separating the ears from their respective ear canals is to see the white-ish/yellow-ish gristle and then, with the point of the scalpel, push in slightly and cut in a concentric fashion so as to protect the integrity of the ears. According to experts in the field, you will know you’ve made a perfect cut if after the ears are pulled away, all that is left on the sides of the skull are two black pits. My patience regarding this phase of the deconstruction paid off. My ears were intact! And, I have to admit, as cute as a button.

I made my way down to its nose without incident, and then, just as I made to accomplish my coup de grace, I made my BIG BLUNDER #2.

The nose, not really having the skin necessary to merely peel away, must therefore be pulled off of the head in one swell foop. Yep, you heard me correctly. Just like Michael Jackson and his revolting removable schnoz, the nose goes completely. And believe it or not, there is a method you must follow to accomplish this feat. It goes like this:

1. Grasp the nose of the mouse in your left hand (or right if you’re a southpaw).
2. Firmly grip the skull in your right hand (or left if, you know, you’re a southpaw).
3. Pinch the nose hard while you twist the skull in a clockwise fashion.
4. You will hear a wee little pop as the nose and skull part ways.
5. You will finally be free from that horrific and gory little mess that you’ve been dying to get rid of for the last hour or two.
6. Victory is yours (almost)!

There are those who sagaciously say, “The nose makes the stuffed mouse doll.” There are yet others who have consciously decided to not make the leap from mere mortals to mouse-stuffers. Granted, this constitutes roughly 99.99% of the population, but let’s not split hairs. Like an underground and unlicensed rhinoplasticist, I botched the job. Let me put it this way: THE NOSE STAYED WITH THE SKULL.

Ah, man, I muttered dejectedly to myself. This is turning out to be a pretty fucked-up mouse. First no tail, and now this? What next? All the fur falls out? My mind wandered a bit as I tried to imagine how I was going to cover this one up, and I pictured a variant of the old vaudeville joke:

Vaudevillian Taxidermist: My mouse has no nose!
Audience (in unison): How does it smell?
Vaudevillian Taxidermist: AWFUL!!!
(Laughter ensues)

Oh, I tried in vain to laugh it off, but my interior guffaws of mirth sounded hollow to me, a bit like crocodile tears. So I looked at the bright side: I was finally done with that unpleasant brutal mess that used to be the interior of my rodent. I looked at it with disdain and nudged it not too carefully to the very edge of my workspace. Good riddance, I telepathically projected to the ruined carcass. I picked up my scalpel again and proceeded to what finally remained—the pelt.

After everything that had preceded it, this section of the exercise was pretty much cut and dried. Laying the skin fur-down on the newsprint , I gently scraped the little bits and pieces of meat and fat that remained and posited them near what I now fondly refer to as “The Mess.” There really weren’t too many leftover pieces, so I took to whittling the remaining meat off of the leg bones, taking mental notes as to how much cotton (yes, the cotton again) would be required to replace that which was removed. I couldn’t help but notice how much the color of the flesh resembled that of a freshly cut piece of maguro sashimi. Yeesh. I can’t begin to tell you how hurriedly my mind raced to get that particular comparison out of its domain.

This last nasty bit went by with no trouble at all. Mouse flesh in small amounts, you see, dries out pretty quick, usually in the space of two to three hours. It’s not necessary to get rid of all of it, so I called it a day on the cutting and scraping and gouging, and began to get focused on the making whole again part. I could not wait. Nose and tail woes be damned, I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Taking the cotton once again in my fingers, I spooled it gently around the base of the remaining bones (to anthropomorphize again, to where your shoulders and hips would be) and pulled it taut to become meat-by-proxy. Then, one by one, I took what was left of the thin-gauge wire and wrapped the cotton into place, leaving enough hanging off the ends to wrap around the aforementioned voodoo mouse once it took up residence in its new environs. Compared to everything that had preceded this step, it was a damn easy task.

Enter the voodoo mouse. I peered at the edge of the dorsal cut and began to carefully insert the head of the cotton and wire stand-in into the head. It fit almost perfectly, but, sadly, the eyes I had sewn into it were a little off (too far apart, as it turned out). I then took the (practically useless) voodoo tail and pressed it through the stump of the real thing that had failed monumentally for me nearly an hour previous. I set up the extended wires so as to embrace the cotton and wire farce as snugly as possible, and then I went for the gusto, pushing the body of the voodoo mouse into the cavity of the rest of the skin.

Surprisingly enough for me, what was apparently enough slippage room for the carcass of the mouse to go through wasn’t enough for the voodoo mouse to go through. The skin tore in not one, but two places; warning me in no uncertain terms that what I was going to end up with in the end was what was going to come across as Frankenmouse itself. I quickly compared the color of the sewing thread to the pelt of the mouse and was frankly surprised at how similar they were in shade. I imagined myself hemming a favorite pair of jeans, and dived right on in.

At long last, I was finished. Finished! I put the completed specimen upon a square of cardboard and wielded the pins, pushing them against the rear paws and forcing the thing to stand up and face me once and for all. Goddamn, I thought. What an ugly fucking mouse. Even its rear legs had been set poorly; one of them, incidentally, was rotated off mark by roughly 180 degrees. My God, man. It resembled the rodent incarnation of Leather Face from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In fact, the perfect diorama for it would have to have been a dilapidated old dollhouse filled with miniature bones and pelts and implements of torture, with a tiny replica chainsaw planted in one of its paws as it “chased” little co-ed mice over hill and dale. That certainly would be something, wouldn’t it?

I realized that my hands were still covered in an unholy mixture of fat, fluids, and cornstarch, so I finally took the opportunity to go to the restroom and wash them. As the ultra-hot water and soap rinsed everything off, I breathed a sigh of relief that practically echoed in the confines of the little room. Clean, I thought. I am finally clean. I went outside and smoked a cigarette and returned to the mouse.

There was one last thing that needed to be done to the wee mounted squeaker. Its tail. It simply had to go. Put quite simply, it was a wreck. Three quarters of its length were merely scraps of skin clinging precipitously to the wire and cotton of the voodoo tail, so I wielded the needle-nose pliers and snipped most of the tail off with the sound of a metallic snick. I felt, somewhat perversely, like the farmer’s wife in the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice .” My proud mouse—warts and all—now had the tail of a hamster.

Regardless of how the experience panned out, I was still pretty happy with it all. I placed my “doll” into a brown paper bag, bid adieu to Jeanie M, and hustled out into the mild Mission District evening. And that was it. I had a cocktail at my local watering hole and showed off my creation to some friends (who were either impressed or were completely grossed out), and then went home to allow the thing to dry out so I could pose it in a prominent place of distinguished honor.

“Pose it in a prominent place of distinguished honor.” Ha, that’s a laugh. My little trophy sat in the guest bathroom for almost two weeks, alone and dried out, before I decided to actually place it in a “prominent place.” Whether or not said place was “of distinguished honor” is completely up to the mind of the examiner.

Final thought: So there she sits upon a curio cabinet; there has been no robe, no cloak, no wee little shoes, no chapeaus, and no odd miniature instruments, tools, staffs, weapons (such as chainsaws), or bric-a-brac attached and/or mounted to her empty little paws.

Still mounted to her cutout square of cardboard with pins, my mouse stares sightlessly with her askew eyes at me each and every time I pass her in the hallway. My house, as it is, is already filled floor to ceiling with what amounts to nearly seven years’ worth of miscellaneous bric-a-brac, tchochkes, books, games, music, junk, and (sometimes) outright rubbish. This stuffed mouse that had been nearly six years in the making from first thought to actual realization, had, in the end, become merely another spoke in my cycle of packratted-dom. A rather unfortunate purgatory for my little rascal, but I like to think of it as the tail-end of something coveted that had been forgotten; and, when at last recalled, had been sought out and captured in the real world, once and for all.

Fini