I’m writing a book. There, I said it. I’m about halfway through. It’s a memoir project based on me doing things that I have always wanted to do or have been scared to do. Among other things, I’ve already butchered some chickens, watched my 9-year-old son learn to walk, spent some time in a funeral home, worked the polls on election day, bought an RV, and had an intensely weird bra fitting. The goal is to do 40 of these experiences before I turn 40 in October 2025 and I’m about halfway through. This is one of the first chapters.

The line outside the Curiosities and Oddities Expo on Easter Sunday was about what I expected. One woman was dressed in a Playboy Bunny costume, complete with spiderweb tights, rabbit ears, and a little bunny tail. When a white guy with dreadlocks turned towards me, I was stunned to discover that he had tattooed the whites of his eyes. They were dark, black pits that made him look inhuman, probably the intended effect. “Have you ever done a taxidermy class before?” I asked him innocently. He glanced at me and answered, “I have plenty of experience with killing animals but I’ve never done the taxidermy process.” I didn’t probe any further. Eventually, all of us, normies and weirdos alike, shuffled through the expo booths and into the makeshift classroom to try our hand at taxidermy.

I grew up in West Texas so I’m no stranger to taxidermied animals. They were present in stores and restaurants and friends’ homes. A cougar in a glass case “prowled” the halls of my high school. At slumber parties, my friend Andrea and I would sit at her desktop computer in the office, giggling under the watchful, glassy eyes of a small herd of deer. While I’ve seen lots of taxidermy, the closest I’ve ever gotten to performing it was the rat dissection in high school biology. I’m not a blood and guts type of girl, so the chance to taxidermy a rabbit and turn it into a jackalope–a mythological jackrabbit with antelope horns- seemed like a good addition to the project. It just enough outside my comfort zone that it will stretch me without killing me.

A couple days before class, I got an email from Sleeping Sirens, the group teaching the class. Here are the parts that most alarmed me.

• If you want to wear an apron to protect your clothes, we would suggest it since class can get messy. 
• BRING A MASK with you for carving dust filtering and lung protection, we only have a handful. Just a regular paper “covid” mask will do the trick.
•  Knowing how to sew a whipstitch is incredibly helpful. We will be using a variety of artistic skills as well if you want to brush up on some sculpting.
• ANATOMY PHOTOS FOR REFERENCE ARE ALSO SUPER HELPFUL!

After a little research, I realized that a whipstitch, despite the ominous name, was quite simple, but the requests for aprons and masks still disturbed me. In my head, I pictured a bunch of blood-speckled, rubber-apron-wearing deviants calling their zombie rabbits to life with chants they purchased from the witchy booth across the aisle.

 To settle my jangling nerves, my friend Lori and I went on a reconnaissance mission to the expo the day before the class. On our way, we stopped by a craft store to find hats for small mammals. I left with a bagful of diminishing sizes of sombreros and bowlers, because I couldn’t tell you how big a rabbit’s head is. I’ve never held one. I don’t like their beady little eyes. Even if I had held one, I doubt I would have been able to determine the circumference of its head to fit it for a hat. What am I, a rabbit milliner?

The parking garage at the convention center had a strange mix of attendees to the Curiosities and Oddities Expo and a statewide karate tournament. The Curiosities crowd was dressed almost exclusively in black, except for the girl in a clown costume with a painted down-trodden face who was carrying a toy telephone. One woman carried a purse made from a real fox skin, its little red face staring despondently down at the ground. There were lots of platform shoes and handlebar mustaches and facial piercings. I’m sure the karate families, with their disciplined children in stark white, freshly-pressed gi, were thinking, “What the fuck?”

Inside the expo, the taxidermy booths were equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Here- a toad in a tutu, stretched into a leap, its fingers delicately touching in an arc above its head. There- a squirrel dressed as an old schoolmarm, clutching a miniature copy of “The Raven”, a tiny cigarette in her left hand. Framed mounted beetles and iridescent blue butterflies sat frozen in time and available to purchase. One booth’s entire inventory was rats dressed as circus performers. The more macabre vendors had squirrel bodies with baby doll heads or grotesque teapots with gaping maws, like they were screaming. You could buy a crystal to clear your energy or a potion to fall in love. The options are, apparently, endless.

Opposite a sideshow performer who was piercing his skin with poky objects to the howling delight of his audience sat the classroom, walled off by fabric. Through a slit in the door, Lori and I watched a woman silently sewing the belly of a white stuffed rat. I was relieved to see that the classroom did not look like a series of murders had occurred there.  Despite the very odd wares for sale, I felt better prepared for the class the following day.

The sinister email had warned us to arrive early to “have the best choice of pelts,” which is how I found myself in line with the Playboy bunny and an experienced animal killer that Sunday morning.  After my classmates and I filed into the curtained-off classroom, we stood in line to get some supplies and choose our rabbits. A plastic folding table held a pile of thawing pelts in sandwich-sized Ziploc baggies. We could tell they were rabbits only because the ears were visible. Everything else looked like a pile of goo. I chose a brownish gray goo that looked no bigger or smaller than the rest of the piles of goo. On our tables were two blocks of floral foam- the green sand-textured foam used to make flowers erect in arrangements. We also had a washcloth, rubber gloves, and a handful of scissors, sandpaper, and various surgical tools. I donned the Christmas apron that my mother-in-law made for me years prior. While its cheery mistletoe and candy cane pattern didn’t quite fit the gothy vibe, the apron was mostly black and thus, would hide any blood spatter. I’m sure she’s very proud.

Our main teacher was Heather, a petite, heavily-tattooed woman who kept her handheld microphone stuffed in her bra strap for most of the day because their microphone stand had broken. Her husband, Peter, was her affable assistant—a man who kept calling me “friend.”

We began with shaping the foam head. Heather walked around and showed us her expertly shaped rabbit head while mine quickly veered into misshapen and lopsided territory. She kept telling us to look at the anatomy photos. As an undying teacher’s pet, I had followed the email’s instructions and found a digital copy of the 1957 The Rabbit: an Illustrated Guide. I dutifully looked at the anatomy sketches but my untrained eye couldn’t see how they were helpful. Eventually, my carving gave me something that looked vaguely like a vulture head.

After all fifty students had shaped their heads, Heather announced that it was time for our first test fit. She instructed us to get our rabbits out of the wet baggies. I donned my gloves and got a first look at Jeremy, a name that I had already decided on. 

The blood and guts part of the taxidermy process had, blessedly, already been done for us. Heather and Peter had prepped the rabbit by running a knife down the back so it kind of looked like the rabbit’s furry chest was a hairdressing smock. The underside of his skin felt slimy, like raw chicken skin. His fur was wet and matted; his face, a pile of mush. Positioned correctly, I could see some facial features but his mouth had some unspeakable aberration coming out of it like something that you might see in an alien movie. The cream-colored bits looked like the pith of a dried-out grapefruit—stringy and starburst shaped.

Our next instruction was to turn the pelt inside out and then fit it on our carved head. To do this, we needed to match the Styrofoam nose to the inside-out pelt nose and then gently roll the skin down the head. Heather did it in about 6 seconds. I stared at the pile of horror in front of me and froze.

“What am I doing here? I’ve paid almost $300 to be here. I’m here, at the place, with all the people, and they just asked me to turn this pile of gloop inside out and stretch it over a foam skull like a goddamn serial killer. And I cannot leave. Heather will question me into her bra microphone and draw all the attention to me. It would expose my severe imposter syndrome to everyone, including Mr. Tattooed Eyeballs.”

After a few moments of struggling and self-doubt, using good old-fashioned peer pressure to push me forward, I matched the inside out nose of a hare pelt to the nose of my carved head and rolled the skin down the sculpted head like a condom. I took a short moment to celebrate getting over that first hurdle.

Once fitted, we were supposed to mark where his eyes were on the foam but there was a problem. Jeremy was- noticeably- not a handsome little fella.  One of his eyes inched up towards his nose a bit too far, like his face was a melting clock in a Dali painting. Surreal Rabbit Face was not part of the vision I had for this project. Heather slung her exemplar rabbit, sodden and limp, over her shoulder and walked the aisles, dolling out advice and troubleshooting.  I raised my hand and waited for guidance on what to do with my wall-eyed hare. She came over, deftly pinched the skin around until the eyes looked balanced, and instructed, “You are the taxidermist and you are the one that makes him look like you want him to look. You have to taxi the dermis.”

After we fit the head, we deskinned the rabbit and then prepared the eye holes in the Styrofoam. I chose some dark brown plastic eyes on pegs for Jeremy. We stuck the eyes into our prepared sockets and lined them up. Heather cautioned us to be very precise about this or we would end up with “taxiderpy,” a term that perfectly describes this taxidermied lion by a well-meaning Swedish taxidermist in 1731. 

Next, we sculpted the turtle-shell-shaped chest and stuck the head and chest together with a wooden skewer. I also started the grooming process. His fur was wet and stuck together, like roadkill that had drunk too much wine. We used various combs and brushes and hairdryers on cool to help get some of the moisture out. I worked diligently to brush the floral foam dust out of his gray-brown fur and fluff his little chest cape.

Remember, we were supposed to be creating a jackalope, basically a rabbit with horns. Heather and Peter had provided some cheap-looking plastic antlers that were comically small but more substantial antlers were available to purchase. Too loudly, I asked the woman next to me if the black spiral Springbok horns looked satanic and three other shoppers at the table whipped their heads toward me. Then, I remembered that I was not with my usual Sunday crowd. I settled on some regular deer antler tips- dainty and slightly curved. 

Heather told us that it was time to make internal “ear cards.” These were rigid pieces of plastic that we were supposed to shove up inside the rabbit’s ear and then secure with a squirt of fast drying caulk. The hole for doing all this was very small and hard to locate and I engaged in an epic, sweaty battle. I will spare you the gory details but I could basically be an ear specialist for rabbits now. I knew I had come out on top when Peter gave a “Good job, friend.”

After that final obstacle, we “redressed” the rabbit on the cobbled together Styrofoam torso, pinning the edges of the fur around the back and trimming the excess. In small groups, Heather showed us “lip tucking and eye pinning.” She demonstrated how to gently trim the extra pithy bits from the mouth and use a small metal paddle to push the unsavory parts back into the clay-lining. The pelt would shrink as it cured so we needed to secure the skin around the mouth, nose, and eyes with pins to keep it in place.

Some of the rabbits were looking damn near professional- perky ears, bright and well-placed eyes, little bunny mouths instead of pithy grapefruit nightmares. Poor Jeremy was looking more like a kangaroo- droopy ears and a long mouth. I had pelt envy, but I was determined. So, I took Jeremy back to my table and started to tuck and pin. He was never going to be perfect. First tries rarely are. The skin of his nose was stretched too tightly and his mouth still didn’t look quite right. Eventually, he and I got to a place that felt good enough and I declared us finished.

I had Peter the assistant glance over Jeremy to make any necessary adjustments. He gave me my final, “Great work, friend!”  I had my neighbor snap a picture of me and I wandered back to the parking garage, clutching a pin-faced rabbit. I was exhausted after a 6-hour day chock full of listening to detailed instructions, with the din of the expo happening outside our curtained walls, but I felt proud of myself. I did something that I was uncomfortable doing because I wanted to prove to myself that I could.

And I could.

Unfortunately, I awoke the next morning to find the skin of Jeremy’s nose and lips had pulled back and the white clay lining was clearly visible. Heather’s response to my frantic email was that I needed to tuck the lips again.

I sprayed him down with the same water bottle that we use to spray the cat when she’s being naughty. My son’s nurse was sitting at the dining table doing some notes, within full view of my surgical area. She probably wasn’t quite sure what to make of this middle-aged woman, who was using a baby toothbrush to gently rewet a dead rabbit’s lips so she could smush them in further with a butter knife. Sometimes I wonder what she says when her Kenyan asks her about us. Let me tell you what this mzungu did today…

I’m happy to report that the secondary tucking seemed to do the trick. After a few more days of letting him cure and settle, I stained the plaque, painted a laurel around the edge, and mounted Jeremy sans antlers. Lori created some little bow ties that fit him perfectly. He looks rather dapper, even without horns or hats, and I’m proud of him. He hangs above the credenza in our dining room, welcoming guests and overseeing family dinners.

The irony didn’t occur to me until a friend pointed it out, but I taxidermized a rabbit on Easter Sunday. Jeremy is a resurrected Easter Bunny. Well, kind of. At first glance, taxidermy seems a strange activity to do on Easter, but what is Easter, if not an occasion to reflect on life and death?

Death gets a bad rap, but without it, I would still be a naive, 20-year-old ding-dong. As I look back at my life thus far, I recognize that death has played an important part in making me the woman that I am today. All sorts of things have died- dreams, lavender plants, relationships, five chickens, beliefs about myself and the world around me, expectations, hermit crabs. Sometimes I fought it. Sometimes I welcomed it. But regardless of how I felt about it, death came and cleared out room for something new.

I’m no dummy. I know more death is on its way. I want to get better about recognizing it as an immovable fact of life and embracing it, instead of squeezing my eyes shut, hoping it will pass me over. Perhaps this 40 before 40 project is a chance for me to do a post-mortem examination of all those beliefs and ideas that have died to make way for new things. Maybe it’s time to thaw out their mushy corpses, stare at them in their eyeless faces, and bid adieu to all the things that have given up the ghost on the way to me becoming myself.