The Stifling

Some people deem taxidermy distasteful. Tarquin was not one of them. The vast room was adorned with dead pets; trophies of his amorous heart. Like all that Tarquin possessed, the menagerie exuded a stifling quality. I sat on the cold stone floor whilst I waited, the chairs having decayed some years before, aware of twenty pairs of eyes upon me-dead, of course, yet unnervingly blinking.

It was only the Persian cat that I had ever known. Even in death, Bellatrix was as beautiful as the day. Seven years on, her seamlessly stitched fur remained immaculate. The glass eyes were as opulent as the originals, I observed. She lay between the spaniel and the large white rabbit, upon the shelf that Tarquin had purchased the previous weekend; the three strangely amicable in death.

Directly above Bellatrix was the insect collection; still unlabelled. I stared at the single butterfly on the wall, dull and lifeless in its’ clear case. I imagined it flying free. Soaring through the sky, the sun would have shone on those pale wings so that they glittered golden. Yet there it lay, cruelly shrivelled. Cold, still and as frail as tissue. Those buttercup wings would tear so easily. How long do butterflies live? A week? A year? I have no idea, but at that moment I knew that I despised Tarquin for killing this tiny, ethereal creature.

I envisioned the butterfly’s capture and watched it like a movie, feeling a certain empathy for the dead insect as I did so; for although I was still breathing, metaphorically I no longer flew. In the glass jar of my mind there were holes but little air. My wings were broken with panic stricken flapping, meaning that however hard I beat them, I could never fly away. This leant itself to a certain depression. Watching the motionless animal, I came to long for my own death, to be pinned to the wall in a twin crucifixion.

I must confess that even if I had been able to fly from Tarquin, I would not have done so. Guilt bound me to him. Guilt! Guilt because this animalistic sense of entrapment was so unfounded, and because by alleged captor had done nothing wrong. Like a steel trap with teeth, this feeling ate away at me, forging its own shadowy cage. But I was not a butterfly. It was not in a in glass that I was trapped, but in Tarquin’s heart. It was his love that stifled me. Love flowed through the arteries that tangled themselves around my neck in a thick, tight noose. And I knew in my own heart that I should I cut this rope, Tarquin would bleed to death.