7/3/2023 0 Comments A stitch in time lively novelShe kept her taxidermy private, stowed away in her mother’s cedar hope chest. “Like cooking in the Dark Ages,” she grumbled.ĭonut slipped the glass eye into the left socket. Since her aunt had arrived three weeks ago, she’d been arguing with the old stove-loading the firebox with too much wood, burning the bread and biscuits. It was making them almost as good as new that gave her the patience to undertake the tiny stitches with linen thread and curved needle.ĭonut could hear Aunt Agnes downstairs clanking the door to the woodstove, filling the teakettle. Sam had taught her how to prepare the skins and stitch them up all perfect, stuffed with cotton batting, dusted with arsenic powder to kill the lice and other vermin. It was the precise steps needed to put them back together. It wasn’t so much the mice and birds themselves that fascinated Donut. That little deer mouse would forever gaze into the pitch-black of its own empty skull. Once before she had so concentrated on the socket and the wood glue drying that she had popped the eyeball in backward. She held a number sixteen glass eye with a clamp, lining up the iris so it looked forward and to the right. In her nightclothes in the early morning light, Donut perched on the chair at the small desk in her room.
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