“Tag the tail,” Aspen snickered. “Now that’s a new way of describing it.”
Laughter and the occasional clicking of one of them snapping a picture through the window accompanied us down a highway we’d be on all day. The vibes made the miles melt, and when I spied an opportunity to make an impromptu pit stop, I took it, because the sign, Museum of the Odd and Mildly Disturbing, was just the place for a break and a bit of sightseeing.
“Have you been on the creepy attractions website again?” Aspen asked as he reached for his door handle.
“You know it,” I replied as I got out and opened the back door.
Yes, my pets could unbuckle themselves. But why should they when they were with me? Besides, unbuckling them gave me the opportunity to kiss them as I undid their seatbelts and adjust the wide gray and purple bracelets around their wrists, each with my name and phone number embossed in the leather.
I knew they’d been hoping for collars when I’d presented the leather bands to them, but after the conversation we’d had about neither liking things tight around their necks, I’d held off on choosing or crafting any type of collar for them, knowing that the event we would be attending in Portland would have a vendor room filled with opportunities to find ones they’d approve of. I hadn’t left my plan a secret either, because I hadn’t wanted them to get spun out wondering if the choice of bracelets meant that I was having second thoughts about them being my pets. They’dbeen let down and disappointed too much in their short lives for me to leave them with any misconceptions.
“These are just temporary,” I explained. “The venue tends to get extremely crowded and overwhelming. I just want you to have something that will help others get you back to me if we get separated, and especially if you get separated from one another. There are vendors there that will have an assortment of collars beyond the buckle-on type. We’ll find you the perfect ones there, and I will lock them in place so there is never any question about who you belong to.”
I’d watched the caution in their eyes melt away and found myself engulfed in tight hugs that left me breathless, not that anything in the world could have ever led me to ask them to loosen their holds.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Raleigh said, breath warm against the side of my neck as he clung. “My kitty is shy, and Murry’s bunny gets nervous in crowds. We’d both be too terrified to speak if we got separated from you and each other; that would be way too much. At least together we could calm each other down enough to find the registration desk or someone wearing a badge or t-shirt that said staff. Apart we’d just frantically start searching for one another and get lost more.”
“That’s happened before, hasn’t it?” I asked as I hugged them tighter.
“Uh-huh.” Murry muttered against my chest. “We got separated from Phoenix, then we got separated from each other, then I ran into a candy cart and knocked it over while I was trying to get to Raleigh. He was hollering my name from the escalator.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Raleigh said. “I didn’t think it would get us all kicked out of the mall.”
“In all fairness, it was a huge mall, and people were being extremely rude and shovey that day,” Murry complained. “Raleigh stopped to look at a tarot cards in the bookstore window, and someone bumped into me and swept me along with the crowd. By the time I was able to duck into a shop, I still couldn’t go back in the direction I’d come from because there were so many people chatting and on their phones that they completely ignored me when I said,Excuse me, and tried to step out of the shop. I will never go anywhere on Black Friday again. That was crazy. No one seemed to care about anyone; they were just rushing around clutching bags and ramming into everyone”
“Yeah, Black Friday is not a day to venture anywhere but the couch,” I said, hating that they’d gotten caught up in the crush of holiday madness like that.
Unlike the stories during the after-Thanksgiving frenzy, the Museum of the Odd and Mildly Disturbing only had a handful of other visitors inside.
“Whoa,” Raleigh breathed as we stepped inside and paused to let our eyes adjust to the low light and shadows that filled the place.
They certainly added to the creepy vibe, as did some of the murky blue and purple lightning behind some of the displays.
“Is that…oh, ewe, ewe, ewe, who does that!” Murry declared, backing into me.
“Who does what?” I asked.
“Models their hair into the shape of a tarantula!”
He pointed, and I followed his finger to a display. Behind the glass was a life-sized tarantula sculpture, statue, I wasn’t sure how, exactly, to refer to it after spying the sign behind it saying it had been crafted entirely out of human hair. I felt Murry shudder before he sidestepped and turned away from the creepy-ass display. The place was certainly living up to the description I’d read online. Judging from my pet’s scrunched-up nose, he wasn’t going to forget that tarantula anytime soon, either. I just hoped there was nothing in here that would leave one of them with nightmares. Or me, for that matter, holy shit. Recoiling, I could only stand there and stare in utter disbelief at the next display in the row.
“Why would someone sew a bunch of different animal parts together like that?” Raleigh asked.
He leaned against my arm as we peered past the glass to see the mounted remains behind the glass. The placard read"Figi Mermaid,"and it was nothing short of grotesque.
“To fool a mostly uneducated public paying for the privilege to see what they thought was a real mermaid,” the caretaker explained. “Folks back then still believed that myths were real and that all manner of creatures roamed the earth and oceans. Carnival showmen would buy pieces like this and display them as truth, knowing that they were really just a fish and a monkey sewn together.”
Aspen snickered as he stepped up to get a closer look. “I guess it’s all in the marketing.”
“Dude, marketing can only go so far,” Raleigh declared. “Mermaids are supposed to be beautiful. That thing is hideous.”
“Not all mermaid myths depicted them as beautiful with long flowing hair and tails that sparkled like jewels as they leapt from the water,” the caretaker said. “Some of the old tales, like those of the Russian rusalka, speak of them as being vengeful, vicious, and even terrifyingly hideous. The truth is probably somewhere in between, depending on what creature those sailors saw sunning themselves on a rock. If it was a seal, then the sleekness likely led them to describe it as something beautiful, while a walrus with large tusks and its mouth gaping would lead them to describe it as a terrifying being. We’ve got a whole shelf of books at the front that are filled with myths and the likely truths behind them, all 50% off right now, since we need to make some room to add new ones.”
“Thanks, I’ll check them out before we go,” Raleigh said.
“See,” Aspen said as he nudged my arm. “I told you it was all about the marketing.”
All I could do was snicker and shake my head as Raleigh moved on to join Murry at the next display. There was no denying the smoothness of the way that caretaker had woven that story with his sales pitch without missing a beat, or the way his tale had held Raleigh’s attention. At the end of our tour, he spent fifteen minutes in front of that bookcase shelf, carefully selecting books on mermaid mythology from around the world, as well as ones on ghost ships, sea monsters, and water sprites and spirits. Murry added a tarot kit to Raleigh’s stack, the whole set based on mythological creatures, before snagging a book filled with obscure laws.
