He lifts the front right hoof forward, casually displaying one black-footed claw. She is walking.

For a moment, Downing is pleased—with all but the eyes. The beads still do not look right, and over the next few days, Downing tries every kind and size of bead he owns, but nothing is working, and the more time he spends staring at the face of the aardvark, the more restless he feels. Trying to correctly visualize the aardvark’s expression with her long lashes, her coarse whiskers launching ludicrously outward from under the eyelids like two misplaced mustaches, is now keeping him awake nights, and since Downing works alone and is unmarried and without children, no one notices or cares for him, and so it goes until, early one afternoon, he catches himself swooning at his workbench. He nearly faints. He must stop, he must eat something.

And what he eats must be nourishing.

With a happy jingle of sleigh bells, Titus Downing leaves his taxidermy shop and walks outside, underneath the twelve buck heads. It is a hot blue British day, all noise and summer, yet Downing, who wears the same black woolen suit every month of the year, hardly notices, for there are no seasons for an artist. Though he can hear the horses clupping down Victoria Terrace, tossing their glossy heads, ringing their neck bells, though he can see finely dressed couples enter and exit Jephson Gardens, promenading the River Leam for exercise, for fresh air, the taxidermist does not take one single cognizant breath. He feels certain that taking a deep breath of anything will kill him outright, and proceeds quickly past the old Royal Pump Rooms with their purported healing waters, which made Leamington Spa famous a few decades past (but turned out to be, the townsfolk learned, quite polluted), and Titus Downing crosses the graveled paths of the new Pump Room Gardens, skirts darkly down Bedford Street, around the corner to the once-bustling-but-now-nearly-vacant Regent Street, to the butcher’s where he buys himself the lone tail of an ox to make oxtail soup.

The exchange happens in silence.

The butcher does not speak when Downing enters.

Others in the shop, too, when they see Downing’s wan, glowering face enter, quietly watch him collect his small parcel as though it’s the first time they have ever set eyes on the man (for many, it must be said, that may well be), and none of this bothers Titus Downing in the slightest. He has never enjoyed sharing pleasantries over the exchange of goods and services; the taxidermist, over the years, has learned that he has little use for people in general, but finds himself surprised, slightly touched, when he returns home and opens the package in his small kitchen and discovers that the butcher—perhaps noticing how very thin Downing looks, how very pale, even in the sweltering endboil of summer—has gifted him with not just the tail but a large eye from the ox as well.

The eye is glassy, glorious, with a rainbow-colored iris which is positively glowing, and it is then that Downing, in a near-delirium borne out of hunger, exhaustion, sees that what taxidermists have done this past century is all wrong! Darwin and Edmonstone and all of them for years used painted beads for the eyes of any beast not killed on local terrain—eyes rot during transport—but how could anyone properly capture the jiva using beads?