The place made me sad. My hangover made me sad. How “Jack” had ditched me colored my mood, too. I kept telling myself I shouldn’t care because I’d never intended to sleep with him. Yet sad manifested as reckless, I guess. I could cover my tracks leading to the shop all I wanted. But I didn’t have a set plan for what to say or do once there.

I lingered in the front area, staring at window displays so covered in dust, you could tell they hadn’t been changed out in years. I felt clammy. My hands sweated. Velvet-upholstered chairs. Porcelain dolls slumped over small tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It struck me so palpably that this could’ve been a scene out of the living room at the farm in the last years I was there that I felt sick. I had to look away. As if my mother had lived in the window display since her death.

Slowly, I made my way through the junk to the corner devoted to taxidermy. A desiccated bobcat. A fox with a strange gleam to the eyes and a sparkly lacquer to the fur that I realized after a moment meant someone had petted its back so much the fur had changed texture. Deer antlers. Spent shotgun shells. I guessed the best stuff was behind the back counter.

Books on taxidermy and related subjects, too. I picked one up as cover, pretended to read it. Then actually began to read it. Oddly Enough: From Animal Land to Furtown, from the 1930s. Even a glance told me it was perverse, wrong, possibly evil. Something an anthropologist studying cultural bias might study.

“We, as the fur bearers of the world, in order to be enthusiastically welcomed to your fur industry, must live a determined double life. First, we exist as ‘an animal’ following the vigorous paths planned by nature. When we depart from this existence as ambassadors of the wild, we will then live our second glorious and commercial being … a life as a fur.”

Did the hummingbird on a pedestal exist separate from this philosophy? Silvina would say it didn’t. That “fur” was a separate religion from “taxidermy.” Yet, somehow, that paragraph made what had been done to the hummingbird more grotesque.

“Transpose what is done to an animal onto a human,” Silvina said in the video. “If it is disgusting, wrong, unethical, immoral, then you know what the truth is.”

I took the book to the back, to the guarded high counter. The man behind the counter had craggy white hair and a ruddy, deeply lined face, wore a plaid lumberjack shirt and jeans, with a vest over the shirt, in an unironic way. He was almost my height, and, if I’d had to guess, mid-sixties, and had spent most of his life outdoors. He had a sleepy left eye.

“You’re Carlton Fusk,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s me. The one and only. That all?” he asked in the gruff voice I expected. Smoker, or ex-smoker.