Abby ran her fingers along the wooden benchtop on her way past. She’d have to make time to get out here again soon – maybe some quiet evening, or on the weekend, when the kids were out and Ray was watching the footy. It was on this workbench that, through trial and error and many a trip to Belport Library in search of how-to guides, Abby had become a halfway-confident amateur taxidermist. Arranged neatly on the bench or mounted on the pegboard behind it were a dark-green apron, scalpel blades, surgical gloves, insect pins, fishing line, rubber bands, playing cards (for ‘carding’ ears), borax laundry soap (for curing hides), critter clay, modelling tools, tongue depressors, pliers, super glue, a staple gun and two dozen sets of glass eyes in various sizes.

Underfoot was a humming bar fridge containing a few bottles of water, a six-pack of beer and Abby’s next specimen: a possum that Susi Lenten had found dead beneath the powerlines outside her house. Alongside the fridge was a plastic tub packed with various chemicals including tanning solutions, pickling agents, luminol and bactericide.

So far, all she’d stuffed were mice, rats and birds. They lived on various shelves around the house, sagging and bulging in all the wrong places. But that just seemed to make them almost human-like in their imperfection. As a rule, she only used animals that died of natural causes, so it was not uncommon for people around the island to call her up any time they found a dead creature on the road, in their garden, or on the beach. They’d say things like, ‘I’ve got a magpie up here on my balcony – poor little fella flew right into the screen door; hasn’t been dead long but you might wanna hurry cause the flies won’t be far off,’ and ‘You need to get this bush rat out of my freezer before Shivaun divorces me – she needs the space and I know better than to argue with a woman as pregnant as she is.’

Abby couldn’t say why she enjoyed taxidermy, and didn’t care to question it too much. It was as messy as it was meditative, and she didn’t make any money out of it. The few animals she didn’t keep for herself she gave away as gifts, usually to people who accepted them through gritted teeth and with wide, terrified eyes. But there was something darkly wonderful about the craft that kept pulling her back. Death imitating life, she thought, and liked the way that sounded.

She finally found the Salvos box on a dusty shelf, sandwiched between a sandy old picnic blanket that smelled like wet dog (which was strange, because they didn’t have a dog) and a milk crate full of old car parts. She dumped Ray’s trousers, shirt and boots into the box, turned off the light, and went inside.