The Fawn

On Friday, Lisa shifted in her ergonomic chair and flipped to page forty-four out of sixtyseven in the list of the Smith’s Professional Taxidermy office expenses. She entered one after another into the computer database. It was getting to be the time of day when her eyes began to cross from staring at the monitor for too long. She sighed and clicked in the endless numbers: $67.32 for a lunch meeting in town. $190.14 for pens with “Hunting? Smith’s does the job right!” printed in navy ink against white plastic. $29.99 for rubberbands. The office was quiet. Everyone left twenty minutes ago to go to happy hour at Otto’s. Lisa had stayed behind tonight, telling them she needed to finish entering the office expenses. Her office assistant desk, tucked between the reception area and the taxidermy studio, was devoid of animals. Instead, this part of the office had rows of gray desks with backboards full of finger paintings and pictures of children that smiled at their parents while they typed. Lisa’s desk had two potted plants that wilted against each other. The other office workers considered the lack of animals a break from the constant staring fish, deer, and raccoons that stood watch, their skins in various states of attachment, throughout the rest of the office. But she would have preferred the animals. She didn’t mind them as much as the rest of the coworkers did, which, her boss joked, is why she’s stuck around for so long. The artists, as they were called, even let Lisa go back into the studios and watch quietly as she gently scraped fat and flesh from the tender skin. The movements were methodical, like watching a sculptor. When she tired of expense reports, Lisa, rarely breathing a word, watched them gently coax the dead back to life. Working as the office assistant at Smith’s was the first job she got when she got to Spoon Lake, and she had been typing steadily behind that desk ever since. Not that she minded. It was quiet, and she liked that these days. The clock read 4:47 PM. She supposed that was close enough to lock up.