Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) by P.G. Lengsfelder Read Free Book Online Page A

one, and Hydrochloric —muriatic is what he called it— which evaporated easily if I wasn’t careful. Those fumes were lethal and the drops would eat away the skin.
    “Your skin,” he said, “if you aren’t mindful.”
    He appreciated my fastidiousness and rarely complained regarding my work or my presence, though he seldom complimented me or looked at me when he spoke, usually keeping an eye on an otter or a black bear as he skinned or sewed or stuffed, as much as he hated that word. “Talk to your subject and it will help guide your hands,” he said without looking up.
    And it did take me a while, when he broke the silence, to understand that most of the time he wasn’t talking to me.
    I peeked from the workshop through the space between the hinges and the door, and I saw the delight of his customers as they picked up their trophies, their beautiful things.
    As he held on to the skinning, and with diminished coordination he could do less and less of it —he even tore a few skins, ruining them— he began to lose business, and his customers died off.
    But I was able to learn a lot about beauty in those nine years, especially in conjunction with Internet research. For instance, in 1883, a guy named Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, was the first to experiment with categorizing faces. A photographer, he wondered if certain groups of people —vegetarians and criminals— had certain facial characteristics typical to each. A strange choice of categories, but anyway . . . He determined that there was no such match, but he also determined that the composite vegetarian and criminal faces were found more attractive than their component counterparts.
    This led to more recent research that I found useful: Exactly 100 years later Grammer, K., & Thornhill, R. ran experiments on “Human facial attractiveness and sexual selection: the role of symmetry and averageness” in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Their research suggested that a symmetrical face is the most attractive to the most people, and that the features needed to be average, a consensus derived by the greater population, just as Darwin’s cousin had suggested with his photographic experiments. In other words, no bloated lips, no mile-wide nose, and certainly no large, brown puddles splitting the face.
    ***
    Experiment & Observation: Crafting a symmetrically-faced animal .
    A dead skunk came in for taxidermy. “No skunks or mother-in-laws,” said Carver, but I convinced him I should give it a try. They’re beautiful animals. It took special deodorizer and extra degreasing but I managed. I even did the skinning. I gave it a perfectly symmetrical face. It looked diabolical and mean.
    “No, no,” said Carver. Despite his failing health I thought he was ready to throw me out physically. “It’s too static. Beauty is being alive. Make it alive!” He sounded like Dr. Frankenstein, but I understood. What I learned: It needed a small touch of fluctuating asymmetry, but not too much.
    ***
    I put away money those years, working full-time till I was twenty-seven, even paying Momma when she raised the rent and used some of it for Carly, because Carly did get the hockey scholarship and she did need nicer clothes for college, especially as she was one of the stars of the team.
    “It’s part of the mystique,” Momma said, something she must have read in one of her magazines.
    Lyle still lived at home. Well, in and out without warning, always carrying his prized Martin D-35 guitar and singing for whatever he could get in the Bemidji bars, especially the most notorious —the once grand Markham Hotel— where he scored his drugs until it closed. He started hanging in the Hotel Hell area in Nymore, by the tracks.
    Momma couldn’t see any of it happening. “His voice will be his savior.” But in the latter years she didn’t say it with much conviction.
    In my little free time I kept swimming and getting stronger. I checked books and the Internet for new