not a pig stye anymore

TABLE & CODE © SKELLE 2021
"Speech!"
Undeniably, taxidermy was a fairly messy business. To create taxidermy, you had to kill the creature. Then, you had to skin it, remove the insides, careful not to ruin the pelt. It went on and on, from curing to drying to mounting the pelt on a wooden base- whittled to the vague form of the creature desired. Pinned and trimmed, glued with paste from deer hooves, a new project was born. Macabre took to this craft and honed it to perfection - hunting the animals, then consuming their insides and using their pelts. It was efficient in his opinion. Fascinating. An art form tailored to his sadistic desires. One day, though, squirrels, rabbits, snakes and the occasional deer would no longer satiate his artistic tastes. But that would come later. For now, the yearling was content with his craft. Unfortunately, said craft was messy. Very much so - though he did his best to clean the offal, the guts, the blood the smell still hung over the arch of his den with a thickly permeating metallic stench. It was getting harder and harder to ignore, and though Macabre didn't care about the smell, others did. Ghoul already commented on how it reeked - so what? - but begrudgingly, the boy decided to make it more convenient for everybody to give his den and work stations a good cleaning.

The spotted male had already placed his clean pelts in one pile, the carcasses in another. His whittled figures were cast aside, tools piled into a tanned hide bag. He had already begun digging out the dead leaves accumulated from fall and winter, nose wrinkling as he realized it did, in fact, kinda smell. Perhaps someone would come along to assist him in his spring cleaning.