Free The Wilding by Benjamin Percy Page A

the head, where he had to cut through their ear cartilage and around the eyes and through their lips to slip off the pelt completely.
    Then came the fat, the flesh, the gristle—scraping it off—and then washing the pelt with soap and water and patting it off with a towel. He keeps several wooden stretchers in the garage and he centered the pelts on them and pulled them taut and waited a day for them to dry and then turned them and waited another day and then wetted their underside with vegetable oil to keep them pliant and brushed their fur with a dog comb so that they appeared fluffy, shiny.
    From the Goodwill he bought a mannequin to use as a frame. He had learned how to sew in the service, but never with leather. The Internet told him everything he did not already know, such as how to keep the holes clean by lightly dampening the stitch groove and polishing the diamond awl blade with a block of beeswax before every punch. With a waxed five-cord linen thread that runs from a thousand-yard spool he used a saddle stitch method, pulling snug so as not to break the thread or rip a stitch.
    He made the leggings first—from four gray-furred coyotes—and then puzzled the rest of the pelts together to match his upper body, binding the variant furs and their colors to make a patchwork coat that hung from him loosely and would not tear if he ran and contorted himself oddly when climbing a tree or leaping across a canal.
    And now he is nearly done, tying off the final stitch for the helmet or mask—he isn’t sure what to call it—made from the beaver he trapped the other day. He is in the living room—seated on the same lumpy couch and watching the same wood-framed Mitsubishi television as he was when his father surprised him so many years ago. Wheel of Fortune is playing. Pat Sajak is making small talk with a contestant, a man from Kentucky who has a wonderful wife and dreams of one day taking a cruise to Alaska. His hands are deformed. They look like fleshy lobster claws. Another contestant spins the wheel for him.
    The sun has set. The curtains are closed. The mannequin stands nearby, draped in the hair suit. Its blue eyes stare into a void and its pink mouth puckers into a dead smile. On television the wheel is spinning, and in the living room Brian is scissoring off a loose thread and knotting its end. The category is Action and the puzzle is three words. Brian sharpens a pair of scissors on a whetstone, then holds his fist inside the furred mask to brace it as he scissors two eye holes and carves open a slit for breathing.
    The wheel is rattling its kaleidoscope of pie-wedge colors, glittery numbers. It nearly comes to a stop on bankruptcy but clicks forward another notch to the silvery promise of a thousand dollars. “Touching you naked,” Brian says to the television. And then, more loudly, “It’s touching you naked, you idiots.”
    The man closes his eyes and lifts his deformed hands as if in benediction. A moment passes before Brian realizes the man is crossing his fingers. “Thumbing your nose,” the man guesses. Lights flash. Bells ring. The audience claps and Pat Sajak smiles and the man does a little dance and throws back his head and opens his mouth to reveal a black cave of laughter that seems to swallow up the screen when Brian punches the remote and everything goes dark.
    Brian stands from the couch and approaches the mannequin. He stares into its blank blue eyes a moment before fitting the mask over its head. He surveys his work as a tailor, tidying a sleeve, brushing his hands across the fur, petting it. A musky smell rises off the suit, somewhere between a groin and a wet dog—a smell that surrounds him, minutes later, when he strips naked and steps into the pants and tightens their belt and then pulls on the jacket and finally the mask. The noise and the heat of his breathing surround him and he experiences that old familiar feeling of power and excitement. An erection throbs to life. It is his