On that particular day, we had no desire to purchase garden spades and yard rakes.

We stood in the street, which looked like every other rue in Paris: with cigarette covered cobblestones, busy boulevards bordered in cafes (all with the same plastic wicker chairs in varying colors: tan, red, blue), aging buildings with tilted floorboards which oversaw the bustle of avenues and this one, lonely garden store. Notarized by a Victorian-era golden font, we walked through the well-tended threshold and entered.

 
“Bonjour madame,” an aging French gardener welcomed us into his realm. “Taxidermy shop upstairs,” he pointed skyward with a speckled hand.

We walked up the warped steps, still grand and romantic dressed in their gown of dust and age.

Time morphed into figures of immortal animals: a lion caught instantly yawning, a cheetah looking onwards in curiosity, peacocks with their feathers eternally splayed, the sweeping form of a science-experiment Pegasus. A baby giraffe stood looking out the window, longingly gazing over the modernized streets of Pairee, searching for some stretch of unclaimed savannah.

A menagerie of dead things.

Their forever-captured death was beautiful. At any moment it seemed their legs would flex, their hearts pulse, their breath quicken: a single, swift movement and I would be the flaunted death. In the death it seemed their life was so much more apparent: draped from the healthy forms of predator and prey. These specimens of species slowly fleeting from the planetary eye were mirrors of an age gone past. A century of accepted poaching, still framed with artistry and awe.

The next room was filled with wings.

Glass cases of iridescent butterflies, the prophetic forms of praying mantises, beetles and spiders with hardening exoskeletons. Years of nimble fingers and gentle nets, traveling to Morocco and Indonesia, all for the perfectly poised forms of moths and all manner of foreign insects.

In the evolutionary array of efflorescence, one butterfly, mettled with gray and undertones of blue, caught my raven-centric eye. The humanness of wanting to claim everything in the name of nothing overcame me and all I wanted was to own its nonchalant form. For twenty euros I bought the ancient.

Next to the register sat a bowl of human eyes. Unasked questions built up in the back of my mind, but it was time to bid au reviour. Neatly packaged box in hand, we descended the steps, said goodbye to the gardener and walked back onto the street. The docile face of the childish giraffe peeking just over the windowsill, watching as we disappeared into the bustle of Paris.