Jen's Confession at the Natural History Museum

The meeting at the university's museum of natural history was meant to be a pleasant outing, a chance for Jen and her two daughters to chaperone Nightbitch's son through a place Nightbitch had loved as a graduate student. The museum was a wonderful little place, quiet as a tomb on weekdays, and it held the oldest collection of taxidermy west of the Mississippi, so old that visitors could see straw filling through a hole in the rhinoceros and a bit of cloth where fur should have been on a cheetah. Jen had never been and expressed her great wonder that such a place existed in their little town, reiterating how creative Nightbitch was. "I wish I were artsy," she said wistfully as her two girls chaperoned Nightbitch's boy around the room, each one taking a hand and pulling him this way and that, mothering him in a way that made Nightbitch want to tell them to stop, to inform them that it wasn't their job to take care of him, that they should be enjoying the displays and not worrying about caring for this little boy, that their aspirations should be toward, say, taxidermy rather than caregiving. Instead, she laughed dryly at Jen's comment.