By 
Allis Markham is five foot two but acts like a giant. As the 32-year-old owner and operator of Prey Taxidermy in Los Angeles, she spends most of her day reanimating road kill and other ethically sourced animal corpses.
Her heart-shaped face and jet-black hair make her a dead ringer for Betty Paige.
"Are those eyelashes real?" I ask as we shake hands.
"Fuck no." She grins, straddling elk antlers. She's busy wrestling the pair onto a red velvet mound for a commissioned piece. The rack is nearly as tall as she is, but Allis isn't sweating.
"You ready for your lesson?" she asks, rummaging around in the freezer, which currently contains her friend's dog, among other carcasses.
"Voila." She puts my frozen duckling on an attractive vintage tray decorated in brown and yellow flowers.
The dead bird feels like a furry popsicle and smells like a hamster cage.
I warn her that I'm very clumsy and she reassures me, saying, "Ducklings are very forgiving." Then she hands me something called The Brain Scooper.
"Want a mimosa?" she asks.
The rest of the day will feel like a slumber party at a morgue, and I will love it.
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As a child, Allis cut class in Daytona, Florida to scour the brush behind her school for bones and dehydrated animal carcasses for her collection. She tells me about growing up around guns, and her family's proclivity, upon reuniting in Indiana (where Allis was born, and where most of her family still lives) to pull out wine jugs and jump on the piano or the upright base—a kind of musical merry-making that her husband, the writer David Iserson (who's from New Jersey) refers to as "ho-downs." She recalls with fondness the raccoons frozen in the Indiana snow drifts by her grandparents' house, and how her family, crosshatched as it was with Native American ancestry and ethos, ate and made art out of viable carcasses, using every part.
I tell her a little bit about living in Southern Illinois and eating road kill.
"What kind?" she wants to know.
"Raccoon."
She makes a face and I concur with a face of my own.
"Oily," she says.
I ask about her husband's recent novel,Firecracker, one of my favorite books from 2014, and how it felt to be the muse for his main character.
"I feel really good about it!" she says, wiping blood off her scalpel.
"Were you pretty involved in editing?"
"Oh god yeah." She beams, clearly proud of David and the book. "I read every version of it and more. At one point we took the dog up to Lake Arrowhead. I got a tiny cabin where the only thing we could do was eat sleep and edit his book. We would sit by the fire and go through sections of it."
"Is there any overlap between editing and taxidermy?"
She points at my duckling. "Don't hold it by the leg like that, it'll fall apart—but yeah, editing and taxidermy. I think they're both about knowing when to walk away. With taxidermy things start drying out. You can only add so much clay before it doesn't look natural anymore. I think it's the same with writing. It can become better with what you don't write."
She pulls off her size extra small latex gloves. I cut through what is scientifically referred to as something other than "duckling poop sac," although that's what it is. Mustardy sludge resembling Grey Poupon oozes over my fingers.
Allis plucks the duckling from my hands to tweak some wrong move I made. I watch her cut into the duckling's neck with her scalpel, slowly pulling the skin inside out over its head.
She taps the skull. "You want to cut a triangle in the back here. Then start scooping out the brains."
Classes comprise about 85% of Prey's business, and Allis teaches both children and adults. Allis says she prefers the kids because they don't waste time talking about how gross taxidermy is. Thinking something's gross is a learned behavior, and kids are simply curious.
"You're fast, dude," she adds, smiling. "Seriously most people take forever with this shit."
For a second I consider the idea that I am truly an amazing taxidermist. I imagine Allis and I side by side in front of some fabulously backdropped display at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum: I have eyelash extensions just like hers, and we are putting the finishing touches on a gigantic bear that we have mounted as a team while listening to Tina Turner.
Then I hold up my duckling hide to the light and find it riddled with gigantic holes from my many mistakes. It looks like a feathered slice of mutant swiss cheese.
Allis tells me not to worry. She flaps her little hand like everything is super cool and says the bald spot on my duckling's butt will "cover itself up."
"When we get to the blow drying phase you're going to flip at how fluffy it gets," she reassures me. "They get so poofy." She goes to take care of something at the fleshing wheel, a large machine that scrubs muscle and fat from hide. Soon the front of her shirt is covered with fresh baby tiger shavings.
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Allis still works for the Natural History Museum, but hopes to continue to grow her business in the direction of commissioned pieces and rentals. (Currently, many of her clients include production studios. Live animal actors command high hourly rates, require handlers, and necessitate a slew of humane logistics that can make them quite litigious, whereas mounted animals are rented by the day, and, being dead, have no rights.) And although Allis is personally and professionally committed to keeping her business ethical (that is, she will only deal with animals that were found, eaten, stillborn, or else died of some other natural causes) she has nevertheless memorized "all the PETA stats" on the off-chance some idiot tries to take her to task.
"PETA was responsible for over 30,000 animal deaths as of 2014," she informs me, shooting me a piercing look that says she has taken to task many vegetarians. "I could keep going," she warns.
"I eat meat," I assure her, glancing at the scalpel in her hand, "and I believe you."
So far, Allis hasn't gotten much flack from haters, affording her the time to do what she does (second) best (after tongue lashing): make dead animals look so lifelike that when flipping between stylized photos of raccoons, baby tigers, peacocks, and Allis's three living pets onPrey's Instagram page, I regularly find myself worrying that Allis has taxidermied her dogs.
When I tell her that, she cackles—"People say so all the time!"
"What's on the docket for you, after these ducklings?" I ask, dusting the feathers on mine with chinchilla powder.
"Big bats. I'm talking thirty-inch wing span. One of my students is a zookeeper at the Playboy mansion and I'm trading with her. She gave me a dead squirrel monkey, and I'm doing a couple of really big Victoria crowned pigeons for her—they're pigeons the size of turkeys—and a couple of toucans."
In general Allis is constantly seeking out and striking up friendships with animal handlers from around the world so that she has connections in place when said animals begin to die.
But right now, despite the beastly to do list in her freezer, Allis is primarily focused on honing her skills for the fast-approaching World Taxidermy Championships. "It's sort of a good old boys club," she says. "All men besides me, and they like to go big, so I'm doing the opposite. It's harder to work in miniature anyway."
So while men who resemble Theodore Roosevelt and Ron from Parks and Recreation drag in big game, mounted after some safari, Allis will be unveiling her biggest coup yet: a curated array of hummingbird babies.
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Despite my apparent prowess we're running overtime. The sun has set and Allis is late for her dinner date with David. So while I poof my duckling with the blow dryer, she sits near the scalpel bin with a hand mirror, giving herself the perfect cat's eye.
"Your eyelashes are incredible," I say. "I think I might get extensions, too."
"I'll give you the name of this lady, she's fucking awesome," she says, turning back to the duckling. Apparently a few more things could be perfect. But Allis Markham is a fine specimen.
