Michael Malone - Weebly

order. He had loved animals, but had preferred them
stuffed. Now, like the rest of the house, his collected
passions belonged to his only surviving child, Ramona.
On the mantel an owl flapped open its sooty wings
beside a crimson bleeding heart, and a scrawny otter
hid among St. Sebastian's brass arrows.
Two bobcats leaped out from the window ledges at
guests already distracted by a life-sized German wood
carving of Christ crucified on the wall.
Unlike her home, Ramona was very eighteenthcentury.
She had left the house furnished just as her
father had left it to her, not out of sentiment, but as a
raffish decorator might stick a Picasso satyr in the
middle of a Dutch Colonial boudoir. So, wryly, Miss
Dingley placed herself in her father's mansion.
"Awful, ain't it?" she asked, for even her grammar
had an eighteenth-century flavor—once an affectation,
now a habit. Miss Dingley was speaking to Father
Jonathan Fields, whose bright, plastic-covered eyes
stared at the bright glass eyes of a raccoon that clung to
a bookshelf.
"Oh, no. They're very well done. Is taxidermy your