DOP #34 - Zominique

Zominique
By Lorna D. Keach

You’ll see her there, with her head in the lap of the Countess de Sardis—sinister, isn’t she? The way her milky eyes stare out at you from the portrait, the flesh peeling back from her skull… A fragment of that very same skull stained the skirts of the Countess as she sat for this painting but, of course, the artists excluded the detail. But the Countess never burned her soiled skirts, oh no. She kept them—treasured them, as much as her mother and her mother before had treasured the tiny, leaking body of their poodle returned from the dead.

In life, the creature was a pest. Emilie de Fromage, the Countess’s great-aunt from Paris, gifted her to the family on St. Claude’s Day, 1648, and the creature soon proved to be a nuisance. Her bark was less a bark and more of a screeching yap. The grounds of the de Sardis estate often rang with the yelps of her discontent; sleepless nights were had by many. Often, she would snap at the fingers of those who moved to comfort her. And death was not one to change her disposition, no—it was only because of the smell did Henri Puissant realize that the poodle had, in fact, perished. (Henri being the Countess’ great uncle on her father’s side.) It was quite the startling revelation, that her ghost was given up, because only hours before had she bitten off the first knuckle of the lady of the house’s left ring finger.

But after such novelty was discovered, Madame Giselle Fromage de Puissant mourned the loss of her fingernail no more. The creature was a constant companion on the Madame’s outings; always seen in theatres and salons perched upon the Madame’s knee, nipping at fingers and dribbling putrid fluids about the place. (The noise was no longer an issue as the creature’s lungs appeared to have deflated. The yips and yowls became more of a wheeze.) Of course, she was quite the popular conversation piece. “Why yes,” the Madame would say, “my poodle is, in fact, dead. Do you not see that glassy, twitching stare? The yellowed bone protruding from the tip of her fetid tail?” The conversation most often lead to conjectures about the creature’s origins—how she could be, in fact, departed, and yet remain so lively—but the Madame feigned ignorance on that topic. Perhaps she had been cursed by a necromancer, or had been bitten by Christ; many clever puns on Easter were made around the poodle, leading to raucous laughter, a display among the women that encroached upon the boundaries of propriety. 

The actual events of the creature’s re-animation were rarely spoken of, as they pointed to a number of Henri’s financial indiscretions. Henri and his wife had only just returned from a failed tobacco plantain in Floride when he discovered the poodle’s demise. The slaves had burned the property to the ground, and it was said that the flames rose so high that night that Henri could see them from the prow of the galleon departing for France.  

In the following years, the poodle held up remarkably well, thanks to the services of a taxidermist—of course, she was certainly never whole and still bore the popular tell-tale markings of the walking dead. She lost an ear while pursuing the Puissant children through the estate grounds one Sunday afternoon. She lost her right hind leg when the Madame’s youngest son beat her with a candelabrum. (She’d woken him from a nap by biting off his ear, after which it was agreed that her teeth should be removed to avoid further disfigurations.) When the Madame’s daughter came of age, she toted the poodle to a number of social events; in once instance, the poodle broke the wrist of an offending chaperon who attempted to grope the young girl’s thigh. (With each passing year, the creature’s strength swelled to startling proportions. By 1725, she was able to pull a small wagon laden with children—as long as they named a leader at the head of the procession, whom the poodle would summarily pursue.) The Madame’s daughter, Henrietta, is seen here, with the famed creature in her lap—you’ll notice the stitches around the poodle’s neck (more of an ascetic addition than anything else) and the wire latching her tail to her patchwork back end.  

And, with every passing year, she grew more grotesque, more iconic. In 1802, she was granted audience with Napoleon’s nephew and regaled the court by biting the heads off of sparrows. (The sparrows never did re-animate, strangely.) Around that time, the British Museum offered to purchase her for display, as she’d had a short stint in the French/Indian war when she’d stowed away in the luggage of Madame Henrietta’s son. (It was Pierre she chased. She never could rid herself of the taste of him after having stolen two of his toes when he was fourteen.) And in 1860, Charles Darwin himself, in a letter to a scientific journal, proclaimed her to be the single most wretched creature to have ever walked the earth. A copy of the journal is preserved, here, under glass.

But, all of these fames were trifles—the ladies all knew the true value of their treasure was timelessness. Her universality. No one could look at the creature and not feel shock or disgust or awe. With one glimpse of the creature’s rotting shell, the bile that leaked from her toothless jaws, the venomous stare of a beast bent on devouring, well…life suddenly seemed so fresh and pretty in contrast. Fresh and pretty! If you’ve lived anything of life, then you’ll understand how novel that is. And the women of the Countess de Sardis’ lineage understood it full well, because what were they without their petty monstrosities, eh?  

Indeed, what are we?  

Lorna D. Keach is an avid smoker and word addict who lives in Manhattan, KS. Her hobbies include internetting, junking, laughing at inappropriate things, drinking, and keeping her day job. Read more at Sex Scenes. With Monsters.