the blt festival

by Robert John Miller

“Nope, I’m afraid it’s dead,” my mother laughed. “You lose again. That bird is stone-cold dead.” She poked it right in the eye to prove it to me.

Of course I knew the bird was dead, even at 9 years old, but it was more fun to pretend. I was right at the age of getting too old for such little kid games, collecting tickets just for knowing which creatures were still breathing. By then, I preferred just eating sandwiches and walking the grounds, admiring all the mounted specimens, most of which were owls. The sandwiches were the best part of the BLT Festival, which everyone knew stood for Beasts, Living and Taxidermized. All of the sandwiches were served on pork rind plates, which you could eat and also use as napkins. It was a really environmentally conscious festival.

Dad had only just then got started in the fake hand-pie industry, so he was away on business and didn’t join us that year. Me and Mom joked how we were eating for three, on account of Dad missing, and we split an extra sandwich and an extra pork rind plate.

Sometimes the purveyors would guard their tickets closely and play tricks, dosing their animals with Benadryl, to make the littler kids guess wrong. But sometimes too the animals would play tricks, and one year a wild coyote had only pretended to be taxidermized and he ate Bill, founder of Wild Bill’s Wild Taxidermized Coyotes, Ltd.

In memoriam, Bill’s son, Bill Jr., taxidermized his own father (presumably salvaged from inside the coyote), and the next year Bill Jr. returned to the BLT Festival as the purveyor of Wild Bill Jr.’s Wild Taxidermized Coyotes and Memorials, Ltd.

Despite Bill Jr.’s generous offer, no one in the entire Tri-County Region ever took him up on buying one taxidermized coyote and getting half off a tribute to the family member of your own choosing. If we were going to taxidermize a family member, we thought, we had better pay full price.

Photo of Robert John Miller

BIO: Robert John Miller's work has appeared in places like Bending Genres, HAD, Maudlin House, Scaffold and elsewhere, available at robertjohnmiller.com.