Inaccurate Necromancy, A Tapestry

[Exhibit 1: Scientific betrayal, witnessed in an illegally inhabited shipping container.]

My stolen satellite reception sputters, but not enough to hide the truth. I would know her face behind the fluttering colors of an ineptly stolen signal; I would know it dirt streaked in the dark over any hundred pilfered graves.

“I started with a firm foundation,” she explains, her voice bright and jarring. Approachable. “It took several years sifting through Oxford Museum's deep storage, but I was eventually able to rediscover the foot of the last stuffed Dodo.”

The camera, as they say, loves her. But I have made a study of our long acquaintance. A lie brackets her false-friendly mouth. Tension pulls at the corner of her masquerade eyes. The newly resurrected dodo—if one can call a bastardization of proper necromancy such a thing—bobbles around the coastal woodland simulation. It bumps twice into Elizabeth’s pant leg. Her nostrils betray her, flaring with each bumbling brush.