The Taxidermist of Hernals

The Taxidermist of Hernals

The workshop sat at the back of a damp courtyard in Hernals, wedged between a defunct Bosnian bakery and a wall that smelled permanently of wet plaster and cheap paprika. Lorenz Reiter, forty-two, unmarried, and entirely comfortable with the silence of inanimate things, spent his days constructing dignified apologies for blunt force trauma.

He was a freelance taxidermist. More specifically, he was the unofficial curator of the Wiener Gürtel.

The Gürtel is not a kind road. It is a six-lane asphalt artery that circles the inner districts of Vienna, roaring with commuter traffic, sirens, and the heavy, rhythmic thud of the U6 train on the elevated tracks above. Wildlife that attempts to cross the Gürtel does not survive. Foxes wandering down from the Vienna Woods, stone martens intoxicated by the smell of warm car engines, the occasional misguided badger—they all eventually meet the tires of a delivery van or a speeding Porsche Cayenne.

Lorenz would ride his electric cargo bike out at four in the morning, navigating the yellow-lit, empty intersections to beat the orange sweeping trucks of the MA48. He collected the broken, flattened things before the city could throw them away.

In his Hernals workshop, beneath the humming fluorescent tubes, he rebuilt them. He used wire, epoxy, and a deep understanding of anatomy to reconstruct crushed skulls and shattered ribcages. He washed the motor oil from their fur with gentle, chemical precision. He sold the finished pieces to hipsters in Neubau who considered taxidermy an ironic interior design choice, and to wealthy widows in Döbling who simply wanted a quiet, obedient presence in their massive, echoing apartments.

There is a specific kind of vanity in paying three hundred euros to pretend a badger wasn’t turned inside out by an SUV near the Westbahnhof, but Lorenz never judged his clients. He simply provided the illusion of a peaceful departure.

Until the second week of November, when the illusions became redundant.

It began with a red squirrel near the Alser Straße U-Bahn station. Lorenz spotted it lying on the concrete median strip, illuminated by the blue flashes of an approaching train. Usually, a squirrel on the Gürtel is a biological smudge. This one, however, was pristine.

Lorenz picked it up by the tail. It was heavy, stiff with rigor mortis, but entirely unbroken. No blood in the nostrils. No crushed hollow bones. It had died curled in a perfect crescent, its paws tucked under its chin as if it had fallen asleep in a warm nest, only to be carefully transported and placed exactly on the dividing line of the left-turning lane.

When Lorenz opened it on his stainless-steel table two hours later, he found no internal trauma. The organs were healthy, plump, and undisturbed. The heart had simply stopped.

Three days later, he found a grey heron at Thaliastraße.

A heron on the Gürtel is an absurdity. Pigeons, yes. Crows, certainly. But a heron belongs near the Danube or the marshlands of the Lobau. Yet there it was, laid out flat over a rusted storm drain. Its wings were perfectly folded, the long slate-colored feathers smoothed down. Its neck was draped in a graceful, deliberate S-curve over the iron grate, like discarded silk.

Again, Lorenz brought it back. Again, he skinned it. Again, he found absolutely nothing wrong with it. It had died a serene, painless death, and someone had arranged it on one of the dirtiest, loudest streets in Europe.

He should have been unsettled. A rational man would wonder who was murdering animals softly in the dark and staging them in heavy traffic zones just before dawn. But Lorenz was primarily annoyed by the lack of professional challenge, and then, slowly, he began to feel flattered.

The city was no longer just killing things for him. Someone, or something, was curating his material.

Lorenz began to treat his four-o’clock scavenging runs with a new, quiet solemnity. He washed his cargo bike. He stopped wearing his paint-stained fleece jacket and switched to a heavy, charcoal-grey wool coat. Before leaving his apartment, he would splash a little Vetiver cologne onto his neck. It was a professional courtesy. He was meeting a colleague, after all.

He acted entirely against his own logic: one Tuesday, he left a clean, empty cedar-wood cigar box on the traffic island near Michelbeuern-AKH, tucked behind a concrete pillar. It was an unspoken request for something small, a way of establishing a working dialogue with the unseen supplier. He let out a short, breathy laugh at the thought of a ghost wearing the orange overalls of the MA48, pausing its spectral sweeping to admire the scent of his expensive cologne. It made perfect sense to him.

Two days later, the cedar box was still there. Inside it was a kingfisher. Its iridescent blue and orange feathers were dry and brilliant. It smelled faintly of ozone and old dust. Not a single feather was bent.

By the end of the month, Lorenz had stopped using wire and epoxy altogether. He felt entirely obsolete, yet profoundly chosen. His workshop in Hernals filled with peaceful deaths. A pine marten with its paws crossed over its chest like a miniature, furry Habsburg emperor waiting for the crypt. A swan, found leaning gently against a traffic light pole at Josefstädter Straße, its neck arched in a pose of pure, tragic melancholy.

The entity that was leaving them was an artist, and Lorenz was merely the preservationist.

On a Thursday morning in early December, a thick, freezing fog rolled down from the Wilhelminenberg, trapping the smell of roasted chestnuts and diesel exhaust in the streets. The Gürtel was a slick, black mirror reflecting the amber streetlights.

Lorenz rode slowly, the cold biting at his cheeks. He approached the vast, chaotic intersection of the Lerchenfelder Gürtel. The traffic lights cycled uselessly from red to green, commanding an empty street.

There, sitting perfectly upright on the pedestrian refuge island, was a red fox.

Lorenz braked, his tires hissing against the wet asphalt. He put the kickstand down. The fog was so dense it muffled the sound of his own boots on the road.

The fox was magnificent. A deep, russet winter coat, a thick tail wrapped neatly around its front paws. It was sitting at attention, staring directly toward the oncoming lanes of traffic. It looked entirely alive, save for the stillness.

Lorenz knelt beside it. He reached out with a gloved hand and touched the thick fur at the nape of its neck. It was frozen solid. The rigor mortis was absolute. The posture had been deliberately shaped before the body cooled.

“Beautiful,” Lorenz whispered, a genuine ache in his chest. He leaned forward to examine the face. The symmetry was flawless. The mouth was closed, the lips not pulled back in the usual agonizing snarl of the dying, but relaxed.

He looked into the fox’s eyes.

Lorenz stopped breathing. He leaned closer, pulling his phone from his pocket and turning on the torch. The harsh white beam cut through the yellow fog and illuminated the fox’s amber gaze.

There was no biological moisture. No clouding of the cornea.

The eyes were already glass.

They were brown with a distinct yellow rim. German manufacture. Size twelve millimetres. Looking extremely closely, squinting against the glare of his torch, Lorenz could see the tiny, faint serial number etched into the curve of the left pupil. He knew the number by heart. It was his own stock.