The Impossibilities of Being Ernest

Ernest McGruwen was a very bright and unusual boy in the vaguest sense of the word. He had a high IQ, but it seemed to many as though he didn’t know how to use it. He had skimmed the surface of life, so to speak, and stayed with his parents well past the age where it is fashionable to do so.

His father was a lawyer and his uncle spent most of his time writing, so anxious elders watched his career with baited breath, waiting to see where his genius would take him. Perhaps he, too, would write the next Great American Novel – or go on to work in the supreme court as a judge– or even go on to work in banking. But Ernest kept quiet about his dreams, and never once did he spill his innermost desires with his relatives.

Ernest had two secret passions – and the first was Priscilla Fortmain. She was descended from New England royalty, and it is unlikely that she ever even noticed poor Ernest whenever he was about her at their contiguous social functions. She was beautiful in a plastic sense, but Ernest had seen so little beauty in his life that he could not and did not mind.

He often would sit next to her at parties, just to hear her tinkling laugh. He even talked to her about the weather on three separate occasions, so it was no surprise when he approached her father with wishes to marry her.

“No.”

But this did not stop him from dreaming about her; and would not stop him from talking to her. Perhaps Priscilla had lost interest in her other lovers – or maybe she just was bored, or wanted anything she couldn’t have – but soon enough she tried to convince her father to change his mind.

“He isn’t that bad of a boy really.”

“He has no sense!”

“Why don’t you want me to be happy?” she cried dramatically.

“Because you won’t be happy! Soon as I say yes, you’ll go and pitch another fit to get me to change my mind again.”

“But I love him!”

“Love who?”

“Ernest…of course, it’s Ernest,” she laughed.

Her father did not change his mind, and Ernest fell into a pit of such despondent and debilitating despair that he lost interest in everything. He became morose for a while, and wrote some rather mediocre poetry of the self-flattering sort that everyone writes at some point, if in the right mood.

And it was at this point that he gave up on Priscilla, and it was no surprise that he embarked onto his other great passion; one that had arose from watching his father and uncle slaving away at their respective works – he became a taxidermist and lived by himself far from the New England coast in a little log cabin, finding solace in the steady and vaguely eerie work that is taxidermy.