On the eve of the annual Lemkin Taxidermist Convention, Lisette vies for top dog as she re-hashes years of mounts, mistakes, and open wounds, finding that it takes just one long night in an economy King room to skin herself alive.
FEEJEE begins the evening before the Annual Lemkin Taxidermist Convention and Lisette, a taxidermy prodigy with an agenda, enters into Lyman’s Econo Lodge economy suite to find Griffin - entitled, drunk and charming - stalking through the room like a live predator. Lyman, a warm and fuzzy genius with zero social skills and his heart beating for Lisette, tends to a mediocre mount with a hairdryer. The buzz of competition and bitterness is thicker than the shag carpet when P.T., the Convention’s eccentric, barges in, accusing Lisette of trying to usurp his winning category, Recreations, with his own specialty: a mermaid. Peering back to year’s past, the image becomes clearer: the blood in this room is bad and things between Lisette and Griffin have been left unsaid and undone. Griffin shrinks under the weight of his Lemkin legacy as he learns that Lyman was leaking Lemkin secrets, Lisette feels like yet another mount lost to his cruelty. P.T., faithful to the art of creation, prepares for his own impending destruction with a devastating confession, and Lisette, herself a stuffed skin, squeezes her fist around secrets that no person can hold for long. As night falls, the four competitors, too, descend into darkness; this year, everything is on the table and the fate of the Competition - and their own lives - lie in the balance. As the first orange dawn reveals, there are more dead things walking in this hotel than the Blue Ribbon will be able judge. As Lyman tears out his beating heart for Lisette, she shares her mermaid’s brutal lineage, unearthing a hidden humanity in Griffin before he runs for his life. As P.T. bows his broken body at the altar of Lisette; she appears to be the last competitor barely standing, a triumphant trophy in a room filled with ghosts.
