‘Anything that dies at a pet store, we’ll go pick it up’: Inside Vegas’ weirdest store

Hold your breath, the bug sandwich has just been opened.

“The smell is something you have to get used to,” explains Erin Kmit as she takes the lid off said apparatus, which is a Tupperware container filled with sunset moths whose suns have set, individually arranged between sheets of paper towel that double as insect funeral shrouds.

Covered from forehead-to-foot in tattoos, hair tinged with blue, Kmit’s as colorful in both appearance and vocabulary as the deceased bugs she presents to the three women seated around her, arms resting on a tie-dyed, pentagram-adorned tablecloth.

Each has a block of Styrofoam in front of them, as Kmit tutors the trio on how to properly pin these butterfly doppelgangers into beatific keepsakes of death.

“We’re gonna stab him through that abdomen,” she instructs her charges, advising them not to poke the creatures through the wings — lest the holes be visible when they dry — showing her students the different ways they can be displayed: belly down, belly up or as if suspended in flight.

She tells them that she can demonstrate how to pull a moth’s tongue out, if they so desire.

They do not.

Half an hour later, class is complete and everyone goes home happy with their dead arthropod art.

“Bugs are fun and easy, right?” Kmit encourages by way of goodbye. “If you guys have problems or you just want to come here and play with bugs, we can totally play with bugs.”

As they exit, they pass a small, foldable sign positioned on the sidewalk out front.

“Welcome to the Creepshow,” reads one side, “a wondrous place where we will put your kidney in a jar and unattended children will be taught how to taxidermy the dog.”

So goes another typical Sunday afternoon at what is arguably Las Vegas’ most atypical store: Cemetery Pulp, the city’s first — and most likely only — combination oddities/comic book shop.

It’s the city’s self-anointed “home for the weird and nerdy.”

Oh, and the dead.

There’s lots and lots of dead stuff here amid the Vincent Price air freshners, spinal cord candles, gleaming silver dental hammers (ouchy!), tomes like “199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die” and ornate crosses (inverted, of course).

There’s enough taxidermied wildlife mounts to decorate half-a-dozen hunting lodges and myriad stuffed animals in anthropomorphic poses — Leering possum in a pink baby doll dress? Check. Tiara-sporting raccoon gripping a crucifix of bones? As if you have to ask. — alongside jars of embalmed rodents and luminous diaphanized snakes translucent in the light.

Flanked by her husband Chris Kmit, a friendly, hirsute man with the sizable, sturdy dimensions of a refigerator, Erin explains how the two developed the concept for their gloriously grotesque yet eerily beautiful store. She does so beneath a wall-sized print of 19th century Spanish painter Luis Ricardo Falero’s “Witches Going to Their Sabbath,” flush with airborne nudes.

“Chris and I are both really artistic people,” Erin says of the decision to roll the dice on a venture with as little local precedence as this one. “We were just like, ‘We should do this. It’s totally crazy — and people will be so (mad) that they have to see witch butts every day.’ ”

From pulp fiction to reality

She was the self-professed weird girl who kept dead bugs and bones in her pocket.

He was the boy who dreamed of being a comic book artist one day, eventually earning a degree in animation.

Together as adults, Erin and Chris Kmit would fuse those interests into the business they now run.

“It’s just our personalities kind of, like, smoooshed together,” Erin explains.

The two met at rock club The Dive Bar close to a decade ago where Erin, a former taxidermist, used to have a table at shows where she sold homemade jewelry, bones and wet specimens.

“I was buying stuff like this from her,” remembers Chris, surveying the wares in his store, which he and his wife staff seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Prior to Cemetery Pulp, the two operated their own car-wrapping company — the walls at their current business are covered in artful adhesives — before deciding to pursue what is clearly a labor of love.

“We thought about four or five other ideas to start a business with that could have made more money,” Chris acknowledges, “but we wouldn’t have has as much fun.”

Erin initially wanted to name the store “Cemetery Polka,” after her favorite Tom Waits song.

“Chris was like, ‘No one’s gonna get it,’ ” she recalls.

And so “polka” was changed to “pulp” considering that comic books evolved, in part, from pulp magazines.

OK, now for the tough part: finding a place.

Turns out, realtors were a little wary of the couple looking to sell animal skulls for a living.

“No one would even work with us,” Chris recalls. “We had a lot of real estate agents who just went, ‘Yeah right,’ and hung up, because they had no concept of what it was gonna be.”

“‘We’ll call you, don’t call us,’ that’s what they’d say,” Erin chuckles.

And so they took matters into their own hands, driving around town looking for places adorned with “For Sale” or “For Rent” signs hours and hours a day until they found their current location (3950 Sunset Road), a former Unlimited Wireless shop that they refurbished in two weeks and opened last December.

One of the things that they liked about the spot was that it was just a few miles from the airport.

“We get a fair amount of tourists who will stop by, pick up a skull, like, ‘Can I put this in the plane?’ ” Chris says. “ ‘Totally! Take a skull on the plane.’ ”

Erin laughs.

“Let’s freak out TSA together.”

Acquiring reptile corpses and such

OK, so now for the big question: How exactly does a couple acquire so many dead things?

“Everybody asks us, Where do we get all this stuff? Where do we get all the these ideas?” Erin says. “This is just our living room.”

“Honestly, our walls at the house look like this as well,” Chris adds.

While a portion of their early stock was culled from their own collection, much of their wares now comes from other sources, like a taxidermist friend in Ohio.

“If there’s stuff that she’s just going to chuck, she just sends us a message on Instagram like, ‘Hey, do you want this dead thing that I’m going to throw away?’ ” Erin explains. “I’m like, ‘Hell yeah I do.’ ”

They also get a lot of small animals from natural deaths at local pet stores.

“Anything that dies at a pet store, we’ll go pick it up,” Chris notes.

For Erin, a big part of the appeal of taxidermy lies in memorializing animals.

“A lot of people don’t think that when they think of taxidermy, they just think hunting and killing, but it’s really — in my brain — a way to let that animal live,” she says. “There really is an art form to it.”

She also works with deceased pets.

“It’s really fun for me memorializing people’s animals,” she says, “either by articulating their bones and turning them into skeletons or a wet specimen or mummification. It feels good.”

In addition to Erin’s near-weekly classes on how to pin everything from tarantulas to beetles to moths, they also host Dungeons and Dragons sessions, tarot card readings, concerts and the stray round-table discussion with morticians.

All in all, it’s quite the lively place — you know, considering all the dead stuff.

“We’ve not had many negative reactions, which is good,” Chris says. “Even the negative reactions aren’t like, ‘I’m gonna burn this place to the ground!’ ” he grins knowingly. “It’s just, ‘I’m a little scared.’ ”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram