Maggie Damken

 

 

What he did to her in the meadow, only the foxes know.

All through the rest of the afternoon the foxes wait in the tall grass. The sunlight limns each blade with liquid gold and crimson blush. Purple night mushrooms across the sky, swallowing the coneflower and milkweed. Moonlight makes ghosts of the swaying leaves. With the impenetrable dignity of statues, the foxes wait. The black wind rustles the tufts of fur on the tips of their ears. The call of an owl moves through their bodies like a prayer.

The girl lays in the meadow where he left her.

The police do not find her.

Foxes are patient until they are not.

 

 

The foxes are not merely foxes. Yes, they have rustic backs and white bellies, long black legs and white puffs at the end of their tails, and eyes as old as Jurassic amber — but that does not mean they are foxes. They have the shape of foxes and the look of foxes but on their faces they wear masks.

Any creature that wears a mask is not limited to what it is perceived to be.

The first masked fox stands and peers down the meadow where the body of the girl still lay. Sometime later — although time matters little to the foxes until they have decided it has run out — a second fox stands, and the pair go walking through the tall brown grass.

 

 

The beetles and the flies wanted her, and so they claimed her. Such is the way of nature: in death all things are equal regardless of whether the death is just. Livid bruises clot her throat in thumb-sized prints. Blood speckles the corners of her mouth. Windblown hair scatters across her face. Her left arm, broken, bends back at the elbow. Her right palm opens toward the sky. The foxes know what happened because they watched it happen, but now they see what it means.

The foxes look at each other. In both of their bellies, the weight of their sacred duty unfurls. In both their eyes the light of primal rage simmers with a cold and unforgiving glare.

Somewhere there is a man who does not know that the foxes are coming for him, but they are coming nonetheless.

 

 

The foxes are not gods. They do not require homage. They do not receive prayer. They do not grant miracles. They do not fight amongst themselves or select favored humans or cast curses. They are not cruel or petty or jealous. They do not love or despair. They do not laugh. They do not exist to be believed in.

But they are not dissimilar to gods. They can change their shape. They can interact with humankind when they choose. They cannot create beginnings but they can create endings. They are not all-seeing but what they see is always true. They are not all-powerful but they do have power. They are not benevolent but they are not the opposite: the foxes are beyond debates of good and evil. They concern themselves only with what is fair.

 

 

Like all that which is holy, the justice of foxes exceeds mortal understanding. It does not seek mortal approval.

The foxes find him. He lives in a white house at the edge of a wood full of thin birches and sweet maples. Coils of smoke rise from the chimney into a sky as blue as the inside of a flame.

From behind the line of ancient trees, the foxes wait and watch. Inside, two young girls set the table for dinner and a woman opens the oven door. When the foxes make their decision, they remove their masks. Swaths of shadows roil across their faces like black mist on a lake, with rows and rows of tiny teeth that glimmer like stars. They roar back their heads and open the vicious spiral of their true mouths.

And then the foxes do what foxes do.

 

 

 

 

MAGGIE DAMKEN is a librarian-in-training and an emerging writer whose work has been previously published by Strange Horizons, Cease Cows, Breadcrumbs Magazine, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, and others.