Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

They grew up a bit. He learnt things, and so did she. They didn’t unlearn their fear of each other.

The girl was pretty, though. . and stubborn and strange.

And the young fox was curious and courageous and clever. .

It was only natural that they would find each other.

The young girl was in love with mystery and secret knowledge. She learnt the names of demons, and summoned them. They never materialised. She didn’t take offence. She wouldn’t have bothered, either, if she were them. The girl lived with her mother and her elder sister at the mouth of the woods, only a few steps away from town — less than ten steps, probably. Still, they didn’t get many visitors. In the evenings the elder sister studied and studied, but our girl set up lanterns in her room and performed puppet shows with marionettes she had made herself. During his long illness the girl’s father had shown her how to make puppets. Then he’d died. “Come away from the window,” the elder sister would say, sharply, whenever she saw what the girl was doing. “Don’t draw attention to us. Who knows what’s watching from the woods.”

But their mother intervened and told the elder girl to leave the younger be.

Our girl sang songs to accompany her performances, and the puppets cast shadows on the leaves and the grass outside her window. Our young fox observed all this from a distance; he stood stock-still, his narrow eyes just a faint shimmer amongst the shrubs. He heard the singing. The sound meant nothing to him, though it did not displease him. The fox knew about fox business. By now his mother had moved on somewhere, and he didn’t much miss her. His paws were swift, and he wouldn’t let his eyes confuse his mind, so he was good at catching rabbits and squirrels. He slept late and woke early and travelled the whole wood wide, tasting the weather. He knew where the bees went to make their wild honey. He saw when cuckoos visited the nests and knew which birds were going to get a nasty shock come hatching time, and he waited for the spoils. The fox fought no one; he took things easy. When it was time to run away, he ran. But not this time.

What can it mean for a fox to approach a girl? Foxes are solitary. A fox that seeks out human company is planning evil. Or it has something the matter with it. Rabies, or something worse. The fox watched the girl at play, and he didn’t understand what she was doing — it certainly wasn’t fox business. Still, it interested him, and he gazed and gazed at her as she sat surrounded by all that greedy, dangerous fire that she kept in jars. He gazed and gazed though it served no purpose to do so, gazed without feeling satisfied and with the sensation of a deep scratch in his side (this was an awareness of time and its disappointments, the certainty that the girl would put out the lamps before he had looked his fill). And it was through observing the girl at play that our fox learnt to recognise beauty elsewhere in the wood. Whenever he became caught up in useless looking, he knew. Moonlight on the water brought rapture. Think of a fox, dipping his paws in silver, muzzle dripping. He didn’t want to drink the water, only to touch it while it looked like that. Another fox came by and laughed at him. But our fox didn’t care.

As for the girl, she looked into the darkness of the woods, and she saw very little. Occasional motion, perhaps, but nothing definite. Our girl developed a distaste for fact. She stopped going to school. Her mother kept a shop in town, selling food, books, toys, linens, and anything else she could think of, and she did very well out of it. The girl joined her mother at the shop counter. She refused to sell people things she didn’t think they needed, and argued with them until they saw her point. The elder sister grew more wan and studious, folding herself into her textbooks because she didn’t like to live in the mouth of the woods, where things she couldn’t see crept and shuddered at all hours of the day and fell deathly still when she turned to look at them. The elder sister wanted to get away and go to a city, and be unknown and kick up her heels and have fun. All in time. She needed to get top marks first, and go away on a scholarship. “What’s to become of you?” the elder sister asked the younger, who shrugged and laughed and looked out the window and dreamed.

Have you forgotten our fox?

The one who now had an eye for beauty, and an inclination to set it apart from other things. .

The fox wished to thank the girl.

(The fox wished to know the girl.)

It took him a long time to make his mind up. He wasn’t happy about it, but he didn’t have a fever and he slept well and his appetite was fine, so he thought he must be well and that everything was all right, and that maybe just this once the things the elder foxes had said were wrong.

So the fox brought the girl berries. Plump, rust-red berries wrapped in the largest, greenest leaf he could find. He left the leaf out overnight first, so that it sparkled with dew. How to give them to her?

He watched and waited. The evening puppet shows had become less frequent; this was because the girl was becoming interested in young men and had begun dressing up to go out to dances with her sister. Their mother had previously refused to let the elder sister go alone. “Young men are animals,” she said. So there were dances, and blushes, and letters written and exchanged, and sighs of longing and — the woods didn’t seem quite as real to the girl anymore. They were just some trees behind her house. A great number of trees, to be sure, but only trees. Men were interesting. They were new puzzles to work at, at least. And if she solved one of them she won a new life, and a new surname, and a companion who wouldn’t tell her off for buying too many music scorebooks and new hats. These days the girl tended to put on a puppet show only when she’d fallen out with a suitor. Then a richly gowned female puppet berated a threadbare male puppet for half an hour at a time.

The fox didn’t like the new tone that the puppet shows had taken. Something about it. . Anyway, here were the berries, and there was the girl and the lantern light. The time was right. He leapt up onto the windowsill with the leaf in his mouth, dropped it, and retreated, farther than a stone’s throw but not so far that they were unable to see each other.

The young woman saw a streak of grey, saw a tail brush the windowpane, saw a green parcel fall. And her puppets fell from her hands with a clatter and lay on the ground with their knees bent as if they meant to spring up again on their own. The lantern flickered. The girl saw a fox a little way down the corridor of trees. The creature was watching her. She moved to the right and its gaze moved to the right. She moved to the left, far left, almost out of the window’s frame, and the fox’s head moved with her. It appeared to be smiling, but that was just a meaningless expression created by the look of its muzzle. There was an unfaltering clarity to the animal’s gaze: thought without emotion. And yet. The fox was quivering. It had brought her something and it had stayed to see what she would do, and it was quivering. So the girl didn’t draw the curtain, and she didn’t turn away. She opened the window and slowly, very slowly, closed her hand around the bulky leaf. The fox did not approach — if anything, it drew farther back. The girl opened the leaf. Berries, but they looked more like jewels. She tasted one, and it was delicious. She ate another and another, and she beckoned the fox. “Come here, come here,” she said in a syrupy voice she used with very small children. The fox did not approach. The fox looked desperately from the girl’s eyes to her berry-stained mouth. She didn’t like the gift. She was angry. What was she saying, what was she saying. .