Helen Oyeyemi - Mr. Fox

She told him that she had looked after him because of the white hairs on his forehead that grew into the shape of a star. Sometimes you see that someone is marked and you’re helpless after that — you love. She wanted to tell him that, but she decided it was better not to. He hadn’t known that there were such hairs on his forehead, or that such a thing could be of significance. She sat and he lay near her, and a little time passed, quiet and bright. Then they had to go, in case the farmer had been told of their trespass and decided to look for them.

They parted outside her hut. It was a ramshackle thing beside a stream. It had a heavily dented tin roof, and its windows were coated with dust. All in all, it looked cross, and as if it had plenty of things to say to its inhabitant about having been left alone for so long.

“Come inside,” the woman said to the fox.

The fox demurred. Sadly, the woman watched him go his own way again.

Days went by. The woman made her peace with her hut. She gave it a thorough sweeping, built herself a new roof, washed the windows, plaited rugs. The woman picked herbs and grasses and boiled and bottled various concoctions. Sick people and their relatives sought her out in the forest; she took their money and they took her bottles away and were cured. “Where have you been?” she was asked, again and again. “Weeks we’ve been looking for you.”

And she answered, “I fell in love.”

“Congratulations! Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll see him again.”

And her pupils grew vast as she spoke, as if her eyelids had been opened while she was still in the first stage of sleeping. Women like her are very serious once they have chosen. To everyone who saw her she said, “If you see him, tell me. He wears a white star on his forehead.” She didn’t tell anyone that he was a fox.

One of the village women went into labour, and our woman served as midwife. The days were full of screaming, and the nights were hoarse, and there were three of each until the baby was born. This happened in summer. When our woman came home, she jumped into the stream and washed; the blood and sweat whirled away, and afterwards she sat outside until the sun dried her. She watched lizards and felt humming in her skin; tiny creatures bit her; they were alive and they wanted her to know. Her pulse slowed to its lowest ebb, and sped up again, flashed through her wrists, in her head. She was happy and unhappy. “The fox has forgotten you,” she told herself. Yet all around her she saw white stars. .

Because of a fox?

Because of him.

The woman went into her hut to find clothes to wear and found that she had been robbed. Bottles and picture frames were broken, her table and chairs were overturned, her papers had been rifled through, matches were scattered on the ground. The woman searched the hut for missing things. She wasn’t aware of all her possessions, so really she was just looking for a gap. She found it on her bookshelf. The thief had taken a dictionary. Nothing else. She stood, looking at the gap, and thinking. Then thinking turned to wonder and she smiled into her hand.

Now think of a fox in his den, wrapped round a book. His front paws are resting on the pages, and his eyes are very close to the text. These shapes! They’re useless. They frustrate him. The more he looks at them the more they mock him. He nudges the book into a sack and drags the sack along by its drawstring, through the forest. In the bushes by the village nursery, he listens to children saying their ABCs. He can see the blackboard. The teacher taps it with a ruler, going from letter to letter. His mind wanders. . He bites his paw. Look and listen. His mind wanders again. . He nips at his paw again, savagely this time. And again, and again, until his paw is bloody and he is learning.

First light finds the fox at his stolen book. No one else knows, no one sees what he’s doing. But words are coming. The fox doesn’t hunt anymore — he doesn’t hunt! He eats easy meat, forest rats. He stays near his den or he goes to the nursery school, he listens carefully, he connects pictures with words, he eavesdrops, he steals newspapers, he stumbles in his understanding and snarls and shreds the newspapers to pieces. . But he will know this language, he must have this language.

Because of a woman?

Because of her.

The day came when the fox had words. Only a few but enough to begin to talk to her. He went to the woman’s hut. Her hair was grey, and there were lines on her face, but otherwise, she was the same. She had not been young when they’d met, and two years had tipped the balance. He wasn’t young himself. The woman smiled and touched his forehead. So it was still there, this shape that she liked. Good.

Come inside, the woman said, in that way that he heard from head to toe. One day he would ask her how she could do that.

The fox entered the hut.

The fox had brought the dictionary back. She’d long since bought a new one — just as well, since the stolen one was falling apart. He had also brought words. He had chewed them out of newspapers: long, patient work, and anxious work, too, double-checking that each word meant what he thought it meant. If he had got it wrong, all wrong. . if she laughed at him. .

The woman settled in a chair and watched the fox sort through scraps of paper. She was holding her breath. She believed — she didn’t know what she believed. It could not be. The fox looked lean and crazed. In her mind she ran through a list of concoctions that might do something for the beast. .

Words began to spread at her feet.

Hello.

The fox looked up at her and panted. He curled his tail around his leg in an apprehensive L.

The woman raised her hand and let it fall. “Hello,” she said aloud. She couldn’t see clearly. All these tears. She brushed them away.

Can you help me.

He was very intent as she spoke. She answered three times, to be clear. “I’ll try. Tell me what you need.”

Quickly, remembering the afternoon at the farmhouse, she added, “I can’t help you die.”

The fox shuffled scraps of paper, chose two.

Not die.

He chose three more.

Please change me.

He thumped his paw on the last two words, his eyes on hers. Change me. Change me.

“Change you how?”

Not fox anymore.

He’d had to tear the word “fox” from the dictionary. It was tiny.

“No,” the woman said slowly. “No, I don’t think I can do that. I haven’t the skill.”

The fox lay down and closed his eyes. This lull, after all his striving, was enormous. It was like pain. The woman fell down beside him — her pity made her do it. The woman and the fox faced each other, nose to nose. Then he stood, nudged her aside, chose more words.

Stay with you.

I with you.

Please.

The fox applied himself to living as the woman lived. He ate at the table with her, and slept alongside her in her bed, and scrabbled around with soap in the stream. He read voraciously. He read more than she did. And as more words came to him, he told her of the hunt, of the horses and the hounds behind, and sometimes there were falcons, like a rain of beaks and claws. The woman listened, and as she listened, she realised that she was hearing him — that he was saying words instead of showing her. She made no remark, and treated it as normal. She asked him which would he rather be, if he could change — a horse, a bird, or a hound? None of those, he said. At night he suffered himself to be held, a thing that was unthinkable in the first days of their acquaintance, even when he had been very badly hurt. He had less and less trouble sleeping upright each night. Together they built a bigger hut, and a bigger bed. She saw that his claws had become thin and brittle — they were more like fingernails. Very long nails, it was true, but they weren’t claws anymore.