Mrs Fox Read Free Page A

don’t want to risk you getting it.
    He is pale, a little crazed, but does not look ill.
    –Sophia has it?
    –Yes. She does.
    –Does she need anything? I can go to the pharmacy.
    –I’m taking care of her. Thank you. Please –
    He gestures for her to leave. Routed, Esmé picks up her bag and steps away. He closes the door behind her, moves to the hall window and watches. She glances up at the bedroom, frowns, walks to her little blue car, gets in, and drives away. When he turns round the fox is standing at  the top of the stairs.
    Later that day, tense with anxiety, he leaves the house and goes to the library. He researches. Delusional disorder. Folie à deux. Poison effects. Then: Transmogrification. Fables . If he can avail himself of understanding, reason, definition . . . He returns home with medical texts and a slender yellow volume from the twenties. There is little correlation. He is no thwarted lover. Nor are there other symptoms. Most upsetting is the repetition of one aspect: an act of will .
     
    So it continues. He enters a room and at first does not notice that she is up on top of the cabinet, on the windowsill, in the sliding food rack, which he has left open. Her poise so still she is entirely missable, the way all wild things are, until the rustic outline comes into focus. The surprise of seeing her, every time, in proximity; a thing from another realm that he has brought home to belong. She sleeps. She sleeps neatly in a circle, tail tucked under her chin. Not on the bed, where he keeps trying to put her, but on a chair seat, in the corner of the utility room. The house is warm but she makes the most of extra heat wherever she can find it – the sitting place he has just vacated, under the boiler. He cleans away the black, twisted scat that he finds, tries not to be disgusted. If we were old , he tells himself, if I were her carer . He leaves plates of food on the floor, milk-soaked bread, cooked chicken, inoffensive dishes, which she investigates, tries, but does not finish. Instead she looks up at him, her brows steepling, haughty, unsatisfied. Part of his brain will not translate what she wants: that she must have it raw . Her eyes flicker after birds in the garden. Even trapped behind glass, she calculates. The metrics of the hunt. Hating the humiliation, he brings home a can of dogfood, tips the jellied lump out onto a china dinner plate. She rejects it. He finds her licking her lips and trotting out of the kitchen. On the expensive slate floor is a dark patch of saliva – she has licked something up, a spider perhaps.
    He cannot speak to her anymore. She doesn’t understand and his voice sounds ridiculous to his own ears, a cacophany. She will not tolerate being in the same room for long. She roams, sniffs at the back door. She wants what’s outside, she is becoming restive, growling, but he knows he cannot let her go. What would become of her, and, with her, his hope? He inches around the front door when he leaves and locks it behind, is careful when re-entering the house. He phones and tells the cleaning woman her services are no longer needed.
    And he knows; in this terrible arrangement, it is he who is not adjusting; he who is failing their relationship. So he decides. He buys uncooked meat from the butcher, offal, and in a moment of bravado, throws it onto the floor in front of her. She nips at a purple lobe, then walks away. Surely she is hungry! You are a fool ,he tells himself. The next day he goes to a specialty shop and brings home a live bird. A pigeon. Its wings are clipped. He sets it on the floor, where it hops and tries to lift. Within moments she is beside it, crouching, lit with energy. He watches as she recoils and then pounces high, higher than she need, in excitement or prowess, and comes down hard on the helpless flurrying thing. She bites its iridescent neck. She twists its head. She is like machinery; the snapping and clicking of her teeth. The lavender breast is