seeing foxes
From the short story collection "What's Left Over: Stories Inspired By Discarded Things"
I caught a glimpse of it just barely, out of the corner of my eye, as it skittered across the pavement and into the bushes that ran along the chain link fence. Someone else might think it was a hallucination, but I was sure it was real—a dark, vaguely shaped mirage that, if I had been looking at it head on, would resolve itself into the shape of a fox.
Hailey was at home in bed, recovering from her implant surgery. So far everything was going smoothly. We had both been very lucky.
To celebrate, I stopped by the market after work to pick up a bouquet along with her favorite fruit. Now, I was short-cutting behind the building to walk the final few blocks home to her.
The riot of color in my hands, the tangy scent of clementines warming in the sun, thoughts of my girlfriend waiting at home—it should all have been enough to draw me away from the lure of the fox. Yet, my mind kept circling back. It was the very same fox that had been following me for a while now. This would have been the fifth time I’d seen it in the last two weeks.
Was it following me? It felt like an omen. I walked ahead and peered over at where it had disappeared to. The chain link had been pried back, leaving a foot-wide space to slink through. If I was going to fit and follow, I would need to put down the things in my hands.
Locating a good spot, I rested them on the grocery store’s utility box, then slipped through the weedy gap. Almost immediately I was hit by a flash of deja vu, like something from a dream. I had been here before, doing this very thing, surrounded by tall vegetation, catching brief glimpses of a fox tail disappearing in the underbrush. The thicket was large and dense, larger than it looked from the entrance. Had I turned at some point, running along sideways instead of straight through?
I picked up my pace and the fox matched it, always just out of reach. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I caught it, I just knew it was important that I did.
I was getting farther away from where I started. What if I get lost? What about the flowers and the clementines? What about Hailey? I needed to turn back. I had gone too far.
Suddenly, with that one thought, my whole world pivoted. The leaves and branches surrounding me turned to piles of rusty junk. The weeds under my feet turned to dirt. A woman was walking toward me with a hunting rifle in her hands. My palms flew up. How did I get here?
“You!” she hollered in a scratchy voice. “You the asshole’s been stealing metal from me?”
“No, I….” I didn’t know how to explain. “I saw a fox and followed it through the fence. It was all just trees a second ago. I didn’t mean to trespass.”
The woman’s face puckered as she looked me up and down. “You one of them dream folks, with the thing in your head?”
I was too stunned to answer, just turned and ran back toward where I came. None of it looked like it had before—just a series of shady, neglected, dirt yards.
When I got to a real patch of weeds clustered around the gap in the fence, I crouched down and rested my head in my hands, trying to calm my rising panic.
The stories are true. The fox is just a dream. You are dreaming while awake and it’s getting worse.
A shiver rippled through my body and I began rocking on the balls of my feet.
You need to tell the doctors. Alert the press.
You need to warn Hailey. They said it wouldn’t to happen to us.
Catching a glimpse of something moving, I looked up—back through the gap in the fence. There was a man with black-rimmed glasses and colorful tattoos taking a picture of the stuff I’d left on the utility box. Was he a dream too?
Too scared to find out the answer, I waited until he passed to collect my things. I almost wished he had just taken the flowers so I knew that he was real. I prayed it would only be foxes.