WHO: Fox [Narrative] WHAT: Memories and nightmares. Prompt: Childhood WHERE: Zarnesti, Romania. WHEN: Winter, 1994 WARNINGS: Animal cruelty. Fur farming. Injury. Guns. Revenge manslaughter. General trauma.
DAY 8
Her right paw was throbbing. The gash on her leg where she’d been ensnared was swollen and hot. Putting any weight on it made her whimper. No amount of tending it brought relief.
The foxes in her overcrowded enclosure were of no help. Some had been bred and fattened in this horrid place. They were glassy-eyed, reeking of chemicals and half rancid food. Like herself, those unlucky few who had been caught sat as close to the kennel fences as they dared, blinking sadly at the windows and the narrow views of greenery beyond. Several of them had parallel electrical burns striped across their bodies from trying to ram the partitions. Their throats burned from the fumes of ammonia and excrement. The water was hard and tasted of tin. Sleep was evasive; the enclosure floors were made of a wide-gap grating that gave them sores and pinched their footpads. Still, they preferred to be alone in their sorrows.
The smell of cigarette smoke, cheap vodka and aftershave heralded woes far worse than the wretched living conditions. Every day, the man would come to drop bowls of putrid grey slop into the enclosures. Three times weekly, he would scruff one of his prisoners and leave. He never brought them back. Once, when one had dared to bite him, he’d blasted it with a metal stick. The stick made a horrendously loud noise that left her ears ringing for hours. Still, she was alive and in one piece. The biter was neither.
This morning was different. A tiny human in a dirtied pink dress came in with the man. Her fist was clenched at the back of his green anorak in one of the few places were it was not stained dark. Wide-eyed, the junior human moved from one enclosure to the next, watching the frightened inhabitants as they scurried from her grasping hands.
Fox was not fast enough to limp away. Instead, she attempted to burrow herself under a pile of soiled rags. There was only enough to cover her head.
“Daddy! Look at this one. She’s so red! Like an apple.”
“Mhmm. Good price for that one, fiică.”
Fingers tunneled through the matted fur at the back of her neck. Fox yelped, sure she was about to be scruffed. Today must be her day. The fingers plucked at some dried dirt, then gently scratched. She was shaking, but she did not dare turn to bite. Through the rags, she could see the small human’s face. She was smiling, with brown eyes and brown hair. The two front teeth were absent. She whistled involuntarily when she spoke to the man. Though their language was unfamiliar to her, Fox thought that the man must take pity on her. She wouldn’t survive on her own in the wild.
“Can I keep her, Daddy? She’s so pretty. Just this once.”
“No.”
“Whhhyyy?” The little human made a noise Fox understood as sadness. Pity or no, the man seemed to make the small one sad, as well. After slop, the pair left. No one had been scruffed today. Fox could not calm her shaking for some time afterward, until the pain in her foot sunk her into sleep. Faintly, miles from the farm, her family was singing, howling to the moon to appeal for her safe return. She did not hear them.
DAY 29
The small human had come to take the bandages off of her foot in the morning. Though scarred, her paw was healed. It could bear weight again. Small human was delighted by this. Or rather, Fox had gathered that that was what a smile combined with squealing meant. The little one said ‘apple’ to her often. Fox had learned that if she responded to this particular noise, small bits of better food were sometimes exchanged. It seemed like a foolish game with no intelligent core concept, but the food made her stomach feel better. The interactions also gave her a chance to study humans.
At night, without any humans around, Fox worked on being a person.
She’d never tried it before. A few times, she’d managed to make her tail look like the raccoon’s that lived in the thicket three minutes’ run from her pack’s den. Another time, she’d made herself look like one of the pack’s cubs. Those had been illusions. Here, illusions weren’t adequate. Not if she wanted to be able to reach the latch at the top of the enclosure and escape.
At first, the transformations were excruciating. Maintaining them took all of her concentration and exhausted her for days afterward. They only lasted for minutes, panicked minutes where she only managed to become a lumpy disfiguration of flesh with too many arms, or not enough spine, or the worst, no means of breathing. She’d returned from that one in seconds, her heart hammering so fast that it took her days to build her courage to try again.
DAY 57
There was no time now. In the morning, the man had come as usual. After slop, he had closely inspected her fur. The eyes of his small person had been lined in red. Her cheeks wet, she had tugged on his anorak, harder each consecutive time. She tried to take his loud metal stick, blubbered word-sounds at him that Fox didn’t recognize, then ran from the kennels. None of it spelled anything good for Fox, she knew.
A few hours after the sun had gone down, Fox changed. She ground her teeth, held her breath and focused harder than she ever had before. Finally, on the third try, the change felt stable. She could breathe. She had the right number of limbs and lungs and enough spine. There were holes where they were supposed to be and none where they should not.
Human fingers were wondrous things. They moved so much, almost with a mind of their own, like the two animated tails she’d been hiding from the man for the last two months. With them, she made quick work of the latch to her enclosure. Naked, cold and wobbling like a foal, the newly made girl moved from one enclosure to the next, fumbling with each latch until all of the prisoners were free. She couldn’t speak to them like this, but it had been arranged earlier, with her fox voice, that they were to wait until she’d made sure that there were no more tricks waiting for them outside the kennel. Afterward, they were to follow her to safety. At the door to the kennel, Fox motioned for them to stay. Several dozen frightened eyes looked up at her, pleading, waiting, so nervous that their collective anxiety was almost energy enough to blow the door off its hinge.
Glowing pale, the fox-girl stepped out into the moonlit farm.
Quickly, she crossed to the shadows beneath the eaves of the man’s house. All was quiet and still except for the sound of Fox’s retching when she nearly ran into a furrier’s rack. Stocked with fresh hides, it stank of death, alum salts and bleach. Both too numb and too resolved to cry, Fox’s hands were shaking from cold and anger when she reached the door to the house. This was risky, but she needed the man's metal stick.
Inside, she tried to make herself as small and quiet as possible. She paused only briefly when she saw the reflection of her human self. Red hair, like her fur. Eyes like the sky. Skin like snow. It wasn't quite right, but it would do for now. In the reflection behind her stood a chair layered high with stitched furs; abominations of stolen lives thatched together, tapestries of torture and murder. The metal stick was displayed on the wall just above it. While retrieving it, she dodged the furs as though she feared to touch them.
She had what she'd come for, but the thought of how many foxes each coat represented made her jaw lock. Dozens waited for her, but what of these? Through the dark house she stalked, holding the stick properly to the best of her recollection. She listened for the sound of breathing in the blackness, wooden floorboards creaking softly beneath her feet. Illuminated by slices of light from a half-shuttered window, Fox spied something sleeping beneath another pile of furs. Her finger on the smallest metal piece was as shaky and unsteady as her breathing when she pressed the end of the stick to the back of the sleeping human's head. She was so angry her teeth hurt.
The small person rolled over.
Fox's breath caught in her throat, hitched in a sob so all-consuming that to keep it down nearly choked her. The small person's eyes were wide, her mouth half open, but no sound came. This was not the man, but it was still wise to take precautions, was it not? The small person would grow. Small would give way to big, and big was cruel. Fox's lower lip quivered. She bit it until it smarted. Still, the small person stared up at her. Pull. Pull. Her finger tightened on the trigger.
She couldn't do it.
Little human was not her enemy. Not yet. Until she was, she needed to understand. “Ssshahhh” Fox whispered, trying to make the sound that she’d heard the man make that requested quiet. Unsure of herself, her eyes ticked back and forth in the low light.
“Ah — Ahbpulle.” Fox tried, finger still on the trigger. She shook her head, then tried to make the small human's favorite noise again, “Abpell?” Small human sucked in her breath.
Believing that meant that she’d been understood, Fox gave a quick nod, then abruptly struck small human on the forehead with the blunt end of the stick to force her to sleep. No one needed to see what she would do next. In her search for the man in the darkness, Fox stubbed her toe, sloshing a jug of bleach. The smell made her gag and watered her eyes. She took it with her. Even over the pervasive stink of the chemical, she found the man by the smell of him.
She nudged him awake with the stick, then hopped back. When she was sure she had the man’s attention, though bleary-eyed and incredulous, Fox lifted the lip of the jug to her mouth and pantomimed drinking. With a sneer, she nudged the jug with her foot, sliding it across the floor while keeping the stick leveled at him. The man scoffed. Fox hesitated, unsure if the big noise the stick made would hurt her, then pulled the trigger anyway, with the end pointed safely above the man’s head. The room flashed. The house thundered. Wood splintered. She felt like the whole world had shaken. Everything smelt like burning. This stick was a horrid, terrible thing. She wanted to throw it away, but forced herself to hold tight. Hiding her surprise as best she could, she jerked her head at the jug again.
He stared at her, uncompliant. Then she saw it, a bloom of red spreading from a few small points on his chest and abdomen. This was not the same metal stick she'd seen before; it hurt in a spread, not a focused point. She watched as he gasped, then coughed. A scarlet line dribbled from the corner of his mouth, down his chin, then into his shirt collar. Her heart was an irregular buzz, a wounded hummingbird caged in her ribs.
Had she meant to do that? Would she really have brought him death, intentionally?
Fox fled from the answers, and from the gurgling sounds of the dying man. Though it sickened her to do so, she snatched several coats from the chair before plunging back into the winter night. She would not survive in this body long enough to protect the others with the metal stick without first protecting herself from the cold. The fox-girl wrapped in dead fox furs armed with the weapon of her enemy ran back to the kennels, beckoning the waiting dozens out into the vast white that lay beyond the farm. Faintly, miles from the farm, she could hear the voices of her family raised in appeal to the moon, singing to guide her home.