Fox and Gone

Mara pressed the clutch, counting the seconds until the light changed. In the adjacent lane, a woman with orange hair checked her reflection in the rearview, completely unaware she was being watched. The color was unnatural, aggressive—a scream against the gray December afternoon.

You used to call me your fox, David had said the night before, while she folded his shirts into the cardboard box. Always so clever, always watching, never quite domesticated.

Now she was just a woman with a U-Haul reservation and a stud in her ear that she'd pierced at thirty-two, drunk on two-dollar wine and the conviction that she wasn't too old for new holes.

The orange-haired woman drove a Prius. Of course she did.

Mara's phone lit up on the passenger seat: David again. She let it ring. The woman in the Prius had good hair, thick and glossy, the kind that required expensive products and probably a stylist who charged ninety dollars for a cut. Mara's own hair had been falling out for months—not visibly, not in clumps, but she could feel it. Thinner. Weaker. The way David made love to her for the last year of their marriage.

The light turned green.

Both cars accelerated. The orange-haired woman merged aggressively, cutting off a pickup truck. Mara followed her, maintaining distance. There was something comforting about chasing a stranger. The woman was going somewhere definite. She had orange hair and a destination.

Mara had nothing but a storage unit in Jersey and her brother's couch for the weekend.

Her phone buzzed again—a text this time. Please come back. We can talk.

She imagined the fox she'd seen once, emerging from the woods behind their apartment complex at dawn. Lean and haunted, its coat matted from winter. David had wanted to call animal control. Mara had stood at the window, watching it nose through the garbage bags, finding something edible in the waste.

At least one of them was eating.

The Prius signaled, turning into a Starbucks. Mara kept driving. She didn't want coffee. She didn't want to talk. She wanted to be the kind of woman who dyed her hair orange and drove badly and didn't answer to anyone.

Instead, she was just fox-gone. Clever, watching, and finally, entirely alone.