The Autumn of Small Regrets

Elena stood before the bathroom mirror, pulling at the stray gray hair that had appeared overnight, or perhaps it had always been there and she'd only just noticed. At forty-five, she'd stopped believing in overnight transformations, though she still took her vitamin supplements with the same desperate hope she'd once poured into lottery tickets.

The fox had been coming to her garden for three weeks now—a rust-red ghost moving through the overgrown hydrangeas. She watched it from the kitchen window, coffee cup in hand, as it methodically dug up the bulbs she'd planted with such optimism in April. There was something familiar in its persistence, its refusal to be discouraged by the chicken wire she'd strung between the fence posts.

"Your father's in the hospital," her brother had said on the phone that morning. "Heart surgery. They're talking about a valve replacement."

She hadn't spoken to their father in seven years—not since the night he'd come to her apartment drunk, reeking of cheap scotch and bullpen smoke, waving the baseball tickets he'd bought for her son's birthday. Elena had told him then that some things couldn't be fixed with tickets, with gestures, with the sudden appearance of a grandfather who'd never bothered to be a father.

Now her brother was saying things like "family" and "forgiveness" and "he's different now." As if people could fundamentally change. As if the bull in the china shop could learn to walk without breaking everything.

She looked out at the fox again. It had succeeded in unearthed something—a tulip bulb, perhaps, or maybe just more dirt. It carried its prize in its mouth like a trophy, tail streaming behind it as it disappeared beneath the neighbor's fence.

Elena swallowed her vitamin without water, letting it scratch her throat on the way down. She picked up her phone and dialed her brother back.

"I'll come," she said, and hung up before he could respond. In the garden, the hydrangeas kept blooming, oblivious to the holes in the earth, to the fox that would return tomorrow, to all the small violences that made up a life.