The Fox at First Base

The iphone lit up at 2:47 AM, David's name glowing like a dying star in the darkness of Emma's bedroom. She hadn't deleted his number after the divorce—some stubborn vestige of hope, or maybe just laziness. Three years of silence, broken by a text she couldn't bring herself to read.

Her retriever, Buster, stirred at the foot of the bed, his graying muzzle lifting to assess the threat level of the notification. Emma scratched his ears, finding comfort in the steady rhythm of his breathing. He'd been David's dog first, a wedding gift from her parents, now hers by default. Like everything else.

She walked to the kitchen window, phone clutched in her hand like evidence. The motion sensor light flickered on, illuminating the backyard. There, padding deliberately across the frost-covered grass, was a fox—lean, russet, impossibly alive. It paused near the old baseball glove she'd left on the patio table all summer, a relic from the Sunday games David used to organize with their neighbors. The fox sniffed the leather, then looked up, eyes catching the artificial light with something like recognition.

Emma remembered the day David had thrown that glove into the lake during their worst fight. She'd fished it out later, when he was at work, and never told him. Some things you save, some things you throw away, and some things just float beneath the surface, waiting to be retrieved or to rot.

The fox vanished into the darkness between the fences, and Emma finally opened the text. David was dying. Pancreatic cancer, already stage four. He wanted to see her one last time.

She sat on the kitchen floor, Buster curling around her, and thought about how we spend our lives pitching and catching—words, emotions, opportunities—dropping the easy ones and swinging wildly at the impossible. Then, when the game ends and the stadium goes dark, we realize we never even knew the rules.

The iphone screen dimmed. Outside, somewhere in the neighborhood, the fox was probably hunting, doing what foxes do, efficient and purposeful and entirely unburdened by regret.