The Fox at Midnight

The bull of a man stood at the edge of the pier, his phone slipping from rain-slicked fingers. Elena watched from her car, that old iphone shattering against the dark water like a dropped star.

"You coming?" David texted. Her on-again-off-again friend with benefits, currently off-again because he'd made it clear he wasn't looking for anything real. Not like she was either, supposedly, except at thirty-eight she found herself wanting things she'd sworn she never would.

She stepped out into the rain. The man on the pier was weeping now, guttural sounds that carried across the water. A fox darted between the pilings below, its russet coat bright even in the gloom, scavenging something from the sand. Always the survivors, foxes. Always picking through the wreckage of others' lives.

Elena had done her own scavenging lately. Picking through the wreckage of three marriages—not hers, but she'd been the other woman twice, which somehow felt worse. The last time she'd sworn, never again. Then David had looked at her across that crowded bar last November, and she'd felt that old, familiar hunger wake up in her chest.

The man on the pier was starting to turn back. His phone was gone. His marriage probably too, if she had to guess. She'd seen that look before—on her father's face the night her mother finally walked out, on her own reflection the morning after she'd let herself believe married men ever really leave their wives.

She started her car. David could wait. The fox slipped into the shadows, whatever it had found clamped in its teeth. The rain kept falling on the dark water, on all of them, on everyone who'd ever loved badly and lived to tell about it.

Some nights you survived. Some nights you didn't. And somewhere between those truths, you kept driving anyway.