The Fox at the Bottom of the Pool

Margaret stood at the edge of the apartment complex pool, gin and tonic sweating against her palm. The water was still—too still for August in Phoenix. Below the surface, something orange caught the last light of day.

A fox.

She'd seen him three nights ago, sleek and impossible, slipping through the torn fence behind the generator. Now he floated belly-up, fur spreading like dark smoke. Someone had thrown the heavy pool cover cable over him, weighted with a cinderblock. Methodical. Personal.

Margaret sipped her drink. She should report it. Call the landlord, animal control, someone who would care that a creature had been murdered in the community pool. Instead she finished her drink and set the glass on the concrete edge.

Inside apartment 204, the vitamin supplements on her counter caught the morning light. She'd been taking them for six months—D, B12, magnesium, whatever the influencer on Instagram said would fix her. Fix what, exactly? The hollowness that widened each year? The way her job as a database administrator had become a series of cable management problems and users who forgot their passwords?

She'd met someone at the pool once. Last June. A man whose name she'd forgotten after two weeks of casual sex and conversation that never quite went deep enough. He'd liked the way she looked in swimsuits. She'd liked that he made her feel something besides efficient.

Now she stared at the fox, thinking about how things got trapped. How they wandered into spaces they didn't understand, looking for something—water, shelter, warmth—and found exactly the wrong kind of welcome.

Margaret went inside and flushed her vitamins down the toilet. Then she called her sister in Denver, someone she hadn't spoken to since their mother's funeral three years ago.

"I think I need to come visit," she said. "Soon."

The fox was still there when she left for work the next morning. By the weekend, someone had removed it. The pool was open again, children screaming, mothers reading magazines, everyone pretending nothing had died beneath the blue surface. Margaret moved out two weeks later. She never learned who killed the fox. She only knew that some things—once you see them—you cannot unsee.