The Fox at the Funeral

Margaret adjusted her black **hat**, the wide brim casting a shadow across her face. At sixty-two, she'd attended enough funerals to know the proper angle of grieving—head bowed, eyes moist but not weeping, **palm** pressed gently against your chest as if to hold your heart in place.

Her sister's ex-husband, David, stood by the casket. His remaining **hair**, thinned to silver wisps, caught the fluorescent lights. He looked ridiculous in his too-tight suit, like an aging **fox** who'd forgotten how to hunt.

"She left me everything," David announced to the room, waving the will.

Margaret's **orange** lipstick—Claire's favorite shade, borrowed for the occasion—tasted like wax and secrets. Claire had confessed three months ago, between chemo treatments and morphine dreams: David hadn't visited in years. The calls had stopped when the money ran dry.

"Actually," Margaret said, her voice steady, "that's the old will."

David froze. The room went quiet.

"Claire revised it last week. I have the copy."

She didn't, actually. But she knew David—knew his gambling debts, his desperation when the telemarketing company fired him. The **fox** was starving.

"What did she leave?" His voice cracked.

"The house. To me. And you're welcome to whatever personal items she didn't throw away."

The lie settled over her like the **hat**'s shadow. Claire had died almost penniless; the house had been sold two years ago to pay medical bills. But watching David's face collapse—seeing the con man finally conned—Margaret understood something fundamental about justice and revenge and the strange, bitter satisfaction of being the last one standing.

Her **palm** no longer pressed against her chest. She let her hand fall to her side, fingers curling into a fist.

Outside, an actual fox slipped through the cemetery gates, sleek and rust-colored, carrying something small and lifeless in its jaws. Margaret watched it through the window and thought: sometimes the world does balance itself, after all.