The Fox in the Garden

Elena discovered the first gray hair the morning she found him sitting in the garden, staring at nothing. Forty-two years old and her marriage had become a series of rituals: the vitamins they took with breakfast (his: D3 and fish oil; hers: iron and calcium), the Sunday morning walks they no longer took, the careful way they avoided mentioning how they'd stopped touching each other in bed.

Marcus had become a zombie of himself — not the flesh-eating kind from movies, but something worse: a man going through the motions of living while everything that made him Marcus had hollowed out from the inside. He'd come home from his accounting job, eat dinner while scrolling through news on his phone, then fall asleep on the couch. The vitamins sat in their orange plastic bottles on the counter, promises of health they both stopped believing.

Then came the fox.

She saw it first at dusk, a russet shadow slipping between the fences of their suburban subdivision. Wild. Untamed. Nothing like the careful lives their neighbors led. Elena began watching for it, waiting at the window with a glass of wine, heart quickening when those amber eyes caught hers through the glass.

"You should see the fox," she told Marcus one evening. "It's beautiful."

He didn't look up from his tablet. "Foxes carry diseases. Probably rabies."

The fox became her secret. She started leaving food — leftover chicken, scraps from dinner — and the fox began coming closer. One night it stood just feet from the window, intelligent eyes studying her. Elena felt more seen by that wild creature than by the man sleeping in the next room.

Then came the night the fox was gone.

Animal Control found it under the neighbor's porch — not rabid, but dying of something slower. Distemper maybe. Elena watched them take it away in a cage, its fur matted, its eyes dull and unfocused. She thought: that could be us. That could be me.

She found Marcus in the kitchen, counting out his vitamins. His hands shook slightly.

"Elena," he said. "I think I need help."

The zombie finally spoke. The vitamins on the counter seemed suddenly ridiculous — tiny chemicals they'd swallowed hoping they'd add up to a life.

She took his hand. "I know. Me too."

Outside, the garden grew wild without anyone to tend it.