The Fox in the Garden

Margaret watched the fox from her kitchen window, its russet coat glowing against the November dusk. It moved through her garden with terrible grace, stripping the last of the season's growth. Her spinach — the tender leaves she'd nurtured through three weeks of unseasonable frost — was gone in seconds.

"James," she called, though she knew he wouldn't answer. He was in his study again, nursing the scotch that had become his only true companion these past six months.

The front door opened instead. Elena.

Margaret's stomach tightened. Elena, who brought casseroles and sympathetic smiles and knowing looks that lasted just a second too long. Elena, who had been James's college friend, his confidante, the person he called when Margaret couldn't give him what he wanted.

"Saw a fox in the driveway," Elena said, setting down her dish. "Wild things are getting bold this year."

"It ate my spinach," Margaret heard herself say. The words sounded petty, small. But wasn't that the problem? She'd become small — bitter as cooked spinach, compressed into something unrecognizable.

Elena's hand brushed her arm. "Margaret, maybe it's time to—"

"Time to what? Accept it? Move on?" Margaret pulled away. "Thirty years, Elena. And you think some wild animal eating my garden is the worst thing that could happen?"

James appeared in the doorway, and something passed between him and Elena — a look Margaret couldn't quite read, had never let herself read before. The foxreturned to the garden, watching them through the glass with amber eyes that seemed to know everything.

"The spinach," James said softly. "I replanted it, Margie. Last week. While you were at your sister's."

The fox slipped back into the darkness. Margaret thought about wild things, and tame things, and the terrible courage it took to be either one.