The Fox in the Mirror

Elena watched the gray strands multiply through her salon mirror, each one a tiny flag of surrender. She'd booked the emergency appointment—the cable guy was coming between four and six, which meant somewhere between next Tuesday and the heat death of the universe, and Marcus would be home by seven. The anniversary dinner reservation was at eight. The math required precision.

"You sure about this color?" the stylist asked, hovering with the bottle.

Elena hesitated. Thirty years of coloring out the evidence of time, and suddenly she was tired. The woman who'd spent three hours every six weeks maintaining the fiction was gone. What remained was someone who'd spent two decades married to a man everyone called "the fox"—not for his appearance, though Marcus had been handsome enough, but for the way he slipped through impossible situations, leaving chaos in his wake that somehow never touched him. Layoffs, bankruptcies, the "restructuring" that had conveniently eliminated her department last month—Marcus had emerged unscathed every time, smiling, incredulous, offering up his famished innocence for her to feed.

The cable box blinked from the corner of the living room when she returned, its diagnostic lights performing some incomprehensible computation. The guy had come and gone, leaving behind a note about upgrading the infrastructure and the distinct feeling that she'd been sold something she didn't need. She sat on the sofa and watched the reflections move across the dark television screen—her face, the window behind her, the gray roots marching like an advancing army toward her forehead.

Marcus called at six to say he was working late. The merger was complicated. He was sorry, he'd make it up to her. His voice was the same low, soothing instrument that had once convinced her father to co-sign the loan, convinced her to leave graduate school, convinced her that uncertainty was just opportunity waiting to be framed correctly.

Elena hung up and walked to the bathroom mirror. The gray was visible now, undeniable against the dark she'd paid so much to maintain. She thought about the fox she'd seen in the garden last week—sleek, wild, caught in the motion sensor's flash before it vanished. Some animals couldn't be domesticated. Some only pretended.

She picked up the scissors and began to cut.