The Lightning We Didn't Catch

The fox appeared at the edge of the patio just as the first crack of lightning split the November sky. Elena sat with her wine glass suspended halfway to her lips, watching the creature's copper coat gleam in the brief illumination. It looked nothing like the photos Richard had sent her earlier—that filtered, oversaturated image of some urban fox he'd spotted in London, sent at 2 AM his time, 8 PM hers, when they were both pretending not to be lonely in their respective cities.

Her phone—his old iPhone, the one he'd left behind during that final, disastrous weekend—lay face-up on the table. A message notification glowed across the screen. Elena had been ignoring it for three days.

"You'd like him," Richard had written in his last real email, the one before the slow fade began. "He's got your hair—wild, impossible to tame."

He'd meant their son. The child Elena had carried for six months before the miscarriage that Richard hadn't been able to come home for. Work emergency. Always work emergencies. That was the problem with loving someone who lived half a world away.

The fox on the patio turned, meeting her gaze with eyes that held none of the anthropomorphic sentimentality humans projected onto wild things. Just survival. Just hunger. Just the clean, simple business of being alive.

Another fork of lightning illuminated the backyard, and in that flash, Elena saw the message on the iPhone screen. Not a work emergency. Not a shallow apology.

I saw a fox today, it read. Outside my building. He reminded me of you. Still waiting for the lightning to strike twice between us.

Elena set down her wine glass. The fox loped away into the darkness, moving with that fluid, purposeful grace of creatures who don't question their own nature. Some things, she realized, weren't meant to be domesticated. Some connections weren't meant to be salvaged.

She picked up the phone and typed back four words: Some lightning only strikes once.

Then she blocked him, watching the screen go dark just as the storm broke open over the house, washing everything clean.