The Prescription for Wildness

Mara stood in the breakroom of the pharmaceutical company, staring at the orange plastic bottle in her hand. Vitamin D3 — the supplement her doctor had prescribed when she'd complained about feeling dead inside. She was thirty-four, a senior analyst who spent eleven hours a day staring at spreadsheets, and she'd started to wonder if this was it. If this gray carpet, this fluorescent hum, this slow erosion of all her jagged edges was what adulthood meant.

Her coworkers shuffled past her like ghosts — or worse, like zombies,整齐 and hollow, their eyes glazed over from too many years of spreadsheets and quarterly reviews. Sometimes Mara felt like she was the only one still capable of surprise. Sometimes she worried that was worse.

Then she saw him through the window: a red fox standing motionless in the corporate courtyard, his coat impossibly bright against the manicured grass and concrete. He looked like a mistake, like something that shouldn't exist in this sterile world of glass and steel. When he turned his head and met her eyes through the glass, she felt something crack open inside her chest.

The next morning, she brought a bag of frozen chicken breasts. She left one at the edge of the parking lot where the pavement met the overgrown ravine that most employees pretended didn't exist. She came back during her lunch break to find it gone.

This became her ritual. Every morning, a frozen offering. Every day, a moment of something that felt like hunger. The fox appeared more frequently — sometimes watching her from the ravine's edge, once even approaching close enough that she could see the scar across his snout. She started telling herself stories about him: that he was a shapeshifter, that he was the spirit of the wild her father had tried to teach her about before his stroke left him unable to remember words like "mountain" or "river."

Then came the morning security found her.

"Ms. Chen," the guard said, gesturing toward her chicken tribute with his flashlight, "we can't have this. Feeding wildlife attracts raccoons, rats — it's a liability issue."

She wanted to argue. She wanted to say that the fox wasn't wildlife, not really — he was the only real thing in her life. She wanted to tell him about the vitamin D3 sitting untouched in her desk drawer, about how she'd started needing less sleep, about the dream she'd had where she ran through a forest and never hit a wall.

Instead she nodded, collected the uneaten chicken, and walked back to her cubicle. When she logged into her computer, she saw an email from HR about mandatory overtime for the upcoming product launch. Behind her, someone made a zombie joke about how dead they all felt, and everyone laughed.

Mara opened her desk drawer and took out the vitamin bottle. She carried it to the window that overlooked the ravine and poured every capsule into her palm. Then she walked to the parking lot's edge and scattered them across the ground like seeds.

"For you," she whispered, not sure if she meant the fox or the version of herself she'd almost let die.

That evening, she resigned. The next morning, she drove west with no destination, toward mountains she'd only seen in photographs. She didn't know if she'd ever see the fox again. She only knew that some hungers couldn't be solved with supplements, and some wild things were meant to run free.