The Things We Chase

The fox appeared at dawn, its coat the color of dried blood, watching from the edge of the parking garage where Sarah had been living out of her Prius for three weeks. She'd started running then—literally, at first, around the concrete pillars until her lungs burned, then metaphorically, from the audit committee, from the foreclosure notice, from the fluorescent-lit office where her colleagues had started looking at her with that particular mixture of pity and relief that says *better you than me*.

That was when the vitamins started. A prescription bottle of yellow oblong pills from her sister, who'd pressed them into her palm at Christmas and whispered, "They help with the darkness," as if Sarah's depression were something you could supplement away, like iron or calcium. She swallowed them dry while watching the fox watch her, a ritual that felt almost holy in its pointlessness.

"He's waiting for something," the security guard said, leaning against his cruiser. He'd caught her arguing with empty air near the elevator. "My dog does the same thing by the back door. Won't move until he sees what he's waiting for."

"What's he waiting for?" Sarah asked, though she already knew. Some mornings she'd catch herself holding her breath, waiting too.

The guard shrugged. "Same thing we're all waiting for, I guess. To see if it's worth it."

That night, Sarah stopped running. She let the fox approach, its ribs visible through its winter coat, both of them skeletal versions of themselves. It nosed her palm, finding the vitamins there, and ate them with a dignity that made her chest ache. She expected the fox to leave then, to vanish back into whatever wild remained between the strip malls and highway overpasses, but it stayed. Watched her with eyes like old amber.

She started feeding it her dinner. Then her breakfast. Then she stopped going to work entirely. The audit could wait. The foreclosure could wait. The sister who called, terrified, could wait.

"We're both fools," she told the fox one evening as snow fell through the garage's open levels. "Chasing things that stopped existing years ago."

The fox leaned into her touch, its fur softer than she'd imagined. For the first time since the running started, Sarah breathed. Not shallow, desperate gasps, but something deeper. She realized then that she wasn't waiting for something to begin. She was waiting for permission to end what had already died. The fox seemed to understand. It closed its eyes against her palm, and together they watched the snow bury the car that had become her entire life.