The Woman Who Ran with Foxes

The goldfish had been swimming in the same eight-gallon circle for three years, longer than Maya had been with James. She watched it through the glass, its orange scales dull in the kitchen's fluorescent light, darting between plastic ferns like it was searching for something it would never find.

"You're running again?" James called from the bedroom, his voice thick with sleep and judgment.

"Always." She didn't turn from the fish. In the reflection of the tank, she saw her own face – thirty-two years old and still trying to outrun herself.

Her feet carried her through predawn streets, the rhythm of running her only prayer. Water from the morning's rain slicked the pavement, each step a small surrender to gravity. This was when she could think about Simon – the man she'd met at that conference in November, the way his hands had lingered on her arm when he handed her a drink. The way she hadn't pulled away.

She'd grown up hunting foxes with her father in Vermont, taught that they were pests – beautiful, but destructive. Then last winter, she'd seen one in the park behind their apartment building, its coat the color of dried blood, watching her with eyes that held more recognition than any human had offered her in years.

Now the fox appeared sometimes on her runs, keeping pace just beyond the tree line, a rust-colored ghost running parallel to her life. James said she was imagining it. Maya wondered if the fox was more real than anything in her apartment.

"Do you ever feel like we're just swimming in circles?" she'd asked James last week, gesturing vaguely toward the fish bowl.

He'd laughed, the sound hollow. "That's called adulthood, Maya. You get used to it."

The fox was waiting for her this morning – closer than usual, sitting on a park bench as if it owned the dawn. Their eyes met, and Maya felt something crack open inside her chest. She stopped running. For the first time in three years, she stood still.

The goldfish was dead when she got home, floating at the surface of its tiny world.

"Maya?" James stood in the kitchen doorway, shock in his face at the sight of her duffel bag.

"I'm done swimming in circles," she said, and the fox watching from the window seemed to nod, as if it had been running beside her all along, waiting for her to finally catch up.