What the Fox Knows

Elena stands at the kitchen counter, forcing a handful of spinach into the blender. Her hands tremble. I watch from the doorway, caught between wanting to help and knowing she'll snap at me if I try.

"It's for your heart," she says, not turning around. "Dr. Sharma said more greens."

"Elena, we saw Dr. Sharma three years ago."

She pauses, blade hovering over chopped leaves. "Did we?"

This is how it goes now — time folding in on itself, memories surfacing like goldfish breaking the water's surface, gasping for air before sinking back into the dark. Six months since the diagnosis, though some days it feels like six decades. Others, I wake up convinced it's all been a nightmare.

She turns, and I see the fear behind her eyes, sharp as broken glass. She knows she's losing pieces of herself. That's the cruelty of it — the lucid moments when she understands exactly what's happening, what's coming.

"There was a fox," she says suddenly. "In the garden yesterday."

"We don't have a garden, Elena. We live on the seventh floor."

"I know what I saw." Her voice gains an edge. "It was watching me through the window. Waiting."

I don't argue. What's the point? She saw a fox; maybe she did. Memory is already rewriting itself around her, editing scenes, adding characters. Last week she was convinced we owned a dog we'd never had.

That evening, while she sleeps fitfully on the couch, I stand at the window. Below, the city sprawls like a lit-up organism, alive and indifferent. And there, beneath the streetlamp on the corner, a fox sits. Its gaze lifts toward our window, bright and knowing.

My breath catches.

The fox watches me for a long moment, then turns and vanishes into the urban darkness, leaving me to wonder what's real and what isn't, and whether the distinction even matters anymore.

Behind me, Elena murmurs in her sleep. I go to her, sit beside her sleeping form, and take her hand. In the morning, she may not remember my name. But tonight, here in this apartment floating above the world, she is still my wife. And I am still hers.