What the Fox Knows

Three weeks after the funeral, I found myself running toward absolutely nothing on a beach in Mexico with a wilted container of spinach in my hand.

The funeral. God, that word. As if my mother had been anything approaching ceremonious in death. She'd hated funerals—called them "performance art for the living." Yet there we were, my sister weeping theatrically, me gripping a palm frond from the arrangement like it might anchor me to the earth, my father staring at his shoes like they held the coordinates to a dimension where none of this had happened.

I'd fled. That's the truth of it. Fled the condolence calls, the casseroles, the well-meaning friends saying "she lived a full life" when we all knew she'd been half-alive for years, drinking herself into a comfortable twilight where nobody could touch her.

The fox appeared at dusk—skinny, mangy, missing half its tail. It watched me from the dunes with ancient, calculating eyes. We'd developed a routine. Each evening, I'd sit on the patio of my overpriced rental with my sad takeout salad—spinach leaves already browning at the edges—and we'd regard each other across the distance of species and circumstance.

"They say you can't tame what's meant to be wild," I told it one evening, nursing a glass of water that went warm in the humidity. "But my mother tried. God how she tried."

The fox tilted its head. Maybe it understood English. Maybe it just understood hunger.

I thought about her last words to me: "You're too soft, Maya. The world will eat you alive." She'd said it with love, in her way. With the particular cruelty that passes for wisdom in families like ours.

The fox crept closer. Close enough that I could see the scar through its left ear, the matted fur where something—dog, coyote, another fox—had nearly ended it. Surviving, I realized, was just a series of near-misses strung together until death finally got its aim right.

I stood up. The spinach had gone to slime in the heat. I dumped it on the sand and watched the fox devour it, greedy and unashamed. There was something holy in that hunger.

"I'm going back," I said to the fox. "To the house. To the lawyers and the will and the fucking casseroles."

It looked at me, spinach leaf stuck to its whiskers, and I swear it nodded. As if to say: good. The world will eat you, sure. But you get to choose how you go down—fighting, or already half-eaten before you start.

I went inside and booked a flight.