What the Fox Knows

The spinach wilted in the pan, exactly like our marriage had—slowly, without anyone noticing until it was too late. I watched steam rise, thinking how three years ago, David would have wrapped his arms around my waist from behind, would have made some terrible joke about my cooking. Now he was in the living room, our sixth floor apartment so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming its mournful song.

"Stupid cable's out again," he called, not bothering to come to the kitchen.

I turned off the burner.

"We can eat without watching the news, David. We can eat without—"

"Without what?" He appeared in the doorway, hollowed out in that way people get when they've stopped pretending. He moved like a zombie now, not the movie kind with their theatrical lurching, but the real kind—the walking dead who go to work and pay bills and make love with mechanical efficiency because that's what living people do.

"Without disappearing," I said softly.

A fox appeared on the fire escape outside our window, its russet coat bright against the gray evening. It sat there, watching us with impossibly knowing eyes. I'd seen it before, this fox that shouldn't exist in Chicago, that nobody else ever seemed to notice.

"You're doing it again," David said. "That thing where you drift away into your head."

"I'm right here." I wasn't.

"The fox," I said. "It's back."

David didn't turn. "There's no fox, Maya."

The fox dipped its head, almost like a nod, and slipped away between the buildings. I wondered if it would return tomorrow, or if I would finally admit that some things only exist when you're lonely enough to need them to.

The spinach was cold by the time we sat down to eat.