What the Garden Keeps

The dog died three months ago, but Martin still finds himself listening for the click of claws on hardwood every evening. It's a kind of haunting, he supposes—the way grief makes space in a house. Sarah had buried Buster beneath the oak tree with all the ceremony of a state funeral, tears streaking her mascara, her hands shaking as she patted down the earth.

Now there's a fox.

Martin sees it most mornings through the kitchen window—a flash of russet at the garden's edge, pausing just long enough to acknowledge him before slipping into the neighbor's yard. Wild thing. It shouldn't be there, not really, in this manicured suburb where everything is fenced and pruned and accounted for. But Sarah insists on leaving out scraps, claiming it looks hungry, and something about the way she says it—hungry—makes Martin wonder if she's still talking about the animal at all.

They don't touch each other anymore. That's the truth he's been carrying like a stone in his throat.

"Have you seen him?" Sarah asks from the doorway, holding a coffee mug with both hands like she's cold. "The fox, I mean."

Martin turns from the window. "Not today."

She nods, disappointed, and walks back toward the bedroom where she's been sleeping since January. The silence between them has grown comfortable, which is the worst part.

In the bathroom, a goldfish circles its bowl with stupid perseverance. Sarah bought it on impulse—something alive in the house, she'd said, though they both knew it wasn't a replacement. The fish has already outlived two of its predecessors. Martin watches it swim, that endless loop of glass and water, and thinks about how some creatures can live in captivity without ever knowing they're prisoners.

The fox returns at dusk. Martin stands on the back porch, watching it nose through the overgrown hydrangeas. For a moment, their eyes meet—something amber and ancient in that gaze, completely unimpressed by him or his mortgage or his disintegrating marriage. The fox bares its teeth in something like a grin before turning back toward the woods, toward wherever wild things go when they refuse to be kept.

Martin goes inside and locks the door behind him.