What We Feed

The fox appeared at dusk every Tuesday for three weeks, a rust-orange ghost slipping through the chain-link fence behind the tire dealership where Mark worked. I watched from the parking lot, smoking a cigarette I didn't want, while he fucked his assistant in the breakroom.

I'd come to bring him dinner—spinach and ricotta tortellini, his favorite, the one thing I could make that made him hum appreciatively. Instead I sat in my car and watched that fox watch me, its eyes knowing somehow, like it had seen this before: women in parked cars, holding takeout containers like evidence.

The baseball stadium lights glowed beyond the highway, Thursday night games bleeding into Friday mornings. We used to have season tickets. Used to. Before the hours got longer, before the smiles got shorter, before I started noticing things like perfume on collars and 2 AM texts that 'meant nothing.'

My sister Sharon got us the goldfish for our fifth anniversary. 'Something low-maintenance,' she'd said, laughing, because even then she knew. The fish died two weeks after Mark moved out. I flushed it without ceremony, watching its orange scales swirl in porcelain circles, thinking about how some things just refuse to be kept alive by force of will alone.

The fox is still there when I finally drive away, carrying the cold tortellini like an offering to a god who's already left the temple. It doesn't run. Just watches me go with that same careful attention, that same stillness I've been practicing in mirrors for months.

I throw the food in a dumpster three miles from home. I don't know why I made it. Habit, maybe. Or maybe I needed to see what would happen when I stopped feeding the things that had already starved.