After everything that happened, we came home to find foxes living underneath our shed. Evan saw just two at first, but then more. In the dusk and early morning, they appear in our back yard and play on the lawn, and he moves my wheelchair to the window so I can watch them. They seem to be a family, parents and four kits who are almost as grown but still tumbly and reckless. I was kit-like myself once, a creature of impulse, greedy for sensation, for grass on bare skin, the sear of sunburn, the ache in my belly every month.
My i-Pad tells me that a group of foxes is a skulk, a Scandinavian word meaning to move invisibly. I’m familiar with things that lurk beneath skin and bone, only to rise like alligator eyes above the swamp. This evening, the adult male’s out there, lounging and scratching, giving off divorced dad vibes. I like the look of him. He’s always calm and patient with his children, even when they bite his ears and cuff him on the nose.
Before we left the hospital, they asked us about my pregnancy tissue, if we’d like to take it with us to be buried in a special place. I sent them away, but now I wish I’d had it in me to say yes, to bring the tiny fluid sac home and lay her in our yard so she too could watch the foxes. Evan says, “They might have dug her up, you know,” and he’s right, but I like to think of her beside me, tiny fingers on the window, her face rapt, as the kits leap like lambs, and a rich purple twilight steals down from the trees.
Fiona J. Mackintosh is the Scottish-American author of a flash collection, The Yet Unknowing World published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She is a past winner of the Fish, Bath, and Reflex prizes, and her flashes have been selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2023, Best Microfiction 2019, and the 2018-19 BIFFY 50. Her short stories have been finalists for the Cairde Word, Colm Toíbín, Bristol, Galley Beggar, Exeter, and Fish Short Story Prizes. In 2016, she received an Individual Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. www.fionajmackintosh.com
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