In the last weeks before my mother died, a fox began appearing on our front porch. Always at twilight. Always facing the door.
It didn’t scratch or howl. It didn’t pace or flee. It sat there, still, eyes fixed on the brass doorknob as if waiting to be let in. Its coat was too clean, too red. Its presence too deliberate.
But we watched it from the kitchen window, my mother and I. She in her robe, flowers faded from the wash. Me with a hand on her shoulder, though I never knew what comfort felt like to her.
“It’s not a real fox,” she said once. “It’s a message. You just don’t know how to read it. Yet.”
That night, I dreamed it stepped through the door, walked the house like it remembered the rooms. Its paws made no sound, and its breath fogged the mirror above the sink as it stood on its haunches. When it turned to me, its eyes were unmistakably my mother’s. Not in color or shape, but in a way I can’t describe without sounding ridiculous. You’d just have to have known her.
After she passed, the fox stopped coming to the porch.
I left a saucer of milk out for a week, then a piece of bread, then nothing.
Seasons turned. The ivy swallowed the stoop’s railing. The door swelled in its frame. I tried to move on.
While clearing out the attic, I found a sketch she’d drawn, pencil on yellowing paper. A fox was seated neatly in front of a door, and above it, in her handwriting: If I forget how to find you, leave the light on.
That night I lit a candle in the hall.
And when I woke, there were paw prints along the corridor. Small. Clean.
Cate McGowan’s the author of four books. Her collection of poems, Sacrificial Steel, is forthcoming from Driftwood Press in 2025. Brill published McGowan’s collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, in 2024. Her short story collection, True Places Never Are, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award.
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