by Emma Day
The fox he just shot has two heads. It looks hungry, lying there sad and twisted with bones showing through the skin. It’s a male, bright orange. The man bends down to stroke the fur with a gloved hand. It comes away in tufts like little flames. The color is a moving sight against all the gray, against the ash of the sky and the land, the pale diffuse sunlight through dense cloud cover. The man loved Rothko paintings, before.
He smoothly swings the rifle over his shoulder and kneels to scoop up the little body. His cabin is several miles away. He walks quickly through the drifts of snow and worries. The fox is light and skinny, having had just as much luck as the man at finding food. It won’t make for a generous meal. The heads loll about the man’s hand. Three blank eyes roll up to stare at him balefully. Don’t bother looking, it’s already done. There’s nothing I can do for you now. He stops and carefully closes the accusing black eyes. He pulls the frail corpse to his chest and continues on.
The man’s father gave him this tiny Buddha statue before he left, which the man thought ridiculous. He wasn’t the religious type. He grew up Presbyterian, but reality had its cruel way with that. That great black vulture pulled and picked off bits of his faith until he abandoned it entirely. If he were honest, he still prayed when the snows turned into howling ice storms, when raiding parties stomped through, when hunger slid under his ribs like a dull knife. He only ever kept the little brass Buddha to trade with, he would say to himself. Some people still like shiny things. He holds it in his fist while he sleeps.
The fox is easy to clean, as there isn’t much to clean at all. The orange fur litters the floor and the man’s clothes, leaving only small stubborn patches around the eyes and feet. The skull he sets on a small shelf, observing two corners of the room with four cold sockets. The bones and meat for a stew, the hide for a future pair of gloves. It won’t be much of a stew, the fox being the only ingredient, and the man doesn’t know how to make gloves. He sits down heavily on the floor and goes to work plucking the fur off of his jeans and coat, placing each soft clump in a pile on the braided rug. It takes hours.
When he finishes he looks up. His back is curled over his knees, cross-legged. There is a small window that sits above the ground, letting in murky light that fails to brighten the space. He can see the straight black trees from here, young and slim, having been planted by a logging company for quick growth and ease of harvest. Against the landscape the blackened trees look like a barcode. They also look like prison bars. The man stops looking out the window.
There is a long terracotta planter set beneath the small window. From it grow small rows of sickly, pale onions, grasping weakly at the window light with wilting fingers. Their soft white tops are visible at the base of the leaves, ghostly. One plant has bravely produced a round flower, a pastel purple fluff atop a skinny green stem. Flowers drain the resources of a root vegetable, suck the valuable nutrients from the onion bell toward the tall purple arrogance of reproduction. The man snips the stem of the flower with a small pair of sewing scissors.
Sisyphus cheated death twice, bound the wings of an angel and lived out past his due. His gods punished him with that everlasting life, rolling his boulder up and up the hill again for all of time. The man knows that suffering is only noble if it ends.
Emma Day is a dedicated student at the University of Alabama studying English and Spanish and looking forward to attending law school. She recently began writing poems and prose with the encouragement of friends and mentors and hasn’t stopped since. Emma has published poetry through the University of Alabama’s Marr’s Field Journal and the University of South Alabama’s Oracle. She loves reading books her dad recommends and hanging out with her conceited pet bird Reginald.