Writings

Fox

Ashley Beitz

             The rumbling of a purr vibrates against my thigh as the marbled colored cat stretches and sighs in her sleep. I look into the murky, sapphire sky and watch as the stars begin to appear, settling in a distant valley like silt in a stream. Bats drunkenly dip and dive through the air catching the gnats and mosquitoes of the evening. Though the night at first seems silent and secluded, comfortable in the valley and engulfed in darkness, it stirs. I slow my breathing and listen beyond the tapping of moths against the yellowing porch light. The leaves rattle like rice against a tin pan as a collection of frogs and birds make their goodnight calls in layers throughout the hills. The cat jumps in her sleep, waking, and quickly wrenches her head around, peering up the stone path. I concentrate through the dark, knowing cat sees a whole world past the dark veil that limits my human vision.

            Brush scrapes against the chestnut walls of the cabin and two silver eyes emerge from among the hostas and lilies. The outline of a nervous animal quickly takes shape from under the darkness and the dusty gray of a fox forms. He cautiously steps from within the shrubbery, ears pivoting to survey the yard. I see the reflection of light off his wet, coal black nose. The fox is the size of a large housecat and the color of ashes. His feet and tail look as if they have been smudged with charcoal, and through the darkness his face has a reddish tint. He slowly moves into the sliver of light reaching across the yard, turns and sniffs the air in my direction but gives no acknowledgement of my presence. He seems curious about the ground and things which might be crawling on it, the bumpy toads and mice of the dusk. He pounces several times on nothing in particular that I could see, playful, straight-legged bounces, nose to the ground.

Suddenly, as if remembering his task, destination in mind, he quickly turns to leave. I watch him vanish into the darkness and out of my world as quickly as he had appeared—a world I quickly claim but cannot see.  Cat has now gone to attend to her business in the dark, and I am still stranded within the light of an old cobwebbed porch. I swat a moth and again try to see into the oily black night, a night belonging to the fox, moths, frogs and crickets of the forest. It was only for a moment that the fox slipped through the triangle of porch light and into the yard, a triangle of my light interrupting his dark, quiet world in which for a moment I did not exist.