Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

“Would you mind terribly if you die next time?” she asked. “Yes, I’d mind. To be honest, I don’t like the sound of that at all. Why do you ask?” “I just want to see . . .” “No.” “No?” “No.” “But Mr. Fox,” she said. “It’s all just a lot of games. . . .”

All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn’t understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it.

she thought that men were just a funny story, and she didn’t expect that she was missing much.

I realise I’m reading very finely between the lines here, but maybe those two had fallen in love, and wanted to spare each other the anxiety of speaking with subtext, each wondering what the other wanted.

There was a shepherd’s crook leant up against my bathroom door—I’d got it on the Portobello Road a few months ago. I considered going to the fancy dress ball as a saucy shepherdess. Or Christ. Or I could go as a saucy shepherdess, and when people asked me if I was a shepherdess I could say “Christ, actually.”

Libraries always make me feel covered in ink, anyway. Ink on my clothes, ink in my eyes. Terrible. All the body heat in there is bound to make the pages mushy.

She had power after that, the knowing and the telling—power to walk away, or stay, save his life, order his death.

Then I realised I hadn’t read it anywhere and I’d just made it up.

My first thought was, But they’re not real, and my second thought was, Under absolutely no circumstances can you say that; you’ll hurt her feelings.

“The first time Charlotte Brontë saw the sea—she was about seventeen or eighteen, I think—she was utterly overcome. . . .” she told me. She didn’t seem to notice she’d slipped into a British accent, and I didn’t point it out to her, I just listened. “. . . After all those years on the moors. She’d imagined what the sea was like, over and over, of course—how could she not—but when she saw it, it was more than she’d imagined. Didn’t someone write that nothing’s greater than the imagination? I think that’s nonsense, don’t you?”