Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

“I would like to have breakfast with you,” Mary Foxe said. “And I would like to have you defer a little to my tastes and habits—at present I have none, because you haven’t given me any. I’d like to go to dinner parties with you and play charades. I’d like to have friends to lend me books and tell me secrets. I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found out all on my own—on my own, not through you. I’d like not to disappear when you’re not thinking about me.”