Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

“It’s nothing to do with that. You simply have to change. You’re a villain.”

how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing.

I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.

For some reason, I’d thought the secretary would be a man.

Maybe she's Mr. Fox

“Are you Mr. Fox?” She laughed. “No.” “You are, aren’t you? You’re Mr. Fox—”

Yes, you looked as if you had a secret, or you were a secret in yourself.

Miss Foxe’s other passion was fairy tales. She loved the transformations in them. Everybody was in disguise, or on their way to becoming something else. And all was overcome by order in the end. Love could not prevail if the order of the tale didn’t wish it, and neither could hatred, nor grief, nor cunning. If you were the first of three siblings, then you were going to make a big mistake, and that was that. If you were the third sibling, you couldn’t fail. Here

understood the beautiful risk of the fairy tale.

Here . . . be . . . dragons.

The words didn’t come easily. She put large spaces between some of them for fear they would attack one another.

You’re explaining things that can’t be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre—but you offer them with such confidence.

“Everyone dies.” He smiled crookedly. “I doubt it’s ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?” “Yes!” She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin. “Yes.” “I’m sorry I’ve been wasting your time,” Mr. Fox said softly.

I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get.

I asked him what the subject of his paper was, but he said it wasn’t particularly interesting. Which meant he thought I was stupid.

I decided that I would not be calling S. J. Fox—there was something married about him.

When I spoke to my mother I was the funniest, cleverest, most interesting girl alive.

The German word for butterfly is Schmetterling.

Here’s what I learnt from the clippings: that there is a pattern. These women had requested assistance. They’d told people: Someone is watching me, has been following me, has beaten me up before, has promised me he will kill me. They’d pointed their murderers out, and they had been told “It won’t happen,” or that nothing could be done, because of this and that, etc. I was jumpy in those days, expecting something terrible to happen to me at any moment, without knowing where it would happen to me, or why, or who would do it.

He probably had to be like this because of work—he had to show people what normal, balanced emotions looked like. But that’s just not how it happens. People move from comic to tragic with the remnants of a smile left on their lips. Natural expressions linger.

He’s never been scared of me, so he’ll never run.

There was a plate on his desk with three squares of iced cake on it. Each cube had been firmly and largely bitten into just once, and then left. It seemed a strangely dainty thing to do.

When someone’s bereaved you think they want to be alone, or that they don’t want to talk, or that they only want to talk to someone close to them. Someone closer than you are. So you don’t phone. You assume that the poor bastard is being inundated with calls from other people, and you don’t phone.”

I can learn things all right; I don’t deny that I can learn things. But I can only learn them when it isn’t important.

That’s easier than books. With books you’ve got to know all about other books that are like the one you’re talking about, and it’s just never-ending, and it’s a pain.

I vowed that I wouldn’t have a man unless he was someone I could really be together with, someone capable of being my better self, superior and yet familiar, a man whose thoughts, impressions, and feelings I could inhabit without a glimmer of effort, returning to myself without any kind of wrench.

I looked into his eyes and realised, with the greatest consternation, that he was irresistible.

It’s hard to even imagine a woman without tactics.

Libraries always make me feel covered in ink, anyway.

but I know she doesn’t want to see me, and I know it’s not because of anything I’ve done or failed to do. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit. I think she’s too old to want to talk anymore; she doesn’t mind listening, but she’s got a radio set for that. She’s still in good health; she’s still got her wits about her. She had a lot more to say for herself

Solitary people, these book lovers.

I think it’s swell that there are people you don’t have to worry about when you don’t see them for a long time, you don’t have to wonder what they do, how they’re getting along with themselves. You just know that they’re all right, and probably doing something they like.

kids who had never been poor and never would be, spouting cheerfully lopsided theories. Men of the world who didn’t live in the world—not properly.

To goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

Every lover regularly turns pale in the presence of his beloved.

There was housework to do, things to dust and scrub and polish and move around and fret over, work that has never been visible to anyone else, and I took great pleasure in not doing any of it.

she said, in a very simple way. No guile, no false concern, just honesty. I couldn’t really be mad at her when she spoke to me like that.

It doesn’t take much to horrify people who are already frightened.”

If you make the women wicked, then killing them off becomes a moral imperative.”

Didn’t someone write that nothing’s greater than the imagination? I think that’s nonsense, don’t you?”

I came to him without substance, and six years later I’m still the same. Sometimes I say terrible things to him because I don’t want him to know I’m sad; sometimes I fly off the handle to hide the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And other times—too often, maybe—I don’t dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone. I’m too stupid for him.