Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

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

Miss Foxe occasionally wondered if she had spent her life approaching invisibility and had finally arrived at it. She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.

But who finds happiness interesting?

“Where are you?” she murmured. “Where are you?” She wanted the question removed from her with forceps at white heat, leaving a clean cavity behind. Then, perhaps, she would be able to perform her task. She was beginning to feel that she owed it to whoever was keeping her alive.

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

He touched my wrist. Lightly, and with just one finger, but I shivered. It wasn’t that his hand was especially cold. I think it was the subtlety. If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have even noticed what he’d done. He took my pulse, I thought. Stole it.

Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own.

The girl tried, several times, to give her love away, but her love would not stay with the person she gave it to and snuck back to her heart without a sound.

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.

“Let me tell you something, kid. Love is like a magic carpet with a mind of its own. You step on that carpet and it takes you places—marvelous places, odd places, terrifying places, places you’d never have been able to reach on foot. Yeah, love’s a real adventure! But you go where the carpet goes; after you’ve stepped onto it you don’t get to choose a goddamned thing. Well . . . there’d better be a market for magic carpets. ’Cause from tonight, mine’s for sale.”

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.

Have you ever heard a note in someone’s voice that said “This is the end”? I heard it in the next words he said to me, and I stopped listening. Have you ever wanted to try and cross an ending with some colossal revelation—“There’s something I never told you. I’m a princess from the kingdom atop Mount Qaf,” for example—“My family live in eternal youth, and if you abide with me, you will, too. I kept this secret from you to see if you would cherish me for who I am.” Have you ever wished, wished, wished. . . .

“I love you.” It means a different thing to us than it means to them. God knows what it means to them. God knows what it means to us.

And, laughing a little, he kissed me back. He kissed me like ice cream, like a jazz waltz, the rough, gentle way the sea washed sand off my skin on the hottest day of the year. And the whole time there was that little laugh between us, sweet and silly.