Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

She doesn’t complain about anything I do; she is physically unable to. That’s because I fixed her early. I told her in heartfelt tones that one of the reasons I love her is because she never complains. So now of course she doesn’t dare complain.

I looked inside my typewriter. There’s a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

She touched the taper to the black folder, and it caught fire. She blew the taper out before the flame struck her fingers. But I didn’t let the folder go. The leather cover burned with a harsh sound like someone trying to hold back a cry between their teeth. Still I held the folder. I felt the skin on my fingers shrink. I watched words turn amber and float away.

I looked around my study and everything was just too damn cosy. The anodyne calm. The gentle, sputtering dance of the fire, and the books that towered all around me, their spines turned out. I couldn’t write down the echo of an exploded shell. I couldn’t smear the smell of the trench across the page. I couldn’t do this thing so that anyone could see what I meant. The things that had happened – things I laughed at when they crossed my mind – you can’t hold onto them too long, unless you want to go crazy. The dead don’t trouble me – dead is dead. It’s the ones who took impact and lived.

It says in the prospectus that Madame de Silentio’s students eat, sleep and breathe good husbandry. That’s true. We’re taught to ask ourselves a certain question when we wake up in the morning and just before we fall asleep: How can I make Her happy? ‘Her’ being the terrible, wonderful goddess that we must simultaneously honour, obey and rule (she’d like us to rule her sometimes, we’re told) – the future wife. In our Words of Love class we learn all the poems of Pablo Neruda by heart, and also Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields lyrics. Love Letters, a compulsory extracurricular course of study, involves a close reading of the letters of Héloïse and Abelard. Our Decisive Thinking examinations are conversations conducted before the entire class, and your grade depends not on the answer you give, but on the tenacity with which you cling to your choice. You earn a grade A by demonstrating, without a hint of nervousness or irritation, that you are impervious to any external logic. You earn an A+ if you manage this whilst affecting a mild and pleasant demeanour.

Under D he had written: Is real. Is unpredictable. Is lovely to hold. Loves me (says M). Doesn’t know me. Under M he had written: Is so many things – (too many things?). Is unpredictable. Is lovely to behold. Disapproves of me; wants more, better. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about me.

Love. I’m not capable of it, can’t even approach it from the side, let alone head on. Nor am I alone in this – everyone is like this, the liars. Singing songs and painting pictures and telling each other stories about love and its mysteries and its marvellous properties, myths to keep morale up, maybe one day it’ll materialise. But I can say it ten times a day, a hundred times, ‘I love you,’ to anyone and anything, to a woman, to a pair of pruning shears. I’ve said it without meaning it at all, taken love’s name in vain and gone dismally unpunished. Love will never be real, or if it is, it has no power. No power. There’s only covetousness, and if what we covet can’t be won with gentle words – and often it can’t – then there is force.