Fox

He’s a boy of unnatural beauty, perhaps seventeen, leading his mule by the bridle. You see the sweat glimmering beneath his dark hair, his shirt and trousers woven from coarse hemp and clinging to his chest, his stomach, his legs. As he passes your studio, you catch his eye. He greets your gaze with a smile like a ripped seam. “I’ll bite your head off, old man.”

You’ve heard worse from other passersby, have had bandits attempt to burgle, intimidate, molest you. Still you live here on this lonely mountain road. For someone like you, it’s the only safe place to reside.

The boy continues on his way and you watch his silhouette evaporate into the distant sunset, water on red silk. You wait until the sun descends fully below the horizon before retreating inside, the memory of his sweat keeping you company through the cool night.

In the days that follow, you carry out your work. You’re a scholar, unofficially, and you spend your time up here reading from your collection of finely-calligraphed scrolls, unrolling them across the wood planks, dictating them in different voices, pretending you’re many people, a whole party, instead of just one lonely man. You recite the jokes with an affected accent and laugh heartily, compliment yourself, then cry fat tears at the tragedy of it all. When you aren’t reading, you’re gardening or brewing tea or sunning yourself by the well or sleeping. Sometimes, on particularly lonely days, you try to write your own stories, but they never want to take shape. You have nothing worth saying and you never get farther into your work than three strokes of the brush. You keep the ruined scrolls in a separate room of your studio, careful never to count them all lest you fall down dead from despair.

Sometimes you interact with passing strangers, to offer a polite nod or to exchange something from your garden, bartering for pretty knick-knacks, fans and paper dolls that, once the stranger has passed, you stuff into your mouth and grind and swallow. You don’t know why you do this. It’s always unpleasant, the taste of paint and the crunching of frail wood between your teeth.

You’ve grown older and fatter since coming to this place and you feel like maybe you’re fading away, that one day you’ll wake up as a katsua tree, clinging to the mountainside. Your tears will fall down as leaves and their scent will drift up to you, burnt sugar and loam.

You blink your eyes and it’s a different day and he’s back in front of you, the boy, walking along the same road with the same tired mule and the same bright eyes. He catches your gaze and runs a finger across his sweat-slick throat. “Fat, old man,” the youth barks. “I’m hungry, you know. You’ll wake up in my belly one of these days.”

You don’t say anything. A fly lands on the bridge of your nose and, after a moment of boredom, buzzes away.

You try to write something that night, something about the boy. You begin with a long stroke down the page, curved at the base, followed by a second, long stroke, its mirror. You’ve written a man. Hesitating only slightly, you bring it to your nose and sniff deeply, but he only smells of paper. You toss him aside with the others.

A routine begins between you and the boy, who begins to make a habit of appearing on the road at least once a week, always strolling in the same direction, dragging his mule alongside.

“A fat old thing like you would feed my family for two months,” he spits.

“Settle something for me, old man: which is more tender, your thigh or your breast?”

“You’re melting, fat man. The heat is turning you to grease.”

Each time he speaks, you take your inspiration to the scroll, draw more men, forked stick figures that you breathe in, press to your face so they stain your cheeks like whiskers.

One day, the boy passes and says nothing, only hisses at you and leaves his mule in the road to spit on the ground between your toes. This is the closest he’s ever come to you. You can smell the musk hanging about him, the sweat steeped into his clothes. He smells like wild animal and you shudder from this brief closeness.

That night, you stroke another man into being and bring him to your nose, find yourself crumpling the paper into a ball and stuffing it between your teeth. You chew slowly, thoughtfully, and swallow. Soggy paper slugs down your throat. You lick your lips, imagine them black with words you didn’t write.

You start losing weight, not from eating less. No matter how many vegetables you harvest or rabbits you snare in your traps, you can’t seem to grow heavier. Your stomach caves inward; your thighs turn to sticks, your skin to leather. At first, the change is only physical and you carry on as ever, speaking with the strangers outside, bartering for paper, ink, news. The boy still passes, still calls you fat as though he can’t see you’re wasting away, as though his disdain ever mattered, as though his words might make you want him less.

Your energy starts to fade. Your feet take root by your writing desk and you don’t open the door any more, even for the boy. You bend over your papers, the last of your stash, and you trace men onto the surface until you have a row, a crowd, a legion. You stroke until your own pointy lines, your own inverted Vs, begin to look less and less like men, begin to look the pointy chins of foxes frolicking in snow.

The final bristles fall from your brush and stick in the ink. You pull out chunks of your hair and, with pinched fingers, continue to draw men. Your hand cramps into an animal shape and you chuckle because, on the wall, the shadow snaps its jaws and laughs too.

Your lantern goes out. Your house grows cold. You’re too tired to move, your arms and legs stiff save for the miniscule strokes of your fingers.

When next you wake, he’s there, the boy, but he’s not the same. He hasn’t brought the mule with him, for one thing, must have left it outside your house along with his clothes. His pale body glistens in the daylight streaming through the crack in your door, shines off his skin in such an otherworldly way as to finally indicate that he is not entirely human, never has been.

“Look at the old man, gnarled over his work. What have you been writing?” Delicately, he slips one of the papers from beneath your stiff finger, brushing against you, sending waves of pleasure rolling through the scraps of your stomach. He reads silently, eyes scanning the men, the foxes, mouth creeping into a small grin at the same time as your own.

“Would you like me to take you to bed, ogre?” the boy asks. “Would you like for me to climb onto you, to sit atop your fat chest?”

You would like this very much and, feebly, you nod. Taking his time, the boy pries your body loose from the chair, picks you up in his lithe, naked arms, and carries you to your bedroom. You cling to his neck and the wild animal smell soaks you through to the bone.

The boy lays you down on your bed of woven rope and closes the door. You stiffen further. You realize your hand is still tracing men in the air.

The boy approaches and climbs on top of you, takes a seat on your chest. “You’re a pig of a man,” he says, staring down at you. “I’m going to sink myself into your flesh. I’m going to fill my belly full of you until your bones shine white and my stomach bulges. You’ve wasted yourself on me, old man. Does it feel good?”

It does, strangely, and even if it didn’t, your body is too far gone. You’ve almost given yourself over to him entirely, this boy, and you want to finally finish something, for once. Your animal hand snaps open and closed.

The boy smiles. You can see the whiskers poking from his pores now, feel the fur of his tail sweep across your legs. “I’ll try to make it bearable,” he says and leans forward to begin.