The Shape of a Fox

They weren’t close friends, but Alys was willing to do Joan a favour: a temporary house-swap, so Joan could get out of the city and work on her poetry. 

Joan’s flat is a sweaty sterile box. Alys slumps on the sofa and pictures Joan arriving in her cottage, savouring the cool grey stone walls. Later, Joan will follow the streams through the woods. Her blonde curls will spiral across Alys’s pillows. Alys's home will nourish Joan's art. 

On a video call that night, Joan demands: “Have you been into town, yet?”

“Not yet.” Alys has discovered that Joan’s flat is forty minutes from the city centre by fume-filled bus.

“Go in tomorrow! There’s an amazing show at the Tate Modern. And did you figure out the TV?”

"Yes,” Alys lies. She has not conjured the wall of black glass into life. 

“I’ve got too many subscriptions, but at least you can catch up!” Joan speaks as though Alys has got the better side of the bargain. 

“How's your poetry?”

“I've written loads, actually.” 

“Fantastic!”

“There’s nothing else to do, here.”

Alys imagines, in a rush, everything she would do if she were there. "Have you been down to the village? There’s a pub, and the church has carvings on the pew-ends. And you should go up to the hillfort...”

“You're on mute,” Joan laughs. “You’re waving your arms around and I can’t hear you.”

†

That night there's a voice outside, yowling for hours, shrill and desperately sad.

It wakes Alys three times. For the first two, coming to consciousness in an unfamiliar bed, she is paralysed by confusion. The third time, by cowardice. It could be someone injured or someone drunk and dangerous. 

Shame nudges her to tug back the curtain. No people to be seen. In the road is a traffic cone, or a garden gnome. It turns its head to look at Alys, revealing a long muzzle, its curved silhouette suddenly unmistakable. A fox like a chess piece, sitting upright on the centre-line of the road.

†

The next day Alys finds a local park with a layer of nature like the thinnest scrape of butter. Sitting on the yellow grass she can sense the rubble underneath, the tree at her back despairing that its roots are thwarted, that it will never attain its full height.

Even in the park, there’s noise: amplified pop, overhead planes. One beep is so insistent that Alys hunts for the source: a starling in a bush, imitating a ringtone. The noise follows Alys back to the flat. Car horns, pings from devices —she should ask Joan what they mean. Are they a warning?

Just as Joan appears on her phone there’s a cacophony, a grinding collision of metal.

“Jesus, sorry, I think there’s an accident. There's this graunching noise...”

“Oh, don’t worry, that’s the trains.”

“Wow. I’ll call back when it’s stopped.”

“It’s OK, I can't hear it. The software filters out anything that isn’t a voice.”

The train subsides. Outdoors, someone screams.

Joan’s face lights up. “Aw, I can hear the fox, though!”

“God, I heard it last night! Like someone being murdered.”

“I bet you didn't check, though.” 

“I did, I—" 

“You should go for a walk to see the foxes.” 

“Now?”

“You’ll love them. They sit in garden gateways. Say hello from me!” 

“I will. How's the writing?”

"Not much today. It’s too quiet.”

†

It’s better at night, the heat more bearable. Alys immediately sees him, prowling around a wheelie bin. Magnificent, muscular, ginger under the streetlight. He leaps up, hoicks back the bin-lid with his teeth and sets to ripping the bags inside. 

Alys closes the gap between them to twenty feet, ten feet. The white tip of his tail glows bright as a star. A delicious tension: wanting to get closer, knowing that he will sense her and run. Five feet. He won’t leave his man-made prey, gulps down kitchen scraps with relish.

“Hello,” Alys murmurs. “You’re beautiful.” 

He raises amber eyes. He should be a welcome sight, a wild thing in this unnatural city. And he should be afraid, acknowledging her as the more dangerous animal. His complacency displaces Alys, knocks her off the top spot. A car whizzes past. He doesn’t care, barks once then buries his muzzle deep in the bin, leaving Alys to turn tail and stalk away.

†

“I went into town, today.” The exhibitions had been interesting but the bus was an oven. Alys has turned off the camera so the resentment won’t show on her face, but she can’t keep it out of her voice.

Joanie is equally curt. “Look, if you’re not enjoying yourself, you can come home.”

“But you shouldn't have to leave. Your writing...”

“Well, I could stay on. For a bit. If you don’t mind.”

Alys is flirt-blind but the quality of the silence that follows suggests to her: that was a romantic proposal. But if Joan wants to be with Alys, why did she suggest this house-swap, where they’re exactly as far apart as usual? 

Alys tries to remember: did Joan say, can I use your cottage? Or was it can I STAY at your cottage? Has there been a ludicrous misunderstanding?

Teasing Alys’s ear is the sound of a kettle boiling, dropping and re-starting, reaching a high keening whine. This time she knows who to blame. Viewed through the window, many foxes lie in the road, stretched full length to soak up the heat from the tarmac. One of them rolls over and screams, setting off a ripple of retaliatory snaps and snarls. 

“Why do they make so much noise?” Alys asks.

“Really?”

“Really!”

“Because they’re having sex!” Joan snaps. “Honestly, you're so naive.”

Alys doesn’t hang up as she leaves the flat, but expects at any moment that her phone will drop the Wi-Fi and lose Joan. 

The squabbling has ceased. They should be territorial predators, but they lounge together in a carpet of fur. The city has made them unlike themselves.

"Think of fresh dawns in the high woods,” Alys says to the foxes. “And rabbit fur and blood.”

“What?” Joan’s voice still comes from the phone, hanging loosely in Alys’s hand. 

One fox looks Alys’s way, then yawns with a vast stretch of jaw. What’s a rabbit? Is it like a cat? Small, stringy? I’m not eating that. The call of nature is as faint as a siren on the ringroad.

Alys lowers herself to sit cross-legged amid the carpet of foxes. She puts the phone back to her ear. 

“I want to come back to the flat,” says Joan. “The writing's dried up.” She doesn’t suggest that Alys should stay on at the flat, that they could overlap for a while. The possibility of romance has also dried up.

“Yeah, I want to come home, too,” Alys says, feeling thick warm fur under the fingers of her spare hand, a ribcage lifting in quick pants. “Tomorrow?”

“I can't hear you,” says Joan. 

“I want to come home!”

“You're not on mute. I can still hear the foxes.”

Alys knows what the problem is. Her voice isn’t human enough; the software is filtering her out.

© 2025 E. Saxey

E. Saxey is a queer Londoner who works in universities. Their works include a slab of Gothic/folk horror (Unquiet, Titan) and a collection of queer weird short fiction (Lost in the Archives, Lethe Press). Other fiction has appeared in Giganotosaurus, Blood in the Bricks (Newcon Press) and The Crawling Moon (Neon Hemlock).