Maggie Damken

What he did to her in the meadow, only the foxes know.

All through the rest of the afternoon the foxes wait in the tall grass. The sunlight limns each blade with liquid gold and crimson blush. Purple night mushrooms across the sky, swallowing the coneflower and milkweed. Moonlight makes ghosts of the swaying leaves. With the impenetrable dignity of statues, the foxes wait. The black wind rustles the tufts of fur on the tips of their ears. The call of an owl moves through their bodies like a prayer.

The girl lays in the meadow where he left her.

The police do not find her.

Foxes are patient until they are not.

The foxes are not merely foxes. Yes, they have rustic backs and white bellies, long black legs and white puffs at the end of their tails, and eyes as old as Jurassic amber — but that does not mean they are foxes. They have the shape of foxes and the look of foxes but on their faces they wear masks.

Any creature that wears a mask is not limited to what it is perceived to be.

The first masked fox stands and peers down the meadow where the body of the girl still lay. Sometime later — although time matters little to the foxes until they have decided it has run out — a second fox stands, and the pair go walking through the tall brown grass.

The beetles and the flies wanted her, and so they claimed her. Such is the way of nature: in death all things are equal regardless of whether the death is just. Livid bruises clot her throat in thumb-sized prints. Blood speckles the corners of her mouth. Windblown hair scatters across her face. Her left arm, broken, bends back at the elbow. Her right palm opens toward the sky. The foxes know what happened because they watched it happen, but now they see what it means.

The foxes look at each other. In both of their bellies, the weight of their sacred duty unfurls. In both their eyes the light of primal rage simmers with a cold and unforgiving glare.

Somewhere there is a man who does not know that the foxes are coming for him, but they are coming nonetheless.

The foxes are not gods. They do not require homage. They do not receive prayer. They do not grant miracles. They do not fight amongst themselves or select favored humans or cast curses. They are not cruel or petty or jealous. They do not love or despair. They do not laugh. They do not exist to be believed in.

But they are not dissimilar to gods. They can change their shape. They can interact with humankind when they choose. They cannot create beginnings but they can create endings. They are not all-seeing but what they see is always true. They are not all-powerful but they do have power. They are not benevolent but they are not the opposite: the foxes are beyond debates of good and evil. They concern themselves only with what is fair.

Like all that which is holy, the justice of foxes exceeds mortal understanding. It does not seek mortal approval.

The foxes find him. He lives in a white house at the edge of a wood full of thin birches and sweet maples. Coils of smoke rise from the chimney into a sky as blue as the inside of a flame.

From behind the line of ancient trees, the foxes wait and watch. Inside, two young girls set the table for dinner and a woman opens the oven door. When the foxes make their decision, they remove their masks. Swaths of shadows roil across their faces like black mist on a lake, with rows and rows of tiny teeth that glimmer like stars. They roar back their heads and open the vicious spiral of their true mouths.

And then the foxes do what foxes do.

MAGGIE DAMKEN is a librarian-in-training and an emerging writer whose work has been previously published by Strange Horizons, Cease Cows, Breadcrumbs Magazine, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, and others.

Hilary Gan

I have just passed Picacho Peak along Interstate 10 on the way home to meet Shane for dinner, Tucson spread out before me in the dusk, when the sun grows so bright that the clouds turn black like an old film negative.

When I come to, I am picking glass out of my neck. My car has stopped halfway into the trunk of another car and all around me I hear the keening of half-naked humans like the screams of snared rabbits, bleeding from their burns, kneeling in the desert, pebbles sticking in their naked knees as black rain falls, hot and steaming onto our ironed bodies. I am keening, too, and I don’t even notice until I take a breath that tastes like metal on fire and the sound stops.

I smell my own skin burnt in the pattern of the small white flowers on my button-down shirt, flowers like scarlet tattoos over my breasts and down the line of my torso. I am saved where the shirt was blue, though the shirt itself is falling away in sticky threads like spiderwebs. I prefer the smell of my own charred being to the acknowledgement of the dead and dying spread before me.

This is my city and I know where the center is, where the lance was loosed, but I do not let myself think of it. I walk, for what else is there to do but keep moving forward? I hold the morningstars of my arms away from the forget-me-nots along my sides so that they will not chafe and lose their petals. I climb over the hot metal side of the train and walk, towards the center of the city, towards the source of the embers and blackness, opposite the way the living travel.

What does that make me?

A mile down the road under the darkened sky I see a woman trying to stuff her own intestines back into the hole in her guts with the hand that isn’t holding her shiny, red, dead child. I say, “There are helicopters coming to the city — they will take you to the hospital — you can make it to the helicopters.” I do not know if this is true but I think it should be true and so I say it.

She says, “No, I need to reorganize my closet,” and as she says it, congealed black blood oozes from her teeth and her body twitches and then she passes out. I leave a mother on the pavement holding her own intestines in with her child’s corpse because I cannot lift her without sobbing in agony at the pressure on my skin.

At the edge of the city, I see a man, upright on a bicycle that has fallen against a lamppost in the absence of forward motion, a man blackened except for the eyes, which have melted in their sockets. I steal his crispy shoes to keep my feet from bleeding as they drag along the asphalt and I rather suspect that he won’t mind, as he doesn’t need them. When I try to take them off his ankles crumble, though his feet are whole and I have to ease them out like the cardboard shapers at shoe stores. But all that happens when I wear them is that the blood from my legs and feet pools and makes it hard to walk and leaves spongy shoe-shaped blood footprints on the cement.

A living man approaches me when I get close enough to downtown to see that it does not exist, see the gradual slope of what was a tree-lined street running a bare trail down into the blast site. I don’t scream when he grabs my morningstar arm until I see his eyes are grey and then I feel the pain and make that keening sound, that same word.

“Lila!” he says like it is 1849 in California and my name is a precious metal.

I stop keening.

“No, I’m Lee,” he says.

“Lee,” I say, and he twists his hand around my arm and some of my skin sloughs off like she-loves-me-loves-me-not daisies. I don’t yell, but he lets go and stares at the piece of my skin in his hand, like a wallpaper sample, and then I know him. We were in love once, until — dear God, the world is ending, and I still run into my ex-boyfriend on the street at exactly the wrong time.

“Lee,” I say, and then I see he is covered in glass, shards of it sticking out of his right side. “Lee, I have to go home.”

“Lila,” he says. “That’s on Fourth Street.” He looks at me, more concerned than when my skin peeled off like an orange rind.

“Will you walk me home?” I ask.

“Lila, that’s on Fourth Street.” Then the pain of my body slips beneath the surface and I know what he means; he has turned his head to face the empty shells of buildings, towards downtown, hard to see in the ash and the dark. He is looking the way I was going. The wrong way.

“You can’t go home.”

There is no water in my body but I can feel my throat begin to close. “I know,” I say, and sit down, and I feel the skin of my buttocks stretch and tear as I hit the pavement. Truly, we are animals, and we will not know it until our bodies make us remember.

“Lila,” Lee says gently, and I hear myself say, “Shane — ”

And I wrap my morningstar arms around my ruined body, for I hadn’t just been keening like a dumb beast: I’d been calling his name.

HILARY GAN lives in St. Louis, MO, with her D&D-playing husband and terrifyingly curious toddler. Her major inspirations include Bob Dylan, Epictetus, Neko Case, trees, Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, an insistent orange cat named Harry, and an odd-but-loveably-goofy second set of claws named Bruce. Find more of her fiction and essays at www.hilarygan.com.

Josie Tolin

Every week that summer the old woman hobbled into my office with a huge bag and a new ailment. Her concerns were understandable at first. When she complained her heartbeat felt irregular, I held a stethoscope to her chest to check for palpitations. “It’s cold,” she said as I listened, so I breathed on the little metal circle and tried again.

“All normal,” I said. She blinked, picked up her bag, and left.

Late June she griped about the discoloration behind her ear. I shined my tiny white light on the problem area. A brownish lump stared back at me. “That’s a mole,” I said. I flicked off my flashlight and slid it into my pocket. “We’ll keep an eye on it to see if it changes shape.”

“I’ll see you next week then?” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder and darting out the door before I could tell her that wouldn’t be necessary.

She started to visit more frequently for even less pressing matters. “The weather is humid,” she’d say as she barged into my office. I’d ask her about her health, and she’d tell me everything was fine, except for her hair, which stuck up like a cockatoo’s in the damp heat. Her hair, she explained, was thick and wiry like her mother’s: that’s why she wasn’t balding like everyone else her age. I sighed and told her not to come in unless she had an illness and she stormed out and came back the next day with red pox Sharpied onto her arm.

“She won’t quit,” I told my wife over breakfast-for-dinner. I shoved a French toast stick into my mouth and chewed.

“Tell the secretary not to let her in.” My wife shrugged. “It’s a simple solution, really.” She chased a piece of scrambled egg around the plate with her fork, stabbing it, swallowing.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No,” I repeated. “I mean, what if something goes terribly wrong and I shoo her away and she dies because no one’s listening?”

My wife sat there, massaging the bridge of her nose.

“What’s in the bag?” I finally asked the old woman during her next visit. That morning, she’d forced me to sniff her toes three times before I convinced her there was nothing to worry about: feet just smell worse in the summer.

She pulled a sweater box from her tote as if she’d been waiting for me to ask. “A sweater box?” I said, crossing my arms, swiveling unimpressed in my doctor chair. She lifted the lid without answering. Inside was a dead cat with an open mouth, its fur caked and gnarled like the threads of an old bathmat. I turned to face the wall, taking the five deep breaths my therapist had recommended. When I swung back around she’d already stowed the box in her enormous bag. She’d looked docile then, cross-legged on the examining table with her hands folded in her lap.

“What the fuck?” I said. “Sorry, I mean, what the hell? Sorry, I mean — ”

The old lady didn’t flinch. “Like Schrödinger’s Cat, you know?”

I snorted. “You’re carrying around a dead animal, not a quantum physics theorem.”

“But in this moment you don’t know if it’s alive or dead.”

“I saw it. It’s dead. I know what dead things look like. It’s dead dead dead.”

“You don’t know that. The box is closed. The cat is out of your sight.”

“Show it to me again.”

“That won’t help my point.” The old woman stood to leave.

“You won’t believe what she did yesterday,” I said to my wife over dinner-for-breakfast. I twirled spaghetti around my fork, slurping the coil from its prongs.

“What?” my wife asked between milkshake gulps.

“She showed me her dead cat. She keeps it with her, boxed in her bag.”

My wife shrugged again. Those days, nothing surprised her. “She’s insane.”

“Yeah,” I parroted. “Really insane.”

My wife tapped her fingernails on the counter, waiting for me to say something else. I grabbed my car keys from their hook and left without making eye contact.

“The mole is changing shape,” the old woman said.

“Let’s see.” I grabbed my mini flashlight and shined it behind her ear. She was right — it’d grown from dime- to quarter-sized in a matter of months. I shivered.

August ended the day the melanoma biopsy read malignant. I walked her out to the exit sign. “Thanks,” I said, “for keeping me company this summer.” The words felt stupid even then, but I meant them, I think. The old woman looked down at her shoes and nodded.

She killed herself with the radio on in her bedroom that night, or so I was told by my secretary, whose cousin was friends with the neighbor who’d found her dangling from the ceiling fan. Small town news travels in a strange way.

It’s like she needed a doctor’s permission to die, I thought as I read the obituary in bed by lamplight. I placed the newspaper on my nightstand and told my wife what’d happened. She was grateful but wouldn’t say it. “Sometime soon,” she said, “we’ll go a night without talking about the bag woman. The bag woman was — the bag woman is — not so good for our sex life.” She slid in earplugs, rolled over, and pretended to sleep. I stared at the ceiling and thought about how every moment in my entire life had led to that one.

The old woman still wouldn’t leave me alone. I saw her in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth before bed and on the train to Chicago for a medical conference. One moment she was in the waiting room reading People magazine with her legs crossed. The next, she wasn’t. She was everywhere and nowhere. She was alive and dead.

JOSIE TOLIN is a flash fiction enthusiast and Indiana native. She holds a B.A. in English and Spanish from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor.