The fox's unseeing eyes still bore into mine, and as Hugo stepped back from his rough foraging to look at me, I blocked the fox from view with my body, leaning languid against the tree.
His eyes raked over me, hungry open maws of sight. He made to move toward me, his basket overflowing with an abundance of mushrooms dangling from his elbow. I did not flinch. I had been chewed up and spat out before. But a single oyster tumbled out of the basket, falling at his feet. His eyes darted down. Curses tumbled from his lips just as the mushroom just had. He crouched and picked up the singular mushroom, angrily brushing the excess dirt off it. He looked so vulnerable there, on his knees, cooing over the fallen thing as though he hadn't just violently torn it from its home moments before.
A rock sat right by the foxes' head, large enough to serve as its stony pillow, jagged enough that it could promise a painful and messy death. Her dead eyes smiled at me; her form less vulpine and more human the longer I stared at that rock and breathed life into her story. If the fox had hands and strength enough to lift it, would it have lived? Would her paws not be dipped in ice? Would she be here now, acting as my hands? My hands had already found their way to the rock, having leaned down as I had pondered those questions. I inched closer to Hugo, staring at the top of his head. I examined his receding hairline and the numerous nascent liver spots and silver hairs—it looked like pencil lines interrupted by a filthy and worn down eraser.
His eyes met mine then. I don't know how he didn't notice until I was already towering over him, rock gripped in both my hands, raised over my head. His eyes bore into me. Terribly blue eyes as death clung to me, whispering to me, "I'd never get them out of my hair—the leaves—the mushrooms—not until…. "
She sat at my shoulder, right there inside the memory of our house sitting quietly without him. A vision tailor made for me. Her tails unfurled; her teeth sharpened. Her gown of mushrooms was apparent and as white as the snow, taking on the quality of shaggy fur. Delicate like the tendrils of a medusa, she was a woman sitting on our porch. She was a fox sitting on my porch, her ears tipped with frost and twitching as leaves fell from our maple tree, never falling outside of the careful circle that we laid out for him.
What would I do without him? she asked.
Maybe spend that fall studying the weight of the leaves and measure them in the fade of green to withered brown. Gather them in piles, feel how they'd crumble to pieces in my hand—the crunch of their skeletons, soft and grainy in their collapse.