---

The Third Time I Saw a Fox

by Cécile Cristofari

 

“You know what I think, the world is going bonkers,”’ the circus man says.

I nod, draw a gulp of burning coffee from my thermos flask. A decent night watch needs to start with a little bitterness on the tongue, the first drink just a little too hot before the next cups fade to lukewarm. It’s the only excitement I’m afforded, after all. No one ever breaks into natural history museums.

“Who needs the world when we have this?” I say, encompassing the anatomy exhibits with a wave of the hand. “And the two of us, of course.”

The circus man nods, sagely. Even though I’m not looking at him, I can hear it from the creaking of his vertebrae, grinding against the copper wire that holds them together.

---

My shift always starts after the cleaning crews have left, and I always take my first walk alone around the quiet halls, as the ghost of another crowded day fades into the night. Some say I’m too old to be working night shifts, but I say I’m too old to stand by as hordes of school children squeal over dinosaur bones. Fake dinosaur bones at that, though children don’t realise they’re standing in front of casts.

It’s easier to tell real skeletons apart when night falls.

“Hello there,” the minke whale yawns. It stretches its big head left and right and sighs, a whisper of wind through polished jaws that snap uselessly, as if attempting to trap shoals of ghost fish in imaginary baleen. It must feel lonely here, hanging above the ground, floating in a make-believe sea. I pat its bony knuckle and walk on.

In the zoology gallery, discreet sounds emerge upon my entrance. Sawdust rustles from inside stuffed bodies, glass eyes whirr in their sockets. Their old bones move even more awkwardly than mine, but they acknowledge me nonetheless. They don’t make new stuffed specimens for natural history museums anymore. Resin models may look glossy and sprightly forever, but the night shows just how dead they are, in their perfection of plastic. All my friends here, posing on their mahogany stands, tired but still proud under their bald patches and protruding wires, are from another time. Just like me. The thought makes me grin, sometimes.

In their glass cabinets, ancient enough that the glass bends in places, the birds stretch the tips of their wings. Some of them groan the way I do when I wake up with stiff limbs on a cold morning. An albatross sways on the thread that holds it up, gliding in the same spot, day after day. I wave, nod, ask about their health. They tell me the same things every night, but I can tell they’re still pleased that I asked. They need distractions, just like all of us, and they have no one else to talk to.

Farther on, the leopard stretches its paw, lazily hanging from a fake branch, and rests it on my shoulder as I walk by.

“Nice evening, isn’t it?” I say, petting its front leg.

“A little damp for me,” it replies. “I feel bloated.”

Of course. All that sawdust stuffing won’t do well in damp weather. I turn down the humidifiers at once. The leopard nods its thanks.

I don’t know how long this nightly ritual has been going on. It seems that they’ve always been waiting for me, dormant by day but awake and already stirring the moment I come in, though part of my mind also holds the memory of a time, long ago, when I considered those night watches to be lonely and dreary. I’m not certain why I should pay attention to passing time anyway.

As I leave the gallery on my way to my favourite seat — next to the circus man, in the anatomy exhibits — I greet a fox sitting on a tuft of fake grass. It doesn’t greet me back. I raise my eyebrows and say it a little louder, but the fox doesn’t budge. A little miffed, I leave the hall.

---

“It’s just a grouchy old fox,” the circus man says. “It must make it grumpy to see those rabbits cavorting just outside its reach.”

He’s making sense, as usual. But I can do nothing about where the rabbits are set, alas. You’d expect the fox would know that. It’s rude of him to pretend it’s my fault.

“Strange creature,”’ I mumble.

It’s uncommon to meet foxes these days. They’re unpredictable, too; some of them will sit by your car, expectant, as if used to be given food, while others will scamper away as if they had been prey all their lives, not predators. I grin as a memory hits me.

“First time I saw a fox, I was not yet ten,”’ I say. “Had been walking in the rain for hours, trying to find mushrooms. It wasn’t a good day, I wasn’t in a good mood. And then I see this fox, right here on the path in front of me, with eyes as big as saucers.” I smile at my own words. It doesn’t sound like such an exceptional experience, when put like that. But the circus man keeps nodding, waiting for what comes next. “So we just stood there and stared at each other for a whole minute. He was thin as a rake. At some point I wondered if he was hungry enough to try and attack me. Then he just left.”

“Nice story,” the circus man says.

“Have you ever seen a fox?”

“You see a lot of things on the road,” he simply replies.

He doesn’t like to talk about his life, the circus man. It can’t have been happy. He was very tall, too tall for most ordinary jobs. He ended up on the road as a circus freak. Eventually he died of tuberculosis, or so the label under his glass case says. Once I told my friend that it pained me to know so little about his old life, and that all of it came from a shiny brass plate in a museum, but he kept silent. I think it pained him more, for some reason I’ll never know. I didn’t press the matter any further.

I don’t press him about foxes, either.

“There was this other time I remember,” I say. “Two other times, in fact.” I grin again. Three encounters with foxes in the wild. It sounds like something out of a fairy tale. “I was in the woods, looking for mushrooms. And all of a sudden, I saw this fox right before me, looking as if he had never seen a human in his life.”

The circus man cocks his head.

“Isn’t that the story you’ve just told me?” he says.

I stop. Pictures overlap in my head, the difference between them fading, like the logic of those half-dreams that come to you when you’re just starting to fall asleep. I frown.

“Same story, yes,” I say. “Sorry, mate. Got distracted.”

“Happens to everyone,” he replies. There’s something sceptical in his tone, though. But he changes the subject too fast for me to ask about it.

“I’m telling you, this world is going bonkers,” he says, and I nod.

---

Just before I leave the gallery the following night, I turn back to look at the fox. It’s just sitting there, empty-eyed. Yet there’s something in its gaze that almost feels like malice.

“Still sulking?” I say.

No answer comes. I shake my head and sigh. Really, those rabbits aren’t even right under its nose anyway. And they’ve always been there. Why would he start fussing about them now?

Why do you expect a dead animal to greet you?

I pause at the incongruous thought. There’s nothing dead here. Only old, rusty creatures, that nonetheless haven’t lost their will to live.

None of us have.

When I sit down next to the circus man, something comes back.

“So, that story I was going to tell you yesterday about the second time I saw a fox,” I say.

I can sense he’s happy that I’ve remembered. I am, too.

“We were going out for a picnic, my girlfriend and I. Driving in the woods to that spot I knew.” I’d felt like a regular woodsman that day, taking city-bred Louise along the forest road, although in truth, I would have been just as lost as she if it had come to surviving there for more than a day. “The weather was beautiful and I was head-over-heels in love. When we saw the fox by the side of the road . . . you should have heard her squeal.”

“I can picture it,” the circus man replies.

This is, I realise, one of the happiest memories of my life. I’d forgotten about looking cool and detached and started squealing along with Louise — who, as it turned out, much preferred this side of me anyway. The fox had been oblivious to us, only glancing our way while licking its skinny leg. We left after it trotted away, and ate sandwiches and blueberries in a clear patch between birch trees, all the while kissing and laughing and talking.

Innocence can’t last, precious and lovely as it is. We parted ways one day as quickly as we had fallen in love, over a misunderstanding I couldn’t even remember. I lost track of her after she got married, and went on to build a family of my own, then another. All my life, however, the memory of our pristine infatuation flickered over the faces of the women I met, until there were no women left, just children who didn’t call often enough and the memory of young love, lost.

Regret is what I should feel right now, I suppose. Or I could be wise and observe that my past is just another of those things that make up who I am; I might as well regret having hands or ears. I feel neither wistfulness nor bittersweet peace. What really bothers me is that I can’t picture Louise anymore in my mind. All I get is the fox, and the blur of our combined laughter.

“It’s terrible that happy memories can become the saddest ones to remember,” my friend says, with unexpected gentleness.

I gulp down some coffee. Terrible, yes. That’s probably why the memory wouldn’t even come back yesterday. I’m too old to be pained by recollections of a happy youth.

---

On every one of the following nights, as I tour the museum before turning off the lights in the exhibits, I stop by the fox. It never blinks. Once I even try moving two of the stuffed rabbits around, to their gentle protests, but get no reaction. There is no expression in its glass eyes. The emptiness I see there has its own depth, though, like murky waters where too much silt prevents you from feeling the bottom.

When I walk out of the gallery, I’m loath to turn my back on it. Dead thing, something in me whispers, as if it made sense. Just a couple of weeks ago, the fox greeted me at night just like all the others. It’s uncanny that when I try to remember its voice, its words, however, they keep eluding me. I suppose it never was a talkative creature.

“Didn’t you say you had three memories of foxes in the wild?” the circus man once says.

Did I say that? I don’t answer for a while. Three, like fairy tales. Yes, that’s right. There was a whiff of the otherworldly every time, I remember that well. Except that when I attempt to recount them, they sound trite to my own ears.

“That’s right,” I say. I force my face into a grin. The circus man never has to make any efforts to smile. My skin feels like the remnants of his, stretched and dry over yellow teeth. I close my lips, shake my head. Good memories.

“There was that time when I was picking mushrooms in the rain,” I say. “I’ve told you about this one, right?”

A creaking nod answers.

“Then that other one with Louise. She was so beautiful that day.” And every day after that, though we spent too few of them together.

Another nod. He knows about that one, too.

“Then the third time . . .”

I pause. It was right here. A moment ago, it was obvious, fully formed in my mind.

I close my eyes and join my hands in front of my face. Is this one of those nightmares when you think you’ve woken up, only to find yourself in another, stranger construct of your brain? The cup of coffee warms my skin, just a touch too hot to be comfortable, as real as one could feel. The memory, on the other hand, has evaporated like a dream.

“I don’t know what’s going on with me, old boy,” I whisper. It sounds like I’m starting to cry.

There’s a shift in the glass cabinet next to me. I glance to see the circus man move his arm. Slowly, awkwardly, he raises his hand towards me. His bony fingers scratch the glass and he makes a frustrated, helpless little groan. I lean on the cabinet and feel the vibrations of his bones that creak against the pane where he moves his hand up and down, trying to pat my shoulder through it.

It takes me unexpectedly long to compose myself. The coffee is cooling in my hand. I drink the tepid brew that’s no longer comforting.

“Do you reckon,” I say, as steadily as I can, “maybe I could ask them not to bury me at all when I’m gone?”

“And just leave you there? What for?”

“Maybe they could embalm me instead. And put me in here.” I tap the cabinet. “We can chat all we want then. Just the two of us. Wouldn’t that be fine?”

The answer doesn’t come straight away.

“You know,” my friend says at last, “embalming doesn’t work that good. They left one of those Egyptian mummies here once, remem —” He stops. I can almost hear him bite his parched lips. “Well, that was a while ago. Before your time, I reckon.” I don’t remember it, no. But I’m glad he would tell me about something that happened before I met him. He so rarely does, and now this is just what I need. “Anyway. Poor chap couldn’t even move his neck. With all the fuss they make about Egyptian embalmers, there’s one simple thing they never figured out. You don’t get younger, ever.” He makes a cackling sound. “Especially when you’re dead.”

“You’re not dead,” I protest. And then the sight of the dried-out remnants of his skin, stretched like a membrane over the huge expanse of his body, hits me like a slap. I take my head in my hands.

A horrible, irrational fear of walking back through the museum courses through me like fever. Behind closed eyelids, I feel the glass eyes of the fox bore into my soul. There’s nothing behind those eyes, only a growing pit. Dead. Old dead things. I start to whimper.

“Bernard?”

The word comes from very far away. I’m certain it means something. I have it right here.

“Bernard? Hey, it’s all right. Don’t be so upset. Come on, old friend.”

And then it comes back. Bernard. I turn my head towards the cabinet. The circus man leans forward, its hand on the glass.

“Yes, that’s me,” I say, and smile. “It’s all right. I felt dizzy, that’s all.”

Bernard. No, it’s not like I was beginning to forget my own name. Bernard Gagnon. I was only scared, that’s all. I am Bernard Gagnon. I’ve always been.

The thought is so satisfying I feel an urge to get a piece of paper and write it in capital letters. I am Bernard Gagnon. I’ve never doubted that for a second.

“What are you doing?” the circus man asks.

I put down the pen and read the words again. I am Bernard Gagnon. What a simple, beautiful truth. I put the piece of paper in my breast pocket.

“You should go home,” he gently says. “You need some rest. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Home. Yes, that’s what one does when one starts crying in the middle of their work shift. November is never kind on anyone.

“You’re right,” I say, and get up, grinning. “I should go home. Can’t keep Louise waiting for me all night.”

---

Three times I saw foxes in the wild, encounters that smelled of magic, such a fragile sort of magic that even talking about it could destroy it.

Or maybe chasing memories is like looking at the stars. Stare at them and they’ll disappear. Catch them from the corner of your eye and they’ll strike you in all their brightness. Except that for untrained eyes, this is the best way never to see the stars; as soon as you’ve caught something, you can’t help staring at it, and then, unavoidably, it escapes your grasp.

The following night, the minke whale, the albatross, the snake swimming inside its jar, all of them greet me with a worried air. I hurry past the fox without looking at it. The circus man is the only one who doesn’t look distressed.

“You were right to take a few days off,” he says. “Feeling better?”

I grin.

“Ten years younger, you mean,” I say.

And then I stop. The circus man stares ahead, tense and silent, and I pick up his hint and turn around.

There is someone in there. For a moment I am too shocked for words. I haven’t had human company in the museum in . . . in . . .

It’s a middle-aged woman I know, mousey hair, grey jacket, sensible shoes. We work together. Or at least we both work here. She’s never shared my watches, that’s for certain.

“Bernard? What are you doing here?”

Friendly, concerned even. Still, I frown.

“Hello to you too,” I say.

Beside me, the circus man remains still, in appalled silence. She has the grace to look embarrassed.

“Good evening, Bernard. Sorry. I wasn’t expecting to find you here.”

Still that gentleness in her voice, as if she’s attempting not to frighten me. A picture flashes in my head, a fox staring under drizzling rain, taut, ready to dart away. We eye each other cautiously.

“Why didn’t you expect me here?” I say, trying to sound genial, though in truth, her intrusion is as irritating as it is unsettling. “This is my schedule. I’ve never missed a day in all my time here. You know that.”

She sighs. Now she straightens her back. I don’t remember what she does here, but she must be some sort of manager. She expects me to listen. I do, but only out of courtesy.

“You were in the hospital, Bernard,” she says. “For the last five days. Someone called an ambulance for you while you were . . .”

She trails off. Now I’m angry.

“While I was what? What hospital, anyway?”

But just as I speak, a new, foggy picture forms in my mind: unknown parts of the city under yellow lights, cars flickering by, high brown walls, all looking similar. Cries for help echoing around, like a small boy begging for his parents, only it was not a child’s voice but a man’s, a shaky male voice I knew but could not place.

I finger my breast pocket. There’s a piece of paper there, all crumpled. I remember a voice reading, word after word, “I am Bernard Gagnon.” That must be the person who stuck that in my pocket. What for, I cannot imagine. Of course I know who I am. Did they mean to make fun of me? People like to make fun of solitary old men. Yet they seemed so kind, their voices so reassuring, when they helped me on that gurney and into the car, under revolving lights.

“After you got lost on your way home,” she says.

I don’t know if she’s trying to play a joke on me. Then I realise that she’s not laughing, not even suppressing a mischievous flicker around the eyes. Hospital. A long straight corridor, painted green, flickers on and off in my brain. A steel bed. I’ve never liked steel beds at home, reminds me too much of a . . .

“I’m certain you’ll be better very soon,” she says, softly. “But now you’re supposed to be resting. At home. I was coming to show your substitute around.”

But this is home, I think. “This is my home,” a voice echoes, a thin whimper of a voice that sounds like my own.

Unexpected pain seizes my throat. There is pain in the woman’s eyes, too. I turn to the circus man. Explain to her, I want to say. Tell her I’ve never been away, never lost my way home, this is all a misunderstanding, we were right here all along, the two of us, drinking coffee and chatting the night away. If I’d been lying helpless in a steel bed, behind the walls of the hospital, surely my friend would have noticed? But the circus man can only stare in dismay as the woman lays a gentle hand on my arm and leads me away from him.

---

Once I saw a fox while picking mushrooms in the forest. I was a child then. I had a happy childhood, a very unremarkable one.

The second time, I saw a fox while driving through the woods with my girlfriend Louise. I had an unremarkable adulthood, of the sort that flies past leaving behind more disappointments than memories.

The third time . . .

My name is Bernard Gagnon. My best friend is a dead circus freak who waits in a glass cabinet between other museum specimens. I hope I’ll never be buried. I hope they’ll put my body in the glass cabinet beside him. People will gape at us, the giant and the short, thin old man. They’ll notice me for the first time and I’ll grin an endless grin in response. Maybe one day my children will walk by and say “Hi, Dad.” Maybe Louise will walk by and recognise my smile even if she doesn’t recognise my bones.

None of this will ever happen. They say I’m too old and worn to work. They’ve sent me home. There’s no sweetheart waiting and no children visiting and the nurse is kind to me but she doesn’t know me nearly as well as my old friends did and one day she’ll stop even pretending that what I tell her makes sense and I’ll have nothing left but . . . memories . . .

And then they’ll find my lonely old body one morning and they’ll put me in a grave and I’ll be all alone, falling and falling and falling forever, with the empty glass eyes of a dead, stuffed fox staring at my back.

---

Out of kindness perhaps, or because everyone can forget things that don’t matter much, they didn’t take my badge from me.

I take one last stroll through the museum in the wee hours of the morning. My friends are weary, but they say their enthusiastic goodbyes all the same. The minke whale settles back in its iron braces. It has another long day ahead of it, weathering squealing children and amateur naturalists by the hundreds.

“Take it easy, my friend,” I say.

“Always do,” is the answer.

My last stop is in the anatomy exhibit. The circus man sees me come in. His grin stretches on his lips, tinged with a sadness I don’t have the heart to dispel.

He knows I’m not coming back.

“Tell them about me,” I say. “We’ve had some pretty good times, haven’t we? Some good memories we have together. Next time you make friends, you tell them all about us.”

“I’ll do that,” he says. As I turn around, he adds, “And if we ever meet again, you’ll tell me about that third time you saw a fox. I’m dying to hear about it.”

I chuckle. He cackles.

“I promise,” I say, though I have no idea what he’s talking about.

It’s not dawn yet when I leave the museum. The slush and dirt of November have dyed the pavement brown. I walk through a city that’s just waking up, under maples whose leaves have turned from their vivid reds and yellows of September to a dull russet colour.

It has been a long time since I last drove a car. I remember how, though. It’s a long drive away from the city, longer yet to get away from the sparse houses dotting the last suburbs. When the sun rises, I open my window. It turns chilly at once, and the first light of the day makes patches of snow glitter by the side of the asphalt.

When I was a child I liked to wander away from the path. I never went far; I knew the depths of the woods could swallow me whole. There is no path by the side of this road. I step through the undergrowth, brushing young snow against my trousers.

Light filters through the trees and only birds break the silence. It’s been so long since I’ve seen anything like this, wildlife that hasn’t been trussed, dried up, filed and neatly arranged in cabinets and galleries, with tidy labels underneath. The crisp scent of the snow, cold air on my cheeks, rustling branches, all spells peace and quiet, yet the slightest sensations are overwhelming in their presence. A bird, bursting with energy, takes flight and sends snow cascading through the needles of the tree it was perched in, and the whole tree shakes like a chime. A whiff of breeze stings my cheeks, wakes up warm blood through my skin as if a sudden spring had melted it from its sleep. The rays of the sun branch and snake through bare boughs and dark needles until they caress my face, like a golden vine, like a delicious wine warming my throat all the way down. Everything is boundless, alive. Everything is trilling, crackling, humming, whispering. I hadn’t known what I’d been missing, how much I’d been missing it. If I stood in front of a glass case, I could tell five species of albatross apart, but I cannot recognise the trees from my own childhood when their boughs are close enough to graze my hands and my neck. And it’s all right. The trees welcome me all the same, and let me breathe in their life, overtaking any need for words, any lingering fear.

I walk into the woods, slowly, taking in every scent, every birdsong. With every step I try to send my mind back in time for precise memories of the forest, and with every step I fail. Yet I remember, completely, organically, as if I had never been inside the woods, but the woods had always been inside me.

In a clearing, I pause to drink the last of my coffee flask, the only drink I took on that trip. And then I see it.

The fox sits on its haunches and watches me with narrow, yellow eyes. I stop moving. It makes a small jerking motion, as if to run away, then stops. In its gaze, I read curiosity, wariness, perhaps annoyance at being surprised on its own grounds.

My grin spreads on my face like an invigorating brew in my blood. The third time I saw a fox in the wild, I was lost in the woods, too far away from home to ever hope to return. We stared at each other for nearly a minute. The whole forest was alive with invisible rustles, with the cold glitter on the ground, pins and needles in the breeze that made my blood rush with the exhilaration of life, life everywhere, never extinguished, only dormant through the winter until it bloomed again. I could feel snow under my feet and I was happy, happier than I had been in years.

Then the fox cocks its head at something I cannot hear and darts into the trees.

Still dizzy with happiness, I follow it, my footsteps disappearing in moss and crumbling snow, off the road, off any trail known to me or anyone else, and we sink into the wilderness.

 

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Third Time I Saw a Fox” by Cécile Cristofari, and if you enjoyed that then the most obvious place to start would seem to be her collection, Elephants in Bloom, from Newcon Press, comprising 18 short stories previously published in venues such as Lackington’s, Metaphorosis and Andromeda Spaceways, as well as this story and the eponymous short. There’s also a number of stories linked from her website, staywherepeoplesing.wordpress.com

Cécile sent us these notes on today’s story: “This story was inspired by the songs by Quebecois folk band Beau Dommage and its frontman Michel Rivard. Two of these songs commemorate historical figures from Québec: Édouard Beaupré, who worked in Barnum’s circus as one of the tallest men in the world and whose remains were later exhibited in a natural history museum, and filmmaker Claude Jutra, who battled Alzheimer’s disease in his last years. The third celebrates the healing powers of the woods. My own memories of living and working in Québec are intertwined with these recollections.”

Thank you, Cécile, for the context and the story. As I said up top, this feels like a more honest sort of tale for this time of year. I am not one prone to go along with the forced optimism and jollity for a new year ahead–in all honesty I am often deliberately contrary when others try to impose a mood or outlook on me, likely one more manifestation of the PDA profile of the autism–and have never much gone along with the idea of new year’s resolutions, either, because the division of our calendar feels like a fairly arbitrary point in our solar orbit and if I want to make a change I can make it any damn time I please, thankyouverymuch. Winter is also, naturally, a more depressing time of year, with little sunlight or fresh air, little to mark the passage of time as compared to the changes we see in plants and weather across the other three seasons, and so it feels like it goes on unendingly: but I also don’t think that’s necessarily a problem, because we ought, as humans, to feel the full range of emotions, and learn to sit in the uncomfortable ones, so that our lives can have that fuller texture, the contrast necessary to properly appreciate the lighter emotions.

I am pretty sure my therapist doesn’t listen to the podcast–though it’d be a goldmine for her if she did–so I think I’m safe to confess that I never did get round to reading the book she recommended, The Happiness Paradox. (And if you are listening, I’m sorry! You know how busy I’ve been!) Partly, though, that’s because I already agree with its thesis: that the pursuit of happiness is antithetical to actually achieving happiness, particularly as it results in so often focusing on the negatives that stand in your way, the things you don’t have, can’t do, and can’t control; and also, that “happiness” should not be a default state we aim to exist in permanently, and that doing so only results in “happiness inflation” as we grow accustomed and inured to our current situation and seek ever higher highs.

Better, instead, to focus on the emotions and actions you can control: gratitude, and generosity. Better to build towards happiness from the bottom up, with sturdy foundations of community and being present in the moment that will arise from those two, rather than trying to self-impose it from the top down and finding it crumbles under the pressure and was an illusion plastered over the top of reality. And I think that’s what Cécile shows us here: even amongst his regrets and his losses, Bernard still focuses on greeting everyone else in his strange community, on listening to them and respecting their stories and their boundaries. He is grateful to have the friend he has in the circus man, and generous with the time he gives him.

So yes, we start our year with regret and sorrow and wistfulness: with thoughts of what was lost, not what could be gained. But I think this is the more truthful approach to life, and the one that leads to happiness’ less showy, but more reliable cousin, the one that you can exist in honestly and naturally: contentedness.

Happy new year.