1. Summer, Season of the Fox
I was coming up the stairs when I realized you would die. It came suddenly. One moment I was twirling action figures, lost in an imaginary world of heroes and villains, the next tears were falling down my cheeks. The whole world, buoyed by the freedom of summer, shrank like a deflating balloon. The leaves that filled the living room window now seemed to taunt me with their green pomp. How dare they be so bright, so alive. How dare they be so cruel.
I was tired of cruelty. You had already told me about our neighbor, Arry, who spent his spare time hunting foxes with his pack of blathering beagles. I knew cruelty by the sound of those beagles, their constant howling and whining. Lying on my bunk bed at night, I would see them–– the drooping jowls trailing a petrified fox, snapping and tearing at the gleaming red coat.
Now it seemed to me that the beagles were coming for you too, with your wavy red hair and foxlike independence––that someday they would ride through the woods and drag you off into the night. And Arry would be sitting on his black horse, smiling.
“Can’t we do anything to stop them, Momma?”
“Don’t worry, Monkey, Arry will be in big trouble if those beagles come on our property.”
When you saw that this didn’t stop the tears, you added, “Why don’t you use that trick I taught you for making a wish? Set those darn hounds down in writing, then bury the page so deep in the ground not even a beagle could sniff it out.”
And so a poem was born, a spell to ward off mortality, to bury death itself:
The beagles will never catch the fox
The fox will chase Arry away
Momma is queen of all the foxes
She will live forever and never ever die.
2. Bandit of the Autumn Road
You told the architect you wanted it to feel like we were living in the woods. You never said forest, always woods, relishing the vowels with your Southern drawl. Wuuuds.
The walls you painted the color of the Luna moths that clung and fluttered against the screen doors. The windows you made so big that the trees seemed to lean inside––the beech leaves like eyes watching while I played in my room, the oaks standing like butlers while we ate at the dinner table, the dogwoods shaking with laughter when I poured dish soap into the house painter’s sandals.
As I got older, the trees did more than watch––they called, dangling like fishing lines over the glass, luring me into the woods. Always it was the uphill side that beckoned. Downhill felt contained, known, finite. I could imagine where it terminated in the gravel road that we took to school. Ah, but that mountain, above all in autumn, when the glowing floor of fallen leaves seemed to lead to some enchanted kingdom on its peak.
I begged you to release me and one day you did, the way a doe releases her fawn, “Ok, Monk, you can go, but not too far.”
I panted with excitement up the leafy knob, pausing now and then to turn over a lichen-covered stone and examine an alien world of millipedes, beetles, and earth worms as big as baby snakes. Up and up, I climbed, forgetting how you stood waiting, listening for my steps, your heart breaking the moment I disappeared behind a wall of autumn leaves.
I must have been halfway up the hill when the rusty barbed wire fence caught me, a remnant of some forgotten property line sagging under the weight of a fallen tree. The blood trickling down my calf was too red to be real, the pain too sharp and tingly. I was paralyzed, terrified that if I took another step I would be barbed again, or, worse, caught in some monster’s jaws. The pain spun into panic when I realized I didn’t know the way back home.
Then you broke the spell, your singsong call rising from below, “Monkey, Moooonkey.”
3. The Wounded Owl of Winter
We had already been on the phone for an hour when you brought up the owl.
“So I went out into the backyard and there was this gorgeous barn owl just lying in the snow under the spruce tree.”
I shifted on the couch, my attention flitting between the pandemic projects scattered around my apartment. More water for the row of seedlings on the windowsill? Another fluffy toy on Amazon for the newly adopted cats? Another virtual writing workshop on Zoom? Yes, a writing workshop…
“Stop me if you don’t want to hear this or you need to go.”
“No, no, go on,” I said, masking my impatience, the resentment that our conversations had become so long and one-sided since the pandemic, each one leaving me feeling more distant from you. It was the hurt in your voice, the panicky desperation, that kept me on the line.
“So he was under that big spruce, you know that tree, which by the way is not doing great. It’s loosing needles and browning. I gotta be honest, Charlie, I’m worried about that thing…”
“That’s awful, Mom. But what about the owl?”
“Oh right, so there he was just lying in the snow, eyes wide open. I knew he was alive cause I could see his chest moving. Not fast, just a slow rise and fall. I have no earthly idea what happened to him. Maybe hit by a car? Poor thing, I just felt terrible…”
Suddenly I could see the owl, no, was the owl––my wings beating against the pelting ice, flying back to my nest. I saw the flash of a hurdling car, the instant ear-ringing collision, my vision blurring grey-white, the screeching pain. A wobbling, desperate flight towards the safety of a tree. Talons grasp, but the ice-glazed branch snaps, and I’m spinning down, down, down…
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I ended up calling those damn animal rescue people which I didn’t want to do because last time I called they came and took away this poor raccoon and kept him there forever and…”
Impressions come and go, intervals of darkness. A vole tunneling somewhere. Sun crowning the sap-sweet spruce. Red berries dotting a green lobed haze. My broken body, sinking into snow…
“So, some guy answered,” you said, switching to your male voice, cartoonishly deep and dim-witted, “Well we can’t get em’ right now but if you bring ‘em down we’ll see what we can do…”
Steps approach in the ice––crunch, crunch, crunch. Tall body perched above, casting cold shadow. Hands slip beneath my back, scoop me into a nest of warm fur. Wrenching pain, fades. Resistance, fades. Everything, fades.
“That was a week ago and still no word. So, I call today and the guy picks up and goes, ‘Yes mam, he’ll be just fine.’ So I say, ‘Ok, so when are you gonna release him?’ and he mumbles something about, ‘Oh well he might have a broken wing and we don’t know if he can hunt and blah blah blah.’ Long story short they’re sending him to some place in New Jersey. I bet it’s a damn a circus. I mean, isn’t that the most awful thing you’ve ever heard in your entire life?”
I said nothing. My heart was beating nervously in my chest, as if it didn’t feel at home there. I stared in a daze through the window at the snow-covered rooves across the block, listening to the cars kick up dirty slush on the plowed streets. No woods for miles. What was I doing here?
“Oh, by the way, Charles, no pressure or anything but just wanted to check if you’re planning to come home anytime soon. You know, just so I can plan.”
4. Falling House of Woodland Bloom
Each step up the creaking stairs made me wince for fear of waking you. Not that you needed sleep––after all, sleeping was almost all you did now––but that you might hear the rattling bottles of medication and scold me, the way you had yesterday when you tasted the crushed Oxycontin in your yogurt. I could still hear the rejection in your voice, the childish pleading, “I don’t want any more damned medications! Please just leave me alone.”
But when I lowered myself into the swivel chair beside your bed, you said nothing, just lay there, eyes closed, taking shallow breaths. For a few moments I sat there, trying to take in what I still couldn’t––that the chemo had reduced your red hair to white wisps, that the bones now stuck out of your freckled skin, that things would never go back to the way they were.
You cracked open your glazed green eyes and without looking said, “Charles, would you mind opening those windows?”
“Of course, Mom.”
The wind that had been howling all day at the window cracks tunneled through the open room, bearing the scent of spring pollen and a braid of birdsong.
“God, that breeze is just heavenly isn’t it?”
Hands folded on your distended belly, white hair run through with sunlight, you looked more peaceful than you had in months. But the peace was bittersweet, for being farther from struggle meant being closer to death.
“Sure is, Mom.”
You propped your elbow on the metal railing of the hospice bed and opened your palm. I took it, savoring your wrinkled touch, wishing I never had to let it go. Somewhere in the holly tree, a mockingbird was carrying on a restless song. Carrying on, just like everything else.
“Ok, Mom, time to turn you on your side,” I said, and slipped my hand into the small of your back.
But already you were far away, lulled by the wind into a deep sleep. I closed my eyes and drifted into the woods, this time not to leave you but to find you, following your trail down the stream, over wet mossy logs, beneath stones and fallen leaves, up the barked paths of trees, into the tips of coiled buds, stoked with red, about to bloom.
Charlie Espinosa is a writer from Virginia, currently based in California, where he is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at UC Irvine. His work appears in Catamaran, The Fourth River, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. He has worked as an environmental journalist and delights in the humor and mystery of the natural world.
