The fox and the cat lay curled in the exposed roots of the old maple. They’d been meeting like this for weeks, the cat slipping out of an upstairs window, the fox climbing gingerly out of the burrow. Meeting under twilight skies, talking for hours, and then lying together, purrs and soft breath. They only slept. One morning as the cat stretched her paws with a little shiver, the dawn sky above her turning blue, she turned to him. “I have to ask. Not that it matters. But are you more like a cat or a dog?”
“I’m a fucking fox,” he said, with a little growl in his husky voice. And as he nibbled on her ear, he allowed one of his sharp teeth to break the skin.
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Mary Milstead is a writer in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA in Fiction from Portland State University, and her work has been published in The Rumpus and Portland Review. She’s currently working on a collection of animal stories, and a novel set in Spain in the early 1940s.
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