Hanna Wagner 29

“Some say that when the yelping kind [of fox] are old, they become monsters. They wear a dry skull on their heads, clothe themselves with oak leaves, and assume a human guise. These creatures do harm in countless ways. People set fire to the mountains and dig up their burrows, grasping arrows and driving their hounds, thinking if fox kind is eradicated, monstrosity will cease.

They do not know that although foxes can become monsters, they do not necessarily do so. Once in a while one becomes a monster, but they do not all become monsters…”

He Bang’e, 1791, in Occasional Records of Conversations at Night

As a child, I feared whistling too loudly at night. When the evening would begin to settle into the night with its dark blue seeping silent through the night sky, I would grow wary, and if the back door and the windows of my house were left open with the white curtains curling and shifting in an uneasy carrying breeze, my breath would grow short as fear twined its way around my ankles. Standing in my kitchen under the flickering fluorescence of the overhead lamp, watching the curtains’ small movements, I knew that with the arrival of night, they too would come.

I had a fear of foxes, you see. I feared the foxes who lurked just beyond the limits of my neighborhood, who waited just beyond the blockade of painted white balustrades, the neat white fences that encircled our backyards where the neighborhood kids threw Frisbees and footballs around. I feared the foxes who waited for the lights to go down and for the doors to lock and for the windows to shutter closed, before they would come creeping out from the shadows they inhabited. I feared their flat faces that they would shove into our mailbox slots and hedges, snouts snuffling noisily along the edges of our windows, scenting for wisps of human breath that wafted through the cracks in our windows. I feared their skinny red bodies and their pointed swiveling ears and their waving tails and I feared the whispering of their whiskers against the painted walls of our house, brushing and twitching as their noses laid tracks along our walls, sniffing. Looking for a way in. I feared being caught awake at night and finding myself standing in my kitchen, looking out through the open kitchen door and seeing their glowing slanted eyes moving inexorably forward through the sky’s impenetrable implacable blackness.

But I knew the foxes would only appear if you whistled for them. Foxes are like dogs, you know. Call them forth and they will come. So even if I had no prior intent

of whistling, whenever night began to fall, I would make a mental note in my mind that I couldn’t whistle. Not right now. Not now, not for the next few hours before I fell asleep, not any night ever. Because if I whistled, they would come.

It’s said that the first fox appeared during the Tang dynasty when a farmer working somewhere out in the rice paddies began whistling idly as night began to fall. As he finished his work for the day and left to return home, he passed by a graveyard on his way back home and, suddenly nervous, he whistled even louder to fill the deadening silence that had thickened in the air. It’s said that a fox, curious about the piercing call he heard coming from earth, came crawling down from the sky to examine the source of the noise, claws clicking and scraping against the glossy black slate of the night sky, leaving chips and scratches, tiny glittering blemishes in the sky. Upon seeing the farmer, the fox promptly ate the poor man’s face and scraped his skull out from his body.

Crouched in the graveyard with the farmer’s blood pooling hot and wet, dampening his red-furred paws, the fox looked up at the trail of stars he had left. Licking his chops, the fox realized he’d rather stay on earth instead of return to the celestial heavens. Eyeing the farmer’s bloodied skull, he thought of a way he could stay here on earth to enjoy all the brilliant things it had to offer. He nosed his way into the opening for the neck of the skull and shoved his snout through the nasal cavity, the ridges of the skull fitting snug over his finely shaped ears, the curve of his thin jaw, pressing gently against the beat of his hot blood pulsing through the veins in his neck under the layer of sinew and muscle and rusted fur. He shook out his fur, tossing his proud head back and forth. The human skull didn’t budge from where it entrapped his own skull. And so, the fox assumed the shape and body of the human farmer and lived out his life better than the farmer could have lived his own, better than real humans. And his fellow foxes above in the sky saw him and envied him.

That’s what Tang dynasty legend says anyways. It’s one of the first things I was taught after I had immigrated as a young child. In America, we’re taught to fear the foxes because if they catch you late at night, out on the pale concrete-gray sidewalks that interlink our townhomes, they’ll try to eat your face off and your blood will paint the sidewalks a dripping viscous red. If you want to blend in, if you want to be like everyone else, you accept this fear of foxes and forget what you might have thought of them before. They say beware the foxes because they’ll steal your skull, your soul, and your body and your life and they’ll live your life better than you’d have lived your own.

But I know better now.

I was in the kitchen preparing a cup of green tea when I saw him for the first time darting through the grass in my backyard from tree to tree to stare at me from the looming growing shadows of the trees. The night had not yet fallen and the evening sky looked like a china pattern of muted whites and dark blues that were still shifting towards darkness. I didn’t know why he was out when it was not yet fully nighttime nor did I understand why he had come to me until I registered faintly that the teakettle was whistling in the background as I boiled water on the stove. I saw his yellow eyes out in the darkness and I stood there at my kitchen door staring back at him. He saw me seeing him and he snarled at me, black lips drawn back, yellow teeth glistening and bared. I threw rocks at him and he yelped, whimpered, and, lips falling, he drew back into the shadows.

He came back the next night though. I saw him emerging from the blueness of the night shadows on all fours and as the shadows grew, so did he in size, his snout and limbs elongating, fur rippling as muscle and bone cracked, then doubled. He rose upright and began walking towards me on his two hind legs, his pointed ears flattened against his head, shadows as black as calligraphy ink slipping off his red fur as he stepped into the faltering light of my kitchen lamp. His yellow eyes dimmed in the light and his monolids slid open and closed, blinking apologetically. He came right up to me and begged for forgiveness, his hot rancid breath washing over my face from where his furred snout towered above me. He was so close to me I could feel the fiery heat of the stars from his body warming my front and as the cool night breeze slipped and curled around the back of my neck, it ruffled his thick red fur, exposing slivers of his skin underneath, which was actually a pale, beautiful yellow. At the time, I knew not what he was apologizing for, and accepted his apology only out of confusion. The second I accepted, he slunk away, back down on all fours, slanting me one last sideways glance from his thin yellow eyes as he slipped into the shadows.

He came back the next night after that. And the night after that and the one after that and eventually I grew accustomed to his presence. I came to expect the gentle padding of his paws through the grass of my backyard. He began to bring with him little gifts: rotting dog carcasses, bloodied poodles, golden retrievers and labs, their big bodies limp and heavy, eyes glassy and vacant. One time, a dead eagle, head hanging at an angle from a snapped neck.

And then one night, he slunk up the stairs to my kitchen door, batted the door open, and towering above me, he cocked his head at me. In a split second he lunged and proceeded to sink his teeth deep into my face and the fear and the pain burst in

a sudden, nauseating wave and his canines punctured my skin and pierced the fat of my cheeks and I’m screaming the best I can but my screams are being swallowed into his hot gaping maw and red is flooding my eyes, blood drowning my face, my nostrils and my mouth in hot rust as he bites down harder and the pain ripples through my face and down my spine, wracking my whole body and I’m regretting my stupidity and foolishness in letting this fox get so close to me when all I’ve known my entire life is that this is what foxes do: they consume; they’ll eat your face and wear it and then they’ll take your body and take your soul and they’ll live your life better than you would have, a model of the perfect human specimen, advancing above all others. And I’m still screaming and the fox’s teeth are digging through my bloodied slick flesh and I feel the points of his teeth scraping hard against my bones under my skin, inside my face and I feel his furred paws pressing pinpoints into the soft flesh of my neck, his claws shinking out as he goes for the hinge of my jawbone, sharp and thin as he slices through flesh, tendon, artery, slippery blood spurting as he goes for my skull and he’s pulling and his claws are hooking on the underside of my jaw and he’s pulling and pulling upward and then there’s a slick pop—

And then—

And then I’m remembering. And I’m lying on my side on the wet grass and my fur is soaked in my hot blood and past my paws I see my human skull, glistening red in the light from my house, lying haphazard on the grass black with blood, empty eye sockets staring blankly back at me. And I see him. He’s retreated a careful distance and he’s staring at me, teeth and gums bared, muzzle red with my blood.

You’re back. My father says. And in his yellow eyes is an apology. An apology for the pain he caused me, an apology for the pain of stripping me of my skull, an apology for sending me away from my homeland in the stars. The memories are rushing back and I remember and I remember and I’ve been gone for so long, so so long and suddenly I’m horrified. I can hardly believe how much I’ve changed.

I am. I say. I am.

I’m sorry it took me so long to find you again. He says. This earth is a big place. Scary. Confusing. I got lost many times.

It’s alright. You did what you thought was best.

My father had sent me away when I was very young. I remember him sitting me down, arranging his nine tails so that the tips of each settled neatly over his crossed paws. I remember him explaining to me that it’s better to be human than to be a fox, that if you want a future, if you want a good future and a good life, then one must

travel to earth and become human. Life was better as a human, better for my future, better for my family. But you are expected to return, every once in a while. You are expected to rid yourself of your skull and shake off the human body and change forms and tongues and become one of us again, if only for a short time. And you can return to earth again and again, but the expectation is always that you will return to your family at some point. But after my first hunt, I had gotten lost. I had forgotten myself, I had forgotten who and what I was and I had lost sight of what we are. I had forgotten to return.

Now I know how easy it is to get lost and how hard it is to return. You find yourself as a human meeting another human and then getting married and then you have a new family, one bound to earth, one that will never let you leave, let you return to your original form. And I know it’s better to be a fox. The elder foxes have always taught us that to be human is to be better, that going to earth is the only way to get ahead, to live a good life. But now that I’ve done it and lived it, I know the truth.

I know that every time you place a human skull on again, it becomes harder and harder to strip yourself of it. Your human body will be harder to shed, your pointed canines will begin to dull and your slanted eyes will adopt a soft roundness. Your claws will not return to their previous keenness and over time your eyelids will fold over, double-layering over themselves. Your yellow skin will begin to whiten and your beautiful red fur will take longer to regrow each time. And you begin to forget. You begin to forget your tongue and how much you love the colors red and yellow, the colors of happiness and royalty to foxes, and you learn to fear them instead. You begin to forget what your past life used to be like, your former homeland becoming only a hazy memory. You forget why you need to return and you begin to believe the human myth that the foxes are foreign, that they will do you no good, that they are something to be feared. You learn to fear the foxes, your own friends, your own family.

I turn to look at the house I had formerly occupied, at the square windows and polite blue shutters and the straight hedges that line my house. The white picket fences that surround my old neighborhood seem heightened in ultraviolet light. I lift my nose to scent the air. With my new-old eyes, I can see into the furthest windows of the other townhouses that line the block and see the human-white figures that flicker and dart in the comfort of their homes.

Now I know the truth that my fellow foxes have forgotten, or perhaps never knew. I now know that all these humans used to be just like us. They used to have our narrowed yellow eyes and our beautiful yellow skin and our thick red fur. But their

fox bodies have been occupied; tricked into trying on these human skulls, believing that wearing the bone-white skull of humans will let us lead better lives, they have forgotten themselves and their former fox lives. I look to my father and in his slanted yellow eyes I see that he knows this too. I see recognition, resignation. I see acceptance of who we are. Finally. Together, we step delicately into the night shadows where my fellow foxes emerge to greet me, rippling out of the liquid blackness, brushing my snout with theirs to welcome me back.

I know what we have to do now. I know the truth that has emerged. We may have fooled ourselves in the past into thinking that to be human is the ultimate, most desired form, but I know better now. So, when you humans speak of foxes and of myth and of the Tang legend, know this truth: We don’t want to steal your skulls. We don’t want to steal your bodies, your lives and act as if we are human, as if we are you. All we want is just to reclaim what is ours. You think we want your skulls, we want to free you from them. Forget your painted white prisons with your perfect hedges and your window shutters and your white picket borders. Come back to us. Come back to us and help us free not only yourself, but also our friends, our family, our fellow foxes.

Now, here I stay, shunted to the side, forever only in the shadows just on the outskirts of suburbia. But I’m in the comfort of my kind, foxes together once again. Sometimes, every once in a while, when I’m sitting outside watching you from the shadows, I’ll catch myself thinking fondly of when my life was easier as a human. And I’ll watch your fluttering human shapes behind the glowing curtains and wonder in the back of my mind if it’d be easier to slip on my old, bloodied human skull once again, to return to my comforting little neighborhood, to lose myself, blending in amongst all the other once more. But no. That’s not the life meant for me and not the life meant for us.

So, when it gets late in the evening and the backdrop of the night sky is shifting gradient slowly from blue to black, and the lights are flickering on from behind closed window shades, and the streetlamps buzz to life, creating hazy little circles of yellow light, havens against the approaching darkness, know that I’ll be there. When the incessant hum and chatter of the night creatures and insects that live unseen in our yards begins to grow in volume, and the world is sliding ever so slowly into night, I’ll be there. When you’re inside your house, maybe lying in bed, or sitting at your kitchen table illuminated in light, sitting and thinking in a hazy half-remembered way of some folks you’ve been meaning to see but have been putting off seeing, or thinking

maybe of some place you’ve been meaning to return to but you just don’t have the time or money to make the trip, I’ll be there. Listening for you. And when you’re staring out into the blackness of night and you feel the fear tickling your spine, snuffling at the back of your ears, and breathing hotly against the nape of your neck, I’ll be there. Right at the edge of your kitchen light where the shadows draw a wavering line in the grass, I’ll be there. Listening for you. Listening for your whistle.

Catherine Huang Cornell University, ’21