Monsieur Renard
regularly, the spill of water fell into view, then seemed to rise again and disappear back up into itself ~ the sound of the water’s approach always just overlapping the sight of its retreat. Atkins closed his eyes, the slow pulse of the sprinkler’s fall reminding him of his childhood, the street he’d grown up on. He wondered if children there still played in the sprinklers, still experienced those sudden rapturous chills, the minirainbows, the muddy lawn. He tried to recall his own daughters playing in a sprinkler, but the best he could come up with was an early trip to a neighbor’s pool. Recently Glynnis had been after him to put in a pool of their own, and Atkins now
Not that he’d ever actually seen the fox. No, in point of fact, the fox that night had been as much a phantom, a figure of doubtful substance, as the magical Monsieur Renard who still, he hoped, on occasion, danced through his daughters’ dreams. Atkins stopped, looked out across the lawns toward the distant, cumulous-shaped shadow marking the edge of the subdivision, the remains of what had once been (or so he liked to imagine) a sizeable forest. Several houses down someone had left their sprinkler on, the neighbor’s security lights catching the nearer end of its sweep so that,
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