Foxfire
It must have come from the grounds around the school, from what’s left of old forest at the base of the bricks bearing the height of the Overground. Your light is dim and yellow, the only one in the street still not off, and you feel the cool of its streaking light even from the first floor.
You slowly cross the living room trying not to wake the couple downstairs with too loud steps and pull an almost-dry coat from the off radiator. You go back to the couch but you look out the open window as you sit to see what’s happening. And then you see it.
A cold white firefox, burning all over, its flames so stark against the rest of the suburban night it looks cut out. It looks away when you look right at it but it turns its head down the road. You are curious but return to your soft laptop glow.
But the cold deepens and you pull your coat tight and looked back out to the fox. Still waiting. You look to it and it looks at you and gestures its head sideways. Again, again. You watch. It stands. Begins to walk off. Looks back to you and wags its bushy tail.
You look to the computer screen and you see the endless scroll otherwise ahead of you as you burn through another late night. You scoop up your bad shoes and plunged with your keys out into the night and onto the street closing the doors slowly but not quietly.
It’s almost gone when you get outside but you see it at the bend of the street and so you hurry. It can hear you and so it dashes back across to the other footpath, slinking between cars, not peering about amongst gardens and yards for food, but racing straight ahead. You see it through sedan and coupe and SUV windows. It heads up the long road and so do you.
Down and then back up and the fox weaves. Where the trees hang low it bites at some as it passes and the leaves catch aflame and burn quick and bright before fading to a light ash that becomes wind before it falls to the pavement. You fall behind as you watch. The fox keeps a good pace. You do not. You left your phone behind but you are sure that Strava would not give you a medal for this regular leg. You excuse yourself that it is after dark. You are not all together.
But you are still giving chase when you see the fox waiting at the top of the road. You see it broadside for the first time and you slow as it makes no move to continue. You are unused to foxes generally, seeing them nearly only from above, and you see for the first time that they are not quite dogs. This one is distinct enough again, its tail bushy with rough hairs of light that you could make out in the brief pauses between wide awake wags.
It looks at you as you approached, at the start of the second last fence, catching your breath and feeling the cold it left in its wake in the air. Your coat loose about you. The run so hard because it dragged in the wind, you tell yourself. You reach the end of the second last fence, close enough to see its wide black eyes, before it darts off leaving sparks behind that sank slow to the brick on the footpath before the short stretch of shops.
You walk up and around the corner and watch as it passes the facades of the estate agent, the wine seller, the interiors place, the salon. You nearly stop and nearly follow it in a straight line but you don’t. Instead you smile and you imagine and you approach the roadside and cross through the night without the day’s traffic and you see what you expected and also what you didn’t.
First the fox looking back at you as if you were going to leave. But you crossed to look on as you follow the fox with it and its light dancing in the storefronts. The estate agents clear through the front and the left side and the fox caught both within and without of each pane. You walk down the street parallel and it knows you’re going with it. It turns to see what you see. And its tail dances. Then it moves on, watching itself in the windows as you do some days.
The wine shop with its fire dancing across the bottles, endlessly in and around and off then back on over and over across vintages from Mendoza, Occitanie, Margaret River. The windows of the salon each curve back to the door and the fox grows and rounds then flattens and shrinks then back. Embers dance in the empty mirrors. It grew long in the polished door handles in the renovators cabinet, slid with grace about the marble benchtops, stood tall in the thick glass of teak cabinets filled with fixtures. And it watched itself in the glass like you watched it before it ran out of the window and then, with a step, found itself looking down the lane between the shops and the pub.
It turns back to see you and for a moment it could not as you stepped behind the wagon of a saloon and it stands tall and its tail hardens and the air falls colder but you reappear and it relaxes and you see it just before it did and for a moment it knows what it was to be embarrassed. So it runs.
With your breath back, you follow. Down again and then back up again, the suburbs all apparently built on hills here, parallel across the road, your coat catching, the fox slowing, the night deepening, and the Common approaching. When you get there, it darts across the middle of the empty junction to the right, up ahead, and alights into the path through the trees to the grass. You see it waiting for you as you check for cars. You cross.
The Common is cold even in the summer night not black but deep blue away from the lights. Beneath the trees the air is clear and crisp and you pull the coat back over and follow after the fox across the worn dirt foothpath flanked by trees into the clearing.
You see it moving across the field, met by a black fire fox with its own soft heat. A calm wind pushes out across the grass and you wait in the shadow of the leaves and just watch.
The white fox and the black fox meet across the glade and brush against each other, their twin flames sparking a vibrant spread of colour where their fur overlaps. The colour spreads and spreads across them both as they begin to dance together towards the trees beside the rail line. The black fox around first, the white fox following. Left and right and down and over and under. Red, yellow, blue join them in a spectacle of colour splashed over the dark night green before they begin to ember and the cool deepens. Your coat tight. The foxfires blow out on the comfortable breeze and their fur falls instead burnt orange. The foxes laugh.
The fox that was black slips off into the opposite treeline but the fox that was white turns back just for a moment. It looks to you and you look at it and it says nothing as it turns and they dash off away a leash.
You turn back home as you wonder why you were invited.
