A Blood Print Trail to the Future

The fox stares, a challenge held in its curiously silver gaze. It possesses no words, nothing verbal that can command her, but it doesn’t need to say anything, Silence, it seems, is more powerful than words, and besides, the fox knows there is nothing left for her to go back to. At least, nothing good left for her to go back to.

Now it’s just her and the fox, a gangly thing with paws too large for its emaciated frame and a tail more like a rope than a brush. A strange pair to anyone observing them, if there were anyone out to observe them. Apparently four in the morning isn’t a hub for activity.

Every time the fox passes under a lamppost, it stops, turns, and stares at her. She’s lagging. She knows it. In the chaos, she had forgotten her shoes, and the hard tarmac tears at her tender soles, leaving her feet in shreds and bloody footprints in her wake. The hours of walking hasn’t helped much, either. If she were on her own, she would’ve stopped in the closed-down arcade miles back, but the fox is set on its goal, whatever that may be, and its tunnel-vision is absolute. It snaps at her ankles, unnervingly close to her Achilles’ heel, each time she shows signs of faltering.

Yet another car passes, though, yet again, it’s driver appears unaware of the young woman stumbling along the roadside, bloody, broken and distraught, becoming more and more like the fox she’s trailing after. Her hair is tangled, wild and matted, her hands caked in cracked dirt and dried-up blood under ragged, broken nails and her mouth sets itself into a feral snarl, torn lips pulled over bloodstained teeth.

“Where are we going?” she asks for the forty-third time. They’ve been the only words she’s spoken since she fled, and as time stubbornly keeps ticking on, they’re beginning to be the only words she remembers. It would be terrifying if she thought about it, how her head felt like a leaking pipe, all the knowledge she’d previously acquired draining from her mind, leaving her with less and less every moment, until not even her name stays stuck in the mess her mind is becoming.

Her name…

                      Her name…

                                  Her…

“Where are we going?”

Forty-fourth.

The fox doesn’t answer. Its pawsteps scrape across the road, echoed and amplified ten-fold in the dead silence of the witching hour street. If only she could find a home with the tinny buzzing of the power lines.

A home.

Didn’t she once have one?

Why isn’t she there?

She must have been lagging as she feels humid breath on the back of her heel, and a sudden snapping of sharp teeth frightens her body into accelerating, though her mind hasn’t caught up with her feet and she goes stumbling forward, hitting the hard pavement with a rough landing. But the fox doesn’t care. It nudges her with its muzzle in sharp jabs to her abdomen, and when that fails to work, its ears flatten and a deep growl rumbles from its throat. She growls back. A reaction without thought. Instinct. One that surprises her as much as it does the fox. It takes a step back, ears pricked and silver eyes focused on her with unnervingly human intensity.

“Where are we going?”

Forty-fifth.

It’s a question she expects no answer to – the fox seems to not care for her comfort – as it has been left unanswered for several painful hours, but this time – for the first time – the fox appears to hear her.

“Home,” it says, not breaking its disconcerting stare.

“You speak,” she says.

“You hear me now,” the fox says.

She’s back on her feet not too long after. Now she can hear the fox, she hears its muttering as it circles her on the ground.

Home.

                      Go home.

                                  Get her home.

                      Home.

                                  Home.

                                              Home.

           Late.

                      Late.

           Get up.

                      Walk.

           Will be late.

           Can’t be

                      Late.                          

Late.

                                              Late.

           Home.

The fox keeps repeating the word.

But what does it mean?

Home.

Something lights up in her mind, burning bright like a flare, a respite from the darkness descending upon her. People, like her but not, gathered around a table in a room adorned with the gallery of the past, and in the centre, a board game.

Opposite her, a boy sits, his face split in two by a gap-toothed grin. You landed on Park Lane and Mayfair, he says, the smile creeping into his voice. You owe me five thousand!

What? she hears herself saying, though she doesn’t remember her voice sounding like that. Is this really her? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. You’ve added two thousand onto that! I’m not paying that.

That’s from last time, he fires back, the smile falling slowly from his face. I agreed to let you go in debt, and now I’m calling it.

Like you know anything about debt, she sniffs.

There’s no point in arguing against it, though. She remembers that, but she doesn’t remember why. It seems logical though, at least in her memory. So she forks over the five thousand – six five hundred bills, eleven hundreds, and a stack of fifties – with a glare thrown into for free.

The tiny silver dog cannot wait to leave.

That, she realises, happened only hours before. But then, why does the memory feel years old, like a box abandoned in a lonely attic to gather dust, cobwebs, and mould. And even then, as she thinks about it, it’s fading. Fading and there’s nothing she can do about it. Like holding onto an ice-slicked ledge suspended over a fogged-up chasm.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“Home,” the fox says again.

Home.

Where a dying Mum cradles the bloody corpse of Brother, and Dad cries for her and Sister to run while his shaking hand loads a magazine into a rifle. Where Brother hears the harsh rap of the knocker and opens the front door, but is shot dead before he can even scream. Where just a few minutes earlier, they were playing Monopoly without a care in the world.

But that was…

                       … not here.

She can’t remember where it is she lives. Not the area, not the street name, not the number. As she stumbles after the fox, she’s not even sure what city she is in. There are signs all around her, but none of them make any sense. Just paint on metal, in shapes that, for some strange reason, do not register in her mind. She knows this can’t be right. She can remember a time where those symbols meant something to her. Where her brain had no problem unscrambling their meaning. She remembers… liking them.

What happened?

Why can’t she

                       Why can’t she

                                                                     Read?

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“Home,” is all the fox says.

Home is not here. Home is not this way. Home is behind. Home is in the past. Home is no longer

           Home.

“Where?”

The fox can speak. She knows it can.

She heard it. 

She heard it. 

She heard it.

She wants answers. She wants to know

            Why.

                       Why is she here?

                                   Why did she follow?

                                               Why can’t she remember?

 The fox. The fox knows more than it lets on. The fox is

                       Not a fox.

“We are here,> the not-fox says.

“Where?> she asks.

“Home,” the fox says.

“This is not…”

                                                                                                             Home

But the woods at the end of the road calls to her, to something deep within her she never knew existed. Something more obscure than logic can describe, more primal for reason to explain.

Something wants her to go, to lose herself in the trees, the leaves, the earth. To lose herself to the cycle of the seasons, to the rise and fall of the sun, to the wind, the rain, and the sky.

           Well, to lose herself more.

           This is not home, her head screams, even as her feet lead her onto the soft earth.

                       This is not home, her head cries, even as her heart sings the song of the woods.

                                   This is not home, her head howls, even as her nails lengthened and blackened.

                                               This is not home, her head says, even as her teeth sharpen to points.

                                                           This is not home, her head says, even as reddish fur sprouts from her skin.

                       This is not

                                   This is not

                                               This is not

           Home.

But those words die in her head as the last of her previous life – her human life – fades from her mind.

But as one candle is blown out, another is lit.

With the last of her old mind she says, “you are no fox.”

The thing regards her with its strange silver eyes – the eyes she had found curious from its first appearance, sat at the bottom of her garden – and blinks. “Why does that matter now?” it asks. “You are one.”

She takes one last look at the silver-eyed thing, holding its gaze while the last of herself leaves her mind, a gaze that challenges, weeps and thanks all at once, until it says nothing and she’s gone.

Without a second glance at the city that sprawls behind it, the fox bounds into the woods, a fox, like a hundred thousand other foxes.