Kitsune

There aren’t supposed to be foxes in New Mexico. They went extinct in 2035. I was ten and it was on the news: The Last Gray Fox Extinct. My mother cried, so I cried. But after we were done crying she had to show me what they were. I had never even heard of them before.

So, when the foxes started to emerge from the desert, people were alarmed. Alarmed, but delighted.Foxes! We thought they were long dead, dead for twenty years! But here they are! A miracle! We should have realized that there’s no such thing as miracles and anything that makes people use exclamation points is probably a false kind of promise.

They weren’t just desert foxes, gray foxes. There were full-tailed red foxes, snowy white arctic foxes, big-eared fennec foxes, kit foxes and swift foxes and even Tibetan sand foxes that look more like wolves. There were species that no one has ever seen before—amalgamations of the other species, foxes that look more like domestic dogs or cats, foxes with odd coloring—tints of blue, pink. A rainbow of foxes, an entire damned rainbow.

I was almost thirty and tired. I worked in a Santa Fe mall at a store that sold dresses I couldn’t afford to women who looked down on me. I stood on my feet forty hours a week and went home and cried, some days. Most days. I couldn’t figure out how to get out of New Mexico. I wasn’t sure where better was. New Mexico was all I had ever known.

And then, the foxes. My mother calls me at the store, that’s how I find out.

“Zorro at El Mercado. This is Reyna speaking, how may I help you?”

“Rey, they’re back.”

“Mom?”

“The foxes.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They’re back, they’re all back.”

I know what foxes are now. They’re a common motif in the clothing we sell, though that product was more popular last year. People seem to lean toward bees these days. They’re in trouble again. The bees are always in trouble.

“That’s … great, Mom.”

“It’s a damned miracle, Rey. A damned miracle.”

“A miracle.”

She kept talking, but I wasn’t really listening.

“Mom, a regular customer’s come in. I have to go.” The store was empty, but she couldn’t know that.

“But, Rey …”

“I’ll call you back.” I wouldn’t.

“Did you see this stuff on the news?”

Alie has ourTV turned toCNN. The ticker, the report, it’s not about the depletion of another natural resource or bombings in Russia and China, which is usually what we see these days when we flick on the news. It’s about New Mexico. About the foxes.

I roll my eyes. I can feel them move inside my head. “Yes, animals, right. I did see them.” I stalk my way into the kitchen and open the fridge. “Al, did you eat all the hummus again?”

“There should be more behind the oat milk.” Her voice is muffled by the popcorn she’s eating.

I find the new tub of hummus and start making a sandwich, slicing tomato and red peppers and turning the conversation with my mother over in my mind. I don’t want to blow her off. I really don’t. But since she retired from her cushy government job (don’t even ask me what the hell she did all those years—administrative something or other) she calls the store constantly. I love her, but …

“Seriously though, this is insane. Come look.”

I live with Alie because we’re the same. Well, no, not the same, but at least on the same sinking ship. We met when we were in college because we both worked at El Mercado, though in different stores—Alie at a high-end jewelry store only a few storefronts down from Zorro—and we went to the same, sad salad place for lunch most days. Chicken Cobb and Thai chicken, complete with wilted lettuce and fattening dressings that made the whole concept of salad obsolete.

We started by nodding to each other, then saying hello, then sitting together. We were both seniors at St. John’s, though we had never met or even seen each other, which seemed impossible given the size of the student body. St. John’s had only two directions of study, mathematics or philosophy, and we were on completely separate paths. Even our minors failed to overlap: Alie had chosen French and economics, while I went in for art and literature.

It was a strange place, St. John’s. Everyone graduated with the same degree, technically: a bachelor’s in liberal arts. We were supposed to come out of school as well-rounded, well-educated, and ready to take on anything. Alie and I both came out more confused than we had been going in. When you study a little of everything, are you learning anything? I still don’t know.

When we graduated, we got a place together. We were basically common-law spouses at this point—though New Mexico doesn’t hold with that, we checked. We’ve been living together for about seven years, and nothing has changed for either of us. We work in the same stores, though we both manage those stores now, and neither of us has any idea what we want from our lives. Our boyfriends have changed every once in a while, and the salad place is now a build-your-own Hawaiian poke bowl restaurant, but everything else is static.

“No, seriously, Rey, you have to look at this stuff.” Alie’s voice winds its way into the kitchen again and catches me. I pick up my plate and make my grudging way into the living room.

Alie has flipped to a local channel with a local anchor. The woman is statuesque and beautiful with the long, straight, dark hair and high-tilting cheekbones that speak to Native American heritage. My mother has a similar look to her, though I received too large a share of my father’s genes to be considered the same kind of beauty. She’s gesturing to the desert behind her, smiling.

“In what many have called a miracle, citizens all over the state are reporting findings of a long-extinct animal: the fox. Even more miraculously, the foxes have been spotted in record numbers, and even stranger, a record number of species have been documented, as well.”

The camera cuts to some B-roll that must have been taken earlier in the day—the sun high and torturous—and there they are: the foxes. Big, small, medium, every color you’d imagine a