Art by Kim Weiss
Shortly after the beginning of the world, in approximately 2006, there was the tale of a boy and a white fox.
The boy was from a lower class French Canadian family that lived in an apartment, and he attended a public elementary school largely populated by Vietnamese children; he would later attribute his utter lack of racial prejudices to this upbringing. Despite not being a particularly athletic child, the boy attended regular meetings of the track and field club, for which he ran laps. Instead of being a superfluous comment, this is mentioned to explain the fact that the boy usually wore his track and field all star uniform (he had won first place in the first official tournament, surprising not only his teachers and peers but most notably himself). This unique uniform consisted of a short sleeve umber jacket with white stripes containing black stars – its pièce de résistance – and black pants with white sneakers; in addition he wore a white sweatband for the video game-cool effect.
The fox was from a limbo for imaginary animals.
The fox had elegant lines of red trailing past its eyes like a painted kabuki performer. A permanent phosphene light shrouded its snow-white fur. Every movement it made was fluid and effortless-looking. Despite its noble appearance, however, its voice was thin and anxious, as though it rarely agreed with anything it said.
During the final recess of the day, the fox revealed itself to the boy as the spirit animal which had guided his victory in the track and field tournament; the encounter took place between two portables, a kind of dark alleyway for the world of frolicking schoolchildren. The boy shrugged and said that he had imagined as much; his haplessness was palpable. The fox asked the boy to meet it after school, when everyone would have gone home.
The boy thus spent the remaining hour of school doodling the striking visage that had been presented before him. The bell eventually tolled and the boy was soon treated to a bizarre lecture on the nature of time.
‘“Everything remains the same by changing.” That is the motto of the immortal molecules which perpetuate the universe. Everything is made up of everything else, so that when something breaks up it becomes an infinite number of seen and unseen other things – that is why we have spirits,’ said the fox. ‘Which is why I can’t die, and why I’m able to talk with you right now.’
The boy sat on the back steps of his school as he stared at the fox. He was naïve enough to accept the absurdities of which the fox spake, and thus young enough to accept the absurdity of talking to this arctic fox that had trotted out of some mythical god’s black oblivion. They had been discussing the finer points of outsider philosophy (or rather the boy listened attentively as the fox droned unceasingly) for approximately half an hour now.
The boy disregarded the fact that he would be chastised for heading home late. Obviously, what the fox had to say was far more interesting to him than whatever his mother had prepared for dinner; but that was quite possibly due to his mother only ever preparing one of three dishes: spaghetti, stir fry or pork. ‘As I was saying before I took the more meandering fork in the conversational path, I am in need of your services. Yes, it’s nothing too fancy – I swear on my right paw.
‘Listen: an immortal walks amongst you. You may allow the profundity of that statement to sink in before I say more on the subject. I shall wait.’ The fox paused, eyeing the boy as he sat in bored silence with his chin nestled snugly in the palm of his hand. The silence was nearly deafening. ‘Truly, there is no rush.’
The fox had expected far more excitement and fanfare than this, his first direct encounter with a human being. Next time he would definitely bring a trumpet, yes. ‘Er, are you ready? Then allow me to clear my throat.’ The fox cleared its throat before continuing:
‘So now then: The immortal has been around for a while now, metamorphosing as whim dictates; for you see, it is capable of transforming its molecular structure – a trick that it has picked up in its many years of existence. However, the immortal refuses to relay this trick to anyone else.
‘I require this knowledge in order to return to my previous form: Before becoming the being which you see before you, I was actually three fairies from the fields of fairyland – innocent, fluttering, playful creatures who would never harm anybody. The immortal will not permit a creature such as myself to near it, as it is fully aware of our desire to obtain its unique ability. Some say that, for whatever reason, it is afraid of us learning it; I view it most simply as an altogether selfish act.
‘We have collected enough data to predict the next occurrence of permutation. It should be in the following few days. What I ask of you is to watch for any evidence of such a change, and then proceed to stalk the living daylights out of it until you spy it in the Ovidian act itself. I shall provide you with a magical bell that you can sound when this happens; it will allow me to manifest within close range of the immortal while it is in such a fragile state, at which time I shall hopefully acquire its ability through the splendiferous use of my natural cunning! But please note that the immortal’s magical barrier is so powerful that you’ll need to strike the bell with all of your might in order to make me appear.
‘Oh, but your reward. I am fully aware of your desire to live up to your jacket, so in return for accomplishing such a deed I shall continue to guide your unnatural ability to run like the wind. But please keep in mind that you must refrain from divulging any of this with your fellow cohorts – or anybody, really – as they will think you’re very, very weird. So what say you, young sir?’
The bored boy parted his lips as if to speak, causing the fox’s fur to rise in tingling anticipation, but then he closed them again. The fox coughed to fill the silence.
‘The immortal has taken the form of a young girl named Larissa. Are you familiar with this creature?’
This caused the boy to shrug. ‘She’s all right, I guess.’
Thrilled to have elicited a response, the fox decided to try its luck by repeating its request.
‘Okay,’ the boy finally agreed, in that naturally indifferent manner inherent to many of the more unusual young gents.
With its dainty paw the fox pushed a small, ornately detailed bell of cerulean silver towards the boy, and the boy picked it up as though it was a misplaced toy that needed to be returned to its proper spot. He was surprised to find that it weighed less than a fluttering helicopter seed; after a quick inspection for any magical switches – and disappointedly finding none – he pocketed it inside his jacket.
‘Could you recapitulate the mission plan for me, please?’
Luckily for the undereducated boy, ‘recapitulate’ sounded close enough to ‘repeat’, so he thought back to all of the gobbledegook that the fox had so suddenly vomited onto him. ‘I need to spy on Larissa until she . . . shifts her shape like a monster, and then I ring the bell to make you come.’
‘Yes! Yes! Exactly right,’ burst the fox with an animated nod. On its thin face lingered a sly curl of the lips (which was not saying much, it being a fox and all) that the boy took notice of, and it put him slightly off his ease.
‘Well, I must take my leave before the immortal one catches my scent,’ said the fox as a gradual translucency began filling its form. ‘Farewell, Jacob, and godspeed!’
‘But my name isn’t Jacob!’ the boy cried. ‘It’s Andrew!’
‘Farewell!’ said the fox, and it disappeared completely. The cosmic pop of the fox’s vanishing was an explosion of sound that was inverted into a silent displacement of air, so bizarre an effect that no proper description could ever do it justice.
In the fox’s wake a low snickering vibrated the air like a cruelly colourful rainbow; the boy chalked it up to his excitable imagination, attributing it to the whistling wind rustling the leaves. He left the site of decadence, thinking on his mother’s meal but not his mother’s worry – that spring in his step as he danced away from the school and past the various properties was suppressed hunger uncoiling itself.
When he returned to the apartment he was greeted by the expected and obviously rehearsed chiding remarks from his mother, peppered with mild curses en français. The warm scent of chili filled the air with the various souls of sacrificed cows, canned beans, and variegated peppers that had been hiding in the back of the crisper.
Once she had expelled all of the theatrical sighs that had been built up in her system, his mother resigned herself to the most perfunctory of questions: ‘So how was school, pumpkin?’ (‘Was’ and ‘school’ combined together in her lower class French Canadian accent to sound like ‘So how was cool, pumpkin?’)
The boy answered with feckless sincerity.
The mother then asked her son if he wanted the white fluffy rice to go on top of the chili or beneath it, and he said on the bottom because that was how the rice received its flavour; he then sat alone at the kitchen table because everyone else had already eaten, and broke his fast to a blue flicker of changing channels emanating from the living room.
Intermittent bursts of white noise threatened to suffocate his thoughts of the blue bell still in his jacket pocket and those of the blue belle Larissa.
By the time the television audience settled on a channel – one graced by the ceaseless tinny laughter of people most likely long dead – the boy was already (clink) moving around some (clink) plates and utensils in the dish-filled sink so as to make room for his emptied bowl; his awkward limbs accidentally dropped the fork onto the floor while settling the bowl into its watery niche (clink clink clink, clink clank clunk), and his mother called to him from the electrified living room:
‘What on Earth was that?’ (‘Are you okay, pumpkin?’)
‘I dropped the fork!’ he shouted as he picked the diminutive trident up off the floor. Halfway between carrying it from the kitchen tiles to the sink, a thought struck him: ‘That stupid fox never gave me anything to ring the bell! But maybe I can just use this.’ He rinsed it off before pocketing it in his jacket – opposite the bell’s own secret sheath – and assured himself that it was not stealing if it was an item owned by the family.
The boy slunk past his mother and her boyfriend – the latter sitting in a chair while the former lay on the couch, both fully hypnotised by the glowing box – and passed through the dangling beads that served as an entrance into the apartment’s stubby hallway. The left room was the bedroom of his mother and her boyfriend, the room straight ahead was the bathroom, and the room to the right was his. He made use of the middle room before entering the right, where he shed his jacket, letting it drop to the floor with a thud.
Beside his bed was a large treasure chest which he opened to procure a pictorial diary guarded by the likes of men with Man in their name. He then sat at his desk and detailed the encounter with the fox, making use of all of the pencil crayons at his disposal – for him the world was an exuberant burst of colour, in stark contrast to the dusty grey world of adults. To an adult outsider, the boy’s doodled representation of himself would be seen as a hornet and the fox would be an anthropomorphic cloud, while the school would be nothing more than a red shack. Such is the dichotomy between the dismissive objectivity of adults and the unadulterated subjectivity of children.
On the next page he penciled an abstract likeness of Larissa, coloured her gently, and beside it scrawled a misspelling of the word ‘immortal’ for literary accompaniment. He focused his eyes on this piece as his mind drifted to the girl herself, that earnest bit of wonder with the black black hair and the blue blue eyes.
Ever since he had consciously encountered one, girls had always fascinated him – they were so much like him and yet so very different. He often wondered what it would be like to be a girl. He viewed them as soft slender miracles with an attracting aura about them that he could never quite place.
Once he had caught the merest flicker of a lesbian orgy while his mother was flipping through channels and the scene had caused his poor young heart to race harder than ever before; for less than a split second he felt that he had peered into some secret heaven, and demanded that his mother return to that passionate pink window so temporarily revealed before him. ‘What channel?’ his mother had asked, retracing her button presses. ‘The good one!’ her son had roared in response, but left the room frustrated when it became clear that the window had been shut forever.
Now he was staring at the portrait of Larissa and wondering why that memory had come to his mind’s lips; his cheeks blossomed into rose petals. He tore out both the picture of Larissa and that of the encounter with the fox and crumpled them into tiny paper boulders, their sharp points dotting his palms.
It should be noted that this violent act was borne from a desire not to leave any evidence – as per the fox’s request – rather than from any preliminary sexual frustration.
He thought about the various ways of spying on Larissa: hiding behind bushes was an option, especially due to the copious amounts of bushes in the area; he could also tail her from a distance on his bike, which would make for a quick getaway if she noticed him. The simplest and most effective way that he could think of, however, was to befriend her. That would easily keep him in close enough range to ring for the fox.
Yes, he had decided. But how could he win her friendship in such a short amount of time? He thought that offering her a gift might do the trick, so he rummaged through his treasure box in search of something a girl might like.
When he resurfaced he was clutching onto a rubber box of rubber french fries that he had received with a fast food meal; they were not particularly girly, but neither were they overtly muscled, which was far more than he could say about any of the other toys in his collection.
The rest of the night was spent drawing and watching tv from under the living room table.
The following school morning was spent burning holes into the back of Larissa’s head. His class was being treated to rudimentary lessons in math, laughably including a focus on the multiplication of zero that set the children at their ease; the boy became disinterested almost immediately once he figured out the ‘trick’. All of his attention was then given to his intentions.
He thought about the various opening lines that he might use to introduce himself, most of them relating to his jacket; the french fries would of course be proffered as he said whatever it was he would end up saying. He felt around in his desk for the rubber fries, touching hardened gum, rolling pencils and crumpled pieces of paper before his fingers finally settled upon the smuggled object; they felt how he imagined dead fingers might feel, and the effect temporarily disquieted him, making the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
When recess eventually and gloriously rolled around, the boy tailed Larissa across the concrete courts to the back of a portable – rather close to where he had met the fox, actually. She turned to him with startling awareness accompanied by a blasé smile. For the first time since gaining metaphysical knowledge from the glowing white fox, the boy viewed the girl as being truly immortal: The pallid yellow frock she wore (again and again and again) was suddenly an ethereal costume not made by human means; her subtly arched form seemed to have been chiseled from the rarest stone (every cliché is immortal); and her very countenance was the personification of the universe in clover.
The boy felt the bell pressing against his breast as though it was telepathically linked to the fox’s anticipation, and that was enough of a push for him to fully approach the supposed immortal in the fox’s stead. Fumbling for words and with nervous naïveté he held out the rubber fries to the girl like a bouquet of dandelions. She responded by beaming as only a most sincere and innocent girl can.
‘How neat!’ she exclaimed, accepting the fries and then examining them. ‘Did you find it? Oh! Your nose is bleeding.’
He then wiped his nose on his prized jacket’s sleeve and saw that he had coloured several of the stars a deep red. As he stared in horror at his ruined jacket, Larissa pushed two of the french fries up the boy’s nostrils to stop the flow of blood, a motherly mixture of concern and joviality showing on her (utterly pretty) face. The boy turned to her in shock, the swivel of his head causing one fry to dangle and the other to drop out completely; the girl picked it up and was about to push it back in when the boy covered his nose with his hands, shaking his head as if to say that no, he did not want any foreign objects to be put up his nostrils, but thank you all the same.
‘You should lie down, that’ll stop it,’ she said, and the boy followed her suggestion by lying down on the grass. She walked around in random directions like a suspicious sentry, shielding her eyes as she inspected their surroundings; the boy assumed that she was looking for a teacher to come take him to the nurse’s office.
‘Am I dying?’ he asked in a pathetically weak voice.
She shook her head and smiled. The merest wisp of a wind came and exposed the girl’s inverted triangle of white to the boy, who swallowed at the sight and thus tasted a handful of pennies. It was just his luck that she seemed to be completely oblivious of her own appearance.
The blood soon clotted, and when the boy sat up he was feeling more alive than ever. Now that they seemed to be on friendly terms he decided to try a little detective work, using the expertly worded questions he had been mulling over in his mind:
‘How long have you been here for?’ the boy asked, as he rubbed the flaking rings of blood from his nostrils.
‘A long time!’ was her expertly worded answer.
‘Don’t you ever change?’
‘Of course I do! I think everyone does,’ she replied. ‘In fact, you could say I’m changing right now!’ And she teasingly began undoing one of the straps of her frock.
‘Hurry up, please – it’s time!’ he could almost hear the fox whisper in his mind. The boy immediately reached into his jacket and swiftly pulled out both the bell and the fork, and then proceeded to ring the bell as vigorously as his yellow limbs were capable.
The girl was already undoing the other strap as if absolutely nothing was happening around her.
With each successive striking of the bell the white fox materialized more and more beside the boy, whose beating heart was about to burst with excitement. The girl’s transformation transfixed him to such an extent that he actually forgot about the reward that the fox had promised him, which was supposed to be why he was ringing the bell in the first place.
When the girl bent down to fold her frock, the boy stopped ringing and stood in a daze. The fox had only been three rings away from materializing completely.
‘No, you idiot!’ the fox screamed in terror. ‘It’s a trick!’
The boy looked to the fox in bewilderment, but it was already too late – the white fox had been turned to stone, its expression in a permanent state of wild panic. With the pride he felt for his yellow jacket guiding his legs, the boy began running from the girl as fast as he could – almost as fast as when he had won the track and field tournament, and all on his own! – and continued to run until he could no longer feel his legs. He even ran until he could no longer feel his body.
The boy became a yellow wind, cool and fleeting, that rose above the laughter of children but never any higher.