Fox wades his auburn fur through a foggy Market Street’s concentration of bipeds navigating their marrow under muscle under memory selves. At 1st and Market, his hungry eyes spot the same auburn-haired woman he hurled words with down on a BART train. In a forested peacoat, she plucks out a strawberry from a transparent container. Fox ambles toward her forest.
“Do you have a strawberry to share now?” “Get away from me! You’re a bullheaded fox!” “I’m sorry for your eyes. I’m still so hungry. Can you share a strawberry?” “These strawberries are for my pet fox’s breakfast tomorrow morning.” “I like how your hair matches my fur.” She bites into one plump strawberry. “I’m awfully hungry,” Fox declares. Pleasure sneaks across her mouth before she turns away to propel herself on a concrete-laden journey. Fox follows her north past skyscrapers cutting open a San Francisco sky. In his next life, his resurrected being will stitch the wounds from steel gutting the bodies of every winged cloud.
A block from the pointed tip of the Transamerica Building, the woman stops before an oak door while Fox blinks behind a diseased tree. She enters a studio box. With sunlight choked up in daylight’s fog, he waits for moonlight to breathe with waxing lungs. When the last strawberry moon of the solar year burns above steel, Fox breaches through a window’s open breeze. As she sleeps on a plush welcome, he grabs a serrated kitchen knife, moves upon a fox sleeping in a cage.
Confinement unlocked, Fox stabs the domesticated mirror of his species. A yelp escapes but the woman’s urban dreaming keeps on churning. He throws out the carcass onto a Clay Street sidewalk for the morning caffeinated stampede.
When July sunlight ripens through her window blinds, she wakes with a shine. “Do you want your strawberries for breakfast?” she asks. Fox tears into his reward. Juice squeezes out, runs red down his face. Once he swallows them all, stems sit clustered before him.
“Remember me?” he asks. The woman staggers forward, presses her inquisition flush against the metal. “You can’t talk,” she stammers out. Fox stabs her with the same thrust from the darkness before. He plops her limbs over his fox victim. Business suit shadows move by but they latch a digital reverence onto their own manufactured god. Back in her studio, Fox stands in an O positive pool. Grabbing a soap bar in one paw, he dons her peacoat.
In a summer dawn before the Transamerica Redwood Park’s metal gate, he climbs over locked nature to soap scrub his body in a stagnant fountain. Shaking himself dry, Fox scampers up a redwood tree to sleep on a canopy branch under the empty glow of a new buck moon.