Asakiyume mita

There was this place where the sidewalk pressed right against the flank of McKinnock Hill. Walking that section of sidewalk, you’d have ferns dropping moisture on your shoulders. It was a narrow sidewalk: you couldn’t walk on it and hold your left arm out straight. Too much McKinnock Hill in the way. But if you bent your arm, you could press your hand into the hill’s thick moss.

You could also kiss a bare patch of stone. That was the kind of thing we’d do when we walked home from school as kids: “Kiss that spot there … Gross! You just kissed McKinnock Hill! You’re going to marry McKinnock Hill!”

There were animals on McKinnock Hill. Mainly squirrels and chipmunks were what we saw, but sometimes there’d be roadkill—possums or the occasional raccoon. So we knew those lived up there too.

And foxes, too. A place like McKinnock Hill has to have foxes.



( At some point we heard a story... )

I have turned this little story into a PDF with the foxes in the header ;-) If you would like a copy--if you would like a copy to send to your millions of friends so that my flash-fiction reputation spreads like a tsunami worldwide!--you can message me here or send me an email at forrestfm (at) gmail dot com, and I will email it to you.

Most think the woman rules the fox, but one wise person perceived in her half-closed eyes and parted lips the face of a sleepwalker, a beast of burden, not a master. This person drove the fox from the woman's shoulders with cinnamon and lye, but freed and wakened the woman walked in circles in the snow, confused, asking, "Where is my friend? I'm cold without my friend," and even led indoors and given food, she soon went out again, but the snow was no longer falling, and by the time the next storm rolled in, the fox had found a new mount--or so I'm told.

Last night, late, I heard this story on the CBC: the tale of Christian Lyons, a lawyer in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who noticed, as he took a shortcut home through the woods behind the local high school, that there were a number of foxes about. He saw five. And then...

Lyons waited for them to cross the path and carry on through the woods. They did, and he carried on his way.

"Lo and behold, as I came over a ridge, I saw that these, at least five foxes, had circled back and were back on the trail."

He began to feel disconcerted. The foxes weren't fleeing or trying to avoid him.

"It's almost like they looped back to come in front of me so I took stock of the situation. I'm not afraid of foxes. Who would be?"

The animals began to approach as a pack, loping towards him from about 10 metres away.

"I just kind of jogged backwards in retreat. Not in full-panic flight at this point."

Another five metres down the road, Lyons turned back.

"They were then closing the gap toward me with some intent," says Lyons.

At this point, he says, "it was unequivocal flight response. I just started to sprint away from these things."

Source: "Pack of Foxes Chase Yellowknife Man in Residential Area."

Some kept up the chase even after he crossed a road, and one pursued him to the door of his house.

Christian Lyons


Was it because he himself has a ruddy, foxlike look? (Perhaps he has fox blood and doesn't know it?)

Your mission, should you choose to accept it¹, is to spin a brief tale explaining the foxes' pursuit of Mr. Lyons.

An alternate mission is to mention other town names that are as cool as Yellowknife. I would love to be able to say I came from a place called Yellowknife.

¹Coincidentally, Mr. Lyons had been returning from seeing Mission Impossible with friends.

sovay, here are some ghost foxes for you. I didn't include your pantomime foxes--the one in the flared skirt, the fox-masked giraffe--which would have been wonderful, but which I didn't think I could do justice to. Just ghost foxes themselves, overrunning a ruined cathedral--that image was so compelling all on its own.

I didn't know how to capture the soaringness of a cathedral, with its glory being so vertical, and the small litheness of foxes, which would be hard to see in a picture that captured those tall spaces. Then the words "rood screen" popped into my head--the fancy barrier between the altar and the rest of the cathedral (and I was thinking "rude screen" because it disdains the populace, and also rude, like rustic, like a ruin)--so I drew that. And then I remembered that "rood" meant the cross, because I remembered that we had read the poem "The Dream of the Rood" in Anglo-Saxon .... and then it seemed extra-right, because dreams.