As we drifted over the body of oily black water, I felt the strangest of sensations buzzing in my belly. It wasn’t the strangeness of my situation- that I was a fox seemed as natural to me as my loneliness- no, it was that somehow only now did I seem aware of the life I used to live and how close I had been to giving in. Only as I floated through the sky with my furry friend biting onto my tail to stop him from falling did I consider the futile nature of the human I once resembled. That human, that man, how close he had at times come to the revelation he sought above all else, and yet he had always backed away, so afraid of taking the necessary step that would lead him to the great beyond. In the end, I’d had a little help. The animals had done it for me. Without their magic, and the magic of imagination, I would be just another man going through life as if life were the one thing I didn’t want to be a part of. The love in me that had once burned so bright had been fading away along with the last vestiges of my childhood, and it seemed as if there had been no way of getting them back. But then along came the fox, and the mess of human flesh that kept me shackled to a way of being I couldn’t escape from was as distant as the memory of a dream upon waking. As the fox spun his tail, the water of the lake groaned below, as did the trees and the soil which their roots called home. The stars were still glowing, as was the moon, but the birds that had been silhouetted against it were no longer in view. Perhaps one of them really had been X? Strange things were afoot after all. What it all meant I couldn’t quite say, and yet I thought that perhaps she too was on a journey just like mine, and that like me she was seeing life and all its mysteries through a startling, new lens.

A Journal for Damned Lovers UK

A Journal for Damned Lovers US

Anthology UK / Anthology US