The Black Fox

Short Story | 1200 Words | Uncanniness in grief; a young woman finds familiarity with a strange fox

My photo: Niseko, Japan, 2025.

Rin’s legs protested as she climbed stone stair after stair, her fingers numb from where they clutched her bag strap. If she craned her neck, she could just see the top of the shrine – its dark wooden spire a shadow against the shadow of the night, marked only where the stars didn’t shine.

An abandoned shrine hadn’t been her first choice of shelter. But her few friends were sound asleep at this hour, and her dad was long gone, and her mother had told her not to come back. So, it was a shrine at the top of three hundred steps and all its likely wild inhabitants, or it was the park.

The breeze rose again, its icy tendrils caressing her cheek and leaving goosebump trails against bloodless skin. Rin tugged her too-small coat tighter around her, thanked herself for not throwing it out when she outgrew it last winter, and ducked her head as she hurried up the last few steps.

At long last, the ground flattened beneath her, and she looked up from her concrete grounding.

But there was no shrine.

In its place was a small house. The door was open, the inside pitch-black, all the windows covered with blankets. There wasn’t even a spire, though she was sure she had seen one.

She and the windows locked gaze for a moment. Then, a sheet fell away, revealing a small figure in its place, staring out at her from the windowsill. A pair of ears, a tail, a set of dark, too-shiny eyes and black fur that blurred in and out of the dark haze of the house.

A fox.

Uneasiness curled inside her, a solid weight anchoring her to her spot.

The wind kicked up again, howling, leaping from tree to tree to shake the world around her, stalking her. She looked back at the house’s entrance. The darkness looked still, familiar, warm. The fox tilted its head, its tail swishing back and forth, beckoning her in, and she found her feet moving against her will.

One night, then.

The wind pushed her forward, ushering her through the entrance. Once inside, she shut the heavy wooden door behind her and took off her shoes. The inside smelt dusty and damp, reminiscent of mud in a mausoleum.

When Rin’s eyes adjusted to the expired gloom, she saw the unblinking fox sitting in front of her. She hadn’t heard it coming.

Up close, it was surely beautiful. Its slender form wrapped itself around her legs, its fur softly greeting her. But she had never seen a black fox before, and it carried the same damp dusty dead smell, and there was something wrong about it beyond just its colour.

The fox was moving down the hall, and Rin found herself following, still puzzling over her unease. It tilted its head this way and that, gesturing with anthropomorphic unnaturalness.

First, she was presented with what would have been the kitchen, although all the furniture was covered in dark cloths, and the sink didn’t turn on when she tried it, and the picture frames hanging on the walls were not pictures but rather mirrors. Eyes the same brown as hers peered out from it, but the face they belonged to was lightly wrinkled with age. Rin recalled that she was only eighteen.

Her feet followed the fox to the next room.

It was lit by candles in its far corner, yet their glow seemed stifled by the oppressive night. And who had lit them?

The fox sat. Stared.

It felt rude to interrupt his tour – and Rin was not sure when she had decided it was a him, because she knew nothing about foxes and their sexes – so she stepped closer. The burning wax candles framed a photo on a covered cupboard, her favourite incense burning to its side, a small wrapped candy placed there too. A tamaya.

Her feet carried her towards the small memorial, and her legs folded underneath her, and her hands clapped together without Rin thinking she ought to pay her respects. Once her prayer was said, her fingers cupped themselves around the candles, so fiery and inviting. Yet she failed to conjure any heat from the flames.

The photo was of a man, but no matter how hard she rubbed her eyes, she couldn’t focus on his face. She thought that he must have dark hair, and that he must be wearing a black suit, but every time she tried to confirm it, murky static filled her head, and an awful sadness filled her heart.

She wasn’t sure if she had sat there for a minute or an age, but when her body decided to carry itself to the next room, her bones felt weary. Heavy.

The black fox waited for her.

It grinned its foxy grin, canines glinting both orange and cold silver as the candles and the moon battled to stake its claim on it; reality and unreality colliding in its cavernous smile. But Rin did not feel threatened by the fox.

The room revealed itself slowly, stripping back layers of shadows to reveal a wooden post here, a wrinkle of cloth there, the depression of foam before it was covered by a veil like that of a bride’s. Her body attuned itself to the room before her mind could, and Rin found herself lying childlike on the bed, though she did not remember the steps she had taken between the threshold and the mattress.

The air was no longer musty and unused. It was heady, hanging heavy with the exhalations of exhausted lovers, tinged with coaxed sweat.

The bedding was tangled around her, evidence of some lovers’ consummation, but when Rin fought to raise herself from the mattress to examine it anew, the bed was perfectly made, and there was only a single pillow.

She grasped it to herself and buried her face within its shirt, for she was overcome suddenly with great wailing sobs. She wrapped her arms around the pillow, hand finding its pair to stroke it, soothing. She startled again at the feeling of wrinkled pads smoothing over swollen joints.

Her back ached then, as it had when she turned forty and persisted long afterwards.

The black fox keened, summoning her. Rin peeled her face away from the pillow and mourned open-faced at the creature. It watched her, dark eyes without the shine of living things, glassy like those of a teddy bear’s. But it was undeniably his dark eyes, the ones she could barely conjure up from memory.

She had not seen him in so long.

She reached for him, memory complete now, and her limb transformed into a pelt of shadows. The joints reoriented themselves, sticking at the elbow in a fixed angle. Her fingers fused, short and velveted except for the pads of her paws.

Her tail swished as it freed itself of human fabric, and she leapt from the bed with canid grace.

Two black foxes nuzzled against each other, communicating not in words but in the unknowable language of the animal race. An ear flicked, an eye blinked, and then they were nothing more than shadows within shadows, eclipsed into the night.