“And don’t say nothing happened, because otherwise it’s a fucking science fiction craziness that everyone just happens to make the same thing up wherever we go, you sneaky fuck! Oh, these drugs.” She starts to lean her head against the window but the road is too rattly. Through the glass and the eucalyptus leaves shimmery in the trees, the moon looks fragile and cowering, like someone could just blow it out. “You said you would quit.”

“So did you,” Reynard says, quiet.

“But why—”

“Because it feels so good,” he says. “What else?”

“Me, is what else. Stop this. Don’t turn it around. You keep fucking up.”

“You’re drunk.”

“You’re drunk. Also. Watch the road. Fucking Jesuit schools, is that it? Is that where you learned to sneak off into the dark?”

“They taught me everything is darkness.”

“They did not fucking not. You’re a clergyman. Watch the road.”

“They taught me the darkness tries, but cannot know us, just as we—”

“Watch the—there’s a dog in the road!” Nina’s voice is terrible to hear. A wild shadow springs toward them, larger, and intersects the windshield. “It’s a fox!”

Something happens right away, at the crest of the hill of the road, right where the wide avenue is whizzing by big as life, headlights and horns. Something shattery. What the doctor will say is, an old-fashioned way of putting it, misadventure. The police will say, accident. Driving under the influence. It happened so fast. I saw nothing. A terrible noise. The two witnesses, high schoolers who truth be told were on the way into the Grove for sex, rethink the night, and indeed much is shuffled around. Nina has an ice pack on her head. She has vomited twice, although that had already been likely to happen, from drink. And the fox is not dead and neither is Reynard, although both have had life-changing experiences, promised at weddings and meetings of addicts, hoping to change into something else. And so they do. Let us admit, let us realize, just as there is a space between married and not, there is a space between beast and person, living and dead, and the fox and Reynard both vanish at once.