Kitsune mews a little and it makes more sense: Pay attention to me. Padgett holds her. It is warm to hold a baby, no one would deny that, and it is nice, also undeniable, to hold something warm. Like wine in the belly. She looks over at this masked conversation. It’s even possible that it is not Martin, that someone else is actually listening to their record and liking it. Or Martin means he’s busy, that the bar’s business is strong. It’s like the rustles out the window, this scratchy communication she has with the barman. It’s there, she can hear it, but it’s not really clear what anything is meaning, or if it means what it says. The rustling birds in the bush, squirrels in the branches, a large burglar raccoon maybe, all sound a little frightening. But they could be spooked themselves, by some larger creature invoking pain and trouble.

Reynard walks cloaked through the neighborhood. One of his hands is running against everything he walks by—shrubs, trees, a wooden fence with each slat tut-tutting his dirty fingers. The other hand holds a cigarette, just one lonely cancerous star, tobacco an almost unusual sight in San Francisco nowadays. The last true cigarettes are seen with banished boyfriends on rusted-out balconies, or petulant white-collars with defiant plumes in lunch-break parks, small huddled masses under the awnings of bars like the last gatherings of the faithful. Reynard, of course, is not a man of faith. He is not a vicar or a husband or even a fiancé. He is the possession of the ghost of a fox. You see such types around the edges of packs of young men, showered and clapping shoulders in loud bars, the one whose eyes will gyre silent around the room while everyone else roars at jokes—in other words, the one who might rape you. You can track him onscreen, cold-logic screeding on the topic of the moment. Observe him underemployed, hunched in a café, crawling under other customers’ legs to plug in his scratchy laptop, how the legs flee from him.

San Francisco is full of pop-ups and takeovers, French tourists using someone’s two-bedroom apartment for three days, a sandwich place in the empty chrome shell of the closed stereo store. This is just another sort. The fox’s howling spirit inhabited him at the moment of impact there in Bottle Grove. Ferocious and scheming forkedly in a language people do not speak, it found a space where Reynard’s heart was beating wildly and conned its way in, although it was not as if Reynard had been previously unconniving or at rest.