And the fox worried at the silence whenever he could, nuzzling at the statuette which now sat on the mantle above the bed he shared with his spouse. Come back, he sighed. I’ll repaint you, if you like. I am very good at that now. We could dress you in gilt, if you’d prefer. Swirls of dark purple, all mixed with nebulae of carnelian and gold, a handful of glitter to make it look like you drizzled stars on your pelt. Only come back.

The maneki-neko, of course, did not reply.

“Hey, Sean? I think I would like to be human.”

The sound of her voice took him by surprise. It’d been months. The fox counted. Twenty-eight months, seventy days, and three hours exactly. Sean barely noticed. He wore glasses now and the weight of his years as salt in his dark, glossy hair. The fox nudged aside Sean’s thoughts of mortgages and pensions, put down his book, and leaned out of his chair.

“I think we could arrange that,” he began carefully. “We’d have to request a new body for you, however. Something hollow so we can fit you inside. Would you like to be a boy or a girl or both or neither at all? I know excellent artists now.”

“No, no. You have me mistaken. I don’t want to look human. I’d like to be human.”

Sean frowned. “I’m not sure how to do that.”

“I know how.” the maneki-neko began to rock on her perch. “But I am afraid that it may take a while.”

“Really? How—”

Between one blink of Sean’s eyes and the next, the fox, for the first time since he met the maneki-neko, found himself completely alone.

The fox waited.

His maneki-neko did not come back.

The years slid together like a lie.

Anniversaries, births, birthdays, festivals, other people’s weddings, a thousand celebrations of mankind’s ephemeralness. Sean attended every one. The fox delighted in these festivities, saw them as competitions, a way to measure his cleverness. He was, he discovered, very good at being Sean, and even better at being mortal. Humanity wasn’t a trick to learn, but a ravine that demanded you do nothing but freefall into its heart.

He thought about his maneki-neko sometimes and their first meeting in the forest, what might have become of its ambition to be human. He missed his friend. But with every year, it was becoming harder and harder to remember the things he cared about as a fox. Some days, Sean woke up and wondered if it’d been all a dream.

“You know what surprises me most about being mortal? How much I like being old.”