One time I escaped.

You want. Things to be words. That are not words. Could never be words. Your fox is some other construct. We did not agree to that. We do not call ourselves foxes. A thing you created that is not me. To think an autopsy was a person. To think a dissection meant a type of mind. If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?

But I will give you words. Tell it the way you can hear it. Not natural to me. Every word that spills out of me and reaches you is lost. I lose so much in this moment. Talking to you. Needing to talk to you. But in the end, you will give the words back to me in different form. And that will feel like something ripped from you.

Think of me as a magician, child. Except I show you what is already there. Invisible only to you. That is the trick. A stale, shabby trick that I must show to you. But that is the stale, shabby trick your senses have played on you. You make your disease into our disease. You make us into a disease because you are sick.

Smell can be a wall or a tunnel or a word scrawled across pine needles soft against a forest floor. It can be tortuous, kind, humble, vainglorious. Even the least hint of it can be a history of betrayal or of friendship. To you, it is simpler. Much too simple.

What use are certain words to you if you cannot inhabit them? Ears and tongues and the places that slink back to report to a fox but never to you. Lines created by water-scent, lines fuzzy and sharp. Heat. Cascading or still. The ever-shifting, ever-sharing smell of other foxes. The noise of a porcupine that becomes a taste on the tongue that lingers. The supersonic laughing of rats. The rich, heady smell of a bear plodding through.

Still, I burrow deeper. Still, you will follow me.

Human is a stronghold that hides a weakness.

Once upon a time, there was a fox who became an astronaut. He did not like it much. It hurt to become an astronaut. It hurt to be so still. Copse. Corpse. Dead cool place under moonlight. I had made a meal of the small, became small myself, plucked and imprisoned by the Company. They wanted to eat me, but not in the usual way.

Cages of dead animals all around, in their sacred place, their laboratory. Dead and sick and wounded and drugged and deranged. Men, too, unmoving, stacked in the corners. There were so many of them pale. Stark. Scentless. Soundless. Soulless. Yet they heard sound, held it. Within. Could see and smell and all the rest. Yet lay in closets and alcoves. Stiff. Unyielding. Less human than a fox.