You couldn’t kill us all.

What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear. We kept being alive even as they destroyed us. We kept our secrets though they tried to extinguish our secrets with us. Still we died. Still we lived. Up until this day.

A fox must set itself on fire to become human, the old myths say. But they never say whether if you set a human on fire they become a fox. Perhaps because no human could live up to being a fox. You are a common species. Or were a common species. A common. In the commons. A common domain.

After I escaped, I lived in a cabin up in the woods for a time. Which woods when is unimportant.

Let me tell you a story about a story I read in the cabin. In the story, there was a parrot imprisoned for sixty years. At the end of the story, the parrot forgave his captor because his captor was an astronomer and looked noble at the stars.

After I read that story, I started killing humans.

Made a sport of trapping humans. I trapped them, I snared them, I poisoned them. I shot them. I cut them. I used arrows on them. I drowned humans. I crushed them. I drove over them. All around in clearings you’d see dead humans. No one took any mind. All the mind was gone, in the place I’d chosen.

It was like a nightmare. It was like a dream. But I was a fox. How could I do any of that? Maybe it was a dream or a nightmare. Maybe it was just a story.

What do you think, human? Do you think I could do that?

A vast golden hotel shaped like a ship had fallen on its side into a ravine and could not right itself. All of the people had sloshed out of the pool at the top of the ark, fallen to their deaths. Their bodies lay rotting and dull red. Ripped apart, vessels filling up with mold and standing water. Faces frozen in less a scream than a monumental disbelief that their monument had failed them.

The rest we killed.

Except the chef, who raged at me that he had so much work to do that day. That he must be allowed to prepare the kitchen. The rows of kitchens. The rows of larders full of stinking maggoty meat. For all of the dead guests. What was wasted was no less or no more than what was wasted before the fall.

The concierge cowered next to him, begging forgiveness for the words of the chef.