You convulse, lose the little ballast you had. A cup of tuna. A ladle of soup from the homeless shelter in town. A few crackers you’d stolen from a fast-food restaurant. Something you ate? Or a shift during the night in the pollution hazing the skyline or welling up from ruptured barrels.

Or you have cancer. But there’s a rash, too, so you think it’s just something new in the air. Not something rising out of you. Deep dive: a deep cleansing dive into the river. As you remember it as a child, not the corrupted thing it has become—maybe farther out of town, where it doesn’t smell. Where half-built beaver dams filter and crayfish still survive under rocks.

The fox gleams, winks at you as you recover. Almost cheery in the moonlight that drifts strange, like snow, down through the trees. Bright white streaks.

The creature puts you in mind of a comforting children’s fable. There are always clever talking foxes. Helpful foxes. Smiling with their teeth. Bedtime stories your mother told you. Of fantastical animals transformed by your mother’s gin-tinged breath. How the pages seemed to curl up like something dying at her touch, and the stories curled up, too, the fox becoming something else. The moral never the normal one.

All right, fox, all right. Each thing in its turn. Wiping your mouth with the edge of a ragged sleeve. Letting out one final gasp.

Cloth still clings to the journal like gauze. Someone had come along, unwrapped it. A moment of panic, spinning around. But there’s no one here now. The book’s discarded. Took a look, flung it into the mud. Maybe even someone who lives huddled under the bridge, like you. Even if you’d never do that. You prefer discarded things, the way they bring something or someone with them. Almost as if they bring friends. Company.

You pry the book out, wipe away the mud. The strange plastic, the hard shell, is lacerated, cuts into the edge of your hand. Windswept, and like it had passed through a flame that left it whole. The book—journal, you think, instinctively—smells like blood, with some antiseptic scent peering out beneath that.

Fumble for your cheap key-chain flashlight. To reveal a faint circle on the cover and inside the circle that crude drawing of a fox head, rendered in blue. The circle’s like an upturned goldfish bowl and thus the fox an old-fashioned deep-sea diver in a ponderous suit.