EACH DAY, I MOVE MORE TENDERLY through the city. The pain hides in alleyways, in the shadows, the black sludge of the gut.

I sleep on the floor now, afraid of the softness of the mattress, feathers as a trigger. I never know when I will erupt, a woman as a volcano. A small madness creeps in, a bit of air in the skull.

At work, I stand at my desk, afraid to sit, afraid I will rupture, split.

“Hello, tall lady!” booms the boss. “Is this a power move? Never let the enemy see you at rest!”

I keep typing. The pain from the knot travels up my spine to my brain and floods my wires.

When the pain comes, I leave my body, corpse up like a dead fly on the windowsill, the world hurling itself forward without me.

“I’LL PUT YOUR NAME DOWN,” SAYS THE next receptionist. “He can see you in one month.”

Her voice sounds like pink syrup, glistening, round at the edges.

“A month?”

“Mhmm! He’s all booked up!”

“I’ll take that appointment,” I say, cradle the phone.

Thirty white squares of hell stretch out before me.

IN THE WILD, I WOULD BE LEFT FOR DEAD beneath black branches. At sunset, predators would smell my weakness on the air, flesh soaked with sweat, muscles flooded in panic.

I wouldn’t fight; I’d lie in the long grass, motionless, memorizing the shape of their teeth in my flesh, knowing them by their mouths as they gnawed through my flesh to my bones.

Fox

Wolf

Bear

Man

I would sing the list in the purple twilight through the black branches of the trees, a sweet death hum.

Fox

Wolf

Bear

Man

VISION

All night the pulsing of the fox hearts in the woods keep us awake. The chorus of the pounding hits the level of dull helicopters.

“What if the walls start to shake?” I ask.

“Don’t be dramatic,” he says.

It was the same way during the owl season, when their wings stirred up the curtains every night. He never woke then.

The foxes are different. A panic seizes my body at their sounds. The drumbeat continues. I can feel their eyes on the house. I can sense they want us.

All night, their scents work through the windows. Everything smells of their musk, even our towels and bedding.

“We’re on the brink of something huge,” I say each morning over cereal, which now tastes of their furs.

He is always buttoning his shirt. He slaps my bare bottom whenever I am close enough.

“Don’t you remember their heartbeats last night?” I ask.

He shakes his head and puts on a record.

The song spins up into the air. We dance for a moment, our bodies close, the heat between us returning.

We can’t know that by nightfall, the foxes will be upon us with their rapid hearts and their gnashing teeth. We won’t know how they got in, only that their bodies rush in to fill our living room, a rabid energy to their entrance, the scent of their musks even stronger.