Happy Belated Solstice!
Some of you dear readers have been asking why I’ve stopped sharing my writing in my newsletter. The answer is, sadly, that whatever I share here I can’t get published later. Anything I post here is considered self-published. And the industry has a BIG stick up its butt when it comes to self publishing.
I’m currently trying to figure out how I want to navigate this conundrum but in the meantime I thought I’d share this story about love. I wrote it when I was 26 and very melodramatic. It’s been rejected 99 million times. And, honestly, I see why. There are some major problems with the story.
But I still find it funny and I still enjoy it and I hope you all might find some humor in it too—dark, creepy, existentially depressing humor, but still humor!
Killing the Fox
by Sammie Downing
“I use data to eliminate oversight on a company wide level. You see,” he leaned forward and his smile disappeared into his coiffed mustache. “You see, we have all these tools now, but we don’t properly utilize them. With each iteration of our software, we become increasingly ineffective.” Jeremy glanced around the room as if he was worried someone was eavesdropping.
“So, my goals are to focus on our core values and make sure our metrics keep up with the pace of the rest of our company. I just make sure that I don’t iterate on anything we’ve created and constantly move us forward.” He leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his Old Fashioned. “And, so yeah, that’s what I do.”
Belle surveyed the patio and resisted the urge to drink every last drop of her Negroni. Belle met Jeremy on Tinder. They’d swiped right, and here he was, in the flesh: a bespectacled man with an adequately muscled body, perfectly trimmed facial hair and tight denim jeans. Well, she thought, let me reiterate all the iterations of your potatoness. Potato was a term she and her friends developed when they were young: you’d make someone feel less empty, not even nourished, not even satisfied with flavor, literally just there to take up space.
“Fascinating,” is what Belle said as she pushed her mashed potatoes to the edge of the plate. The world was teeming with them.
“I feel like I’ve been talking about myself this whole time. What’s your story, Belle? What’s a Colorado girl like you doing in Portland?”
Belle groaned.
Iterations of Potatoeness:
Use of the world “girl” in reference to a twenty-six-year-old woman in charge of her own fucking life.
Asking a bland, open-ended question that he could care less about the answer. Where’s the creativity?
Arguing with the waitress about the proper way to make an Old Fashioned. What’s the over-under on him ever working in the service industry? Not good.
Belle checked her watch. “Want to head down to the waterfront? We can probably still catch the fireworks.”
“Oh, the waterfront?” He paused. “There are so many people, and the fireworks are exactly the same every Fourth.”
“Have you ever wondered who lights all the fireworks? Can you imagine being that man? Standing on the stern of the boat, surrounded by fuses, in charge of setting them all alight?”
“I think it’s an algorithm on a computer.”
“I’m just saying, what if you were the man in charge of all that fire?”
“And I’m just saying there is no man.”
Belle drained her drink and scanned the restaurant. This was her fifth date in two weeks, and she’d already come to this new speakeasy in the Pearl twice. She wondered if the staff recognized her. Or him.
“Anyway, you never answered my question.”
“Well, you didn’t really ask a question.” Belle felt electric. Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was the knowledge that not too far from her there were fireworks destined to ignite. Deep inside she was aware that something was about to combust.
“Yes, I did,” Jeremy adjusted his collar. “I asked you what your story was.”
“Come on, that’s not a real question. That’s a non-question. It’s a weak-ass question.”
“What’s a real question?”
“What’s your relationship like with your mother?”
Jeremy leaned so far back in his chair he nearly touched the head of the woman who sat behind him. “I don’t know, normal?”
“Okay, normal. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. She’s fine? She’s like, a mom, you know?”
What a wuss. “Okay, last try, Jeremy.” Belle folded her arms across the table and came closer. “Do you believe in God?”
He jerked backwards. “Whoa. Don’t you think that’s a bit heavy for a first date?”
“What are we doing here if not to ask real questions? If not to get to know each other? Like, what is this? Why are you actually here, Jeremy?”
The trifecta of questions you were never, ever supposed to ever ask on a first date. No wonder she was single.
Jeremy turned around, scanning the patio and then he cracked his knuckles. “I don’t know, just to like, see if we vibe well. Maybe go home together. You know, see if we want to spend a little time together?”
“How many people are you seeing?” Belle asked.
Jeremy coughed, rubbed his hands on his jeans. Belle couldn’t help but smirk. “I’m not judging,” she said. “I don’t care, I swear, I’m just curious. I just want to know.”
“Three or four, I don’t know. Why does it matter? I just haven’t found someone I connect with, you know?”
Belle knew she was acting crazy. She knew she was behaving the exact opposite of how you were supposed to behave on a date. You’re supposed to be coy, mysterious, know a lot about beer. You’re supposed to appear available enough. In high school she was voted “Most Intense,” because she had a habit of going to parties and asking everyone what they thought happened after you died. In her twenties she’d tried to tone it down, take it easy, nobody likes the girl who wants to know how you really feel. But she’d whittled herself down to the bone. There was nothing left to hold.
“God,” she said shaking her head and half laughing to herself. She felt close to tears.
“Are you okay?” Jeremy attempted to appear concerned but instead he looked like he’d had an overdose of Botox.
“When I was thirteen, after my mom died, some psychiatrist decided to put me on Prozac,” Belle said. She’d always been a go big or go home type of person. She was in it now. No going back. “Do you know what that does to you? It evens you out. The world doesn’t hurt so bad but you also don’t feel excited either. That’s what this is. It’s love fucked up on Prozac. Love on meds.”
“Do you need to step outside or something?”
“See, case in point. I’m not here to see if I vibe with you, Jeremy. To see if maybe we want to hang together. I’m here because I don’t believe there’s a God and I think when you die you just end and I want to know if you do too. Cause if that’s not where this is going, if we’re not eventually going to get to something real, then I don’t want to spend another fucking minute at this table.”
“I think maybe you’re upset about something? Maybe you had a bad day at work? Maybe you’re off your meds? I’m not judging! I just think I’m gonna grab the check.”
Belle opened her purse and put 40 dollars on the table. She stood up, folding her dress against her thighs. Before she walked out, she leaned close to his ear. She could smell his juniper cologne as she whispered, "You wanna know what the saddest thing is? You don’t even know you’re a potato.”
Belle could not stop smiling all the way down to the waterfront. She was going to see some fireworks. Even if there wasn’t a flame puppeteer, even if there wasn’t one single man in charge of all those explosions, that fire dance, even if, in the end, it really was all a computer.
As she walked, she thought, not for the first time, about a friend of hers she met five years and another world ago. Mason happened into her mind on nights like this one. She’d felt a kinship with him. It was hard to describe. Some people might have said her feelings were a crush. But it was more than that. She didn’t really have crushes—she had longings. Longings to know someone in a real, unadulterated way. Rarely did she come across a person whose spirit appealed to hers in such a surge that she could only describe it as magic. This is what Belle believed: that the only real magic in the world was the magic of one human yoked to the magic within another.
A few months ago, Mason called her out of the blue. Just to see how she was. He said wanted to hear about her life. It was real and honest and brief and wholly without expectations. Belle spent the day after their call contemplating buying a plane ticket to New York and knocking on his front door. More than anything, this is what Belle desperately wanted to know: Why did they live in a world where to cleave yourself open, serve up a slice of yourself, still quivering in your palms, to another human, was unacceptable? When did they all become such collective cowards? When did it become crazy, repulsive even, to travel 3,000 miles just to say, I don’t know what this is, I’m not entirely sure if it’s even love? All I know is that I feel this human magic towards the human magic that lives in you.
But she did not say any of this. Instead, she swiped right endlessly at night, alone in her bed, and ended up smack in the middle of dates like the one she just left.
Everyone was better online. Their faces crisper. Flaws were funny and well groomed. The dialogue was always witty, if only basically so. Any person, when given forty minutes of private response time can come up with something interesting to say. Perhaps she spent so much time focusing on the ways in which John Doe, 28 “Goonies Never say Die—Let’s catch up and watch the world go by” wasn’t accurately portraying his true self that she refused to admit that what terrified her was the fact that she was lying to them, too. Before each date, she felt sick, imagining them sitting across the table, viewing her in the light of this flesh realm, so far removed from the bridesmaid’s pictures, photos of her hiking with smooth hair. The truth is: for her profile she had to boil down who she was into a single line and she hadn’t even defined Who am I really? into anything she could remotely paraphrase.
She felt false, a liar, a masquerade, a charade. A Scheherazade but instead of 1,001 stories and one woman, she became 1,001 women attempting to tell one story. And so, on this Fourth of July, faced with fireworks and strolls on the waterfront, she just couldn’t bear it. She didn’t want that hot, embarrassed shame to spread like a rash over her cheeks.
After a short walk, a little tipsy and invigorated, Belle stood in the middle of the crowd. Hundreds of little kids and teenagers climbed the walls, dangling over the Morrison Bridge. Masses screaming and laughing. She felt overwhelmed but in a wonderful way. Her head ached, and there was a slight pressure behind her ear. But she wanted to go! To be out! To be observed but not seen and to smell the scent of life without rain. The very flesh of the crowd was radiant after three seasons spent sodden with darkness and a deluge of constant, tremulous rain. A sky that was afraid to speak and yet unwilling to let anything go unsaid. But tonight, all that remained of winter was this frenetic feeling and the crowd was drunk on it.
Belle liked being in the center of this awakening. Her favorite time to feel turned-on was when she was not with a man. She could possess herself then without any obligation to anyone. The feeling needn’t be a gift or stolen, shared, or complicated by misunderstanding. It belonged to her. Alone but so not alone. Belle closed her eyes and let the crowd overtake her.
Suddenly she felt someone’s breath at the nape of her neck.
“What are you looking at?” asked a voice from behind her. The hairs on her neck flared like the buzz inside her body. “The fireworks are that way.”
The voice was right. All around her there were fireworks and yet she was looking down. She’d done that thing where she listened with her body.
“I know where the fireworks are,” Belle said, turning to face the voice. He was handsome, tall, wearing a baseball cap that highlighted his stiff cheekbones. His brown eyes were overly large for his thin, white face. Attraction made her feel helpless and unintelligent. It was so biological and so unruly, hell bent on betraying her.
“Well, I thought I’d make sure you were okay. You know some people get PTSD or seizures from the sound of fireworks. And here you are, just staring at the ground.”
“I’m not a combat veteran or an epileptic but thank you for the concern.”
“How do I know who you are? Or who you’re not?” His face was so close to hers and he actually looked into her eyes, as if there was something there that he needed to discover.
She found herself smiling despite herself. “Who do you think I am?”
“I think you’re someone who knows how to be alone.”
She was dizzy. He was too close. “And who are you?”
“I’m someone who knows how to be alone, too.”
“I doubt that,” Belle snorted. He was not the type of man who lacked company. His stiff posture, the way he held his body, his ironed shirt—this was the type of man who expected things of himself and believed he met those expectations.
“Why wouldn’t I tell you the truth?”
“People lie for all kinds of reasons.”
“I think it takes someone who is alone to recognize it in someone else.” He leaned closer. “Look, I feel like we got off on the wrong start. I’m Reid.” He held out his hand.
“I’m Belle.”
His grip soothed her, just the right amount of pressure, bordering on too tender.
“Nice to meet you, Belle. Not many people come down here by themselves. Bad night?”
“No. Actually not at all. It’s a great night.”
“Every night is what you make of it, right?” Reid said.
“Exactly.” It was like he knew what brought her here, like it brought him here too.
“I almost didn’t come tonight. Sometimes, it feels like you’ve seen one firework show, you’ve seen them all. But how often do you get to watch fire rain from the sky?” Reid’s face was alight beneath the crescendo of explosions. The coordinated, final hoorah.
“Listen,” Reid said, turning his gaze back to her. “I know a better spot for fireworks.”
All around the bustle was growing and she felt that sharp twang behind her ear. She was supposed to be on a date anyway tonight, so why not? They’d barely talked and yet she already felt more fully flesh and blood than she had in a long time.
“Follow me,” he led her up below the Morrison Bridge and onto the sidewalk. “My car is right over here.”
They came to a parked black sedan. His car was freshly waxed, luminescent under the streetlights.
Reid held the door open for her. Belle was about to duck her head into the passenger seat when she heard someone call her name.
“Belle!” It was Sophie, her coworker and her boyfriend, Brandon. They waved at her from the sidewalk. “Where are you going? Come to Sassy’s with us!”
“I’m going to see more fireworks,” Belle called back.
“Nah, you should come with us! It’ll be fun.” Sophie and Brandon waited on the other side of the street watching them. “You can bring him!”
“We don’t have much time. They’re scheduled to go off at ten.” Reid said this only to her.
She was already halfway inside the car. Besides, she wanted this moment all for herself. It was the beginning of something new. Sophie lingered for a few moments watching Belle before she shrugged and headed back to the crowd.
Belle looked up at Reid. A part of her couldn’t believe that she was getting in the car with a stranger—she never did anything like this. But maybe that was her problem? Maybe that’s why she felt so alone—because she never followed her instincts and she never took any risks.
“I just want you to know that I’m getting in this car because I want something real, I want something I can sink my teeth into. But I’m not going to go home with you. That’s not how this night ends. Do you understand?”
“If you say so,” he said.
“Well, so long as you know.” Belle climbed into the black car. It smelled the way rental cars smell.
“Put on your seatbelt,” he said as he started the car. He didn’t drive off until he watched her fasten it. As they drove over the bridge she looked around. The sky was vermillion with colored fire. Everything in the world was splendid in this moment. She put her nose to the glass.
He got on I-80 and headed east, away from the city.
“The Gorge?” she asked. It was one of her favorite places. When she was a little girl, she used to visit Portland with her parents. They rented a car and drove to the green cliffs that dangled above the river. Waterfall after waterfall after waterfall over a wide, unyielding river and then—golden hills.
Reid smiled and said, “You’ll see.”
As the city drifted beyond them, Reid turned to her and said, “Tell me the saddest thing you’ve ever seen.”
Belle let out a laugh that burst from her chest and outwards. Yes. Yes, she thought. You just had to be open! You just had to take yourself off the drugs! This was a real question. This was a question that deserved an answer.
“Why are you laughing?”
“It’s just funny. Sometimes you ask and you receive and sometimes you ask and you don’t. There is absolutely no reason to this world.”
“You’re right about that.”
“If I tell you the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, will you tell me yours?”
“You have a deal, sweetheart,” he said and squeezed her knee.
“Don’t call me sweetheart,” she said, but didn’t move away.
It was strange, Belle didn’t even have to think. It was like she’d had the story waiting there, for this moment, all along.
“In high school, it was late and my Dad and his new wife were fighting and I just wanted to get out of the house, to just breathe, you know? So, I decided to walk around my neighborhood.”
“That’s dangerous, to walk alone at night as a young girl.”
Belle shrugged. “I hated being at home.”
“Controlling parents?”
She shivered and looked out the window. She never talked about her family anymore. After she left home, Belle stopped being the girl whose mom killed herself. Now, if she brought it up with someone new the response was always: I don’t know what to say, I’m so sorry. She wanted to scream—you know exactly what to say!—You want to know why! You want to know how she killed herself, you want to know if I was the one who found her, you want to know what a dead body looks like after losing all its blood.
“I was never close with my dad. After my mom died, I just felt like the house wasn’t really mine anymore.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“Yeah, I guess it was.” They were getting further from the city and the stream of cars had thinned. Theirs were the only headlights on the road. It was beautiful, Belle thought, to be following two beams of light charging through the night. “Anyway, as I was walking, I heard someone call out to me in the darkness. There was a group of younger guys gathered on a porch of one of the houses that college kids rented out. They were playing beer pong. I was going to keep walking but they kept calling after me so I stopped in front of their fence. Three guys came down to meet me. We talked for a bit and then one of them invited me to his new Vegetarian restaurant that he’d just opened in downtown Denver. I remember thinking, even then, that he was too young to own anything other than himself. He said he dropped out of school because he felt ‘called’ to open the restaurant. He had that tone of voice that men get, you know what I’m talking about?”
“Yeah, I know the tone.” Reid laughed.
“He was telling me that he’d opened this vegetarian restaurant because he couldn’t stand animal cruelty and he’d been on this commune in Nepal where he’d watch goats being slaughtered and he realized that he could never be a part of a world that killed other living things. He couldn’t bear to watch suffering of any kind. No creature should be miserable. He’s one of those Colorado guys, you know, with the beard and the knife on his belt. And as he’s talking, I start to tune him out and I turn my head and stare across the street. That’s when I see her. I see this fox standing in the middle of the street. She’s so close. I’ve never seen a fox this close in my entire life. I always thought they’d look like dogs, but when you see them like that, you realize they look like cats—there is a fierce, feminine look to them. She was beautiful and she was just standing there letting us stare at her. The guys got quiet too and it was like what had been just a dance of bullshit and horny teenagers all of a sudden became a real moment.
“The car came out of nowhere. It was so late and it was such a deserted street that no one was expecting it. You know that sound? That body to tire sound? It makes this gut-curdling, bone-crunching noise. It made me want to throw up, the smack of the fox’s body on the pavement. And then it drove off. The car was gone like that.”
Belle reached over and put her hand on Reid’s thigh. She felt shy and the touch seemed to mean more than she’d expected. Now they each touched each other twice. His hand on her and her hand on him. The highway rumbled smoothly beneath their wheels.
“But, in the middle of the street, the fox was still alive. It was screaming. Have you ever heard a fox scream?” Belle asked.
“We don’t have them where I’m from.”
“Growing up, women in my neighborhood used to call the police when they heard a fox cry in the night. They thought that a woman was being raped, being murdered. And that’s the noise this fox was making. We all watched as the fox attempted to drag her broken body away from her own blood.
“I remember it like it was yesterday. The guy who started the restaurant, he puffed up his chest and said something like, ‘I have to put it out of its misery.’ Like he was some sort of hero, like he was the only one capable of ending her pain. So, he pulled out his knife that he had clipped to his belt and crouched next to her. He held his knife over the white fur of her throat. But he didn’t cut deep enough. He tried again. But when his knife touched the fox's throat he chickened out. The fox sounded like someone being mutilated in the night. And she was.
“God, that’s horrible,” Reid said.
“It was awful. Finally, the guy gets his knife through the neck, almost decapitating her. Her screams stopped. But you know what the saddest part was? It was like he knew—he had this one chance to make it all real. Everything he was telling me, his whole story about animal cruelty, defender of the small—all the stuff he’d said to fill up his life with, this was his chance to prove them all true. And he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill the fox on the first try, he couldn’t take away her pain and he couldn’t protect her—he wasn’t brave enough and he couldn’t mean all the things he said. And then he cried.
“Ever since that night I’ve wanted to ask every man I’ve ever dated if they could kill the fox. I want to know if they know what it means to kill her. If they have what it takes. If they mean all the shit they say.”
A swell of silence filled the car, taking up all the extra space. It was a silence so warm and deep it left condensation on the windows. How long could he bear the silence? How long can any human bear silence with another before they began to feel ashamed—ashamed that they have nothing to say that is worthy of space?
Belle was terrified of her relief. To have this night. This moment. This man who asked real questions. To refuse to fill silence and surrender instead. It shouldn’t be this way, she thought. This shouldn’t be rare. This shouldn’t happen once in twenty-six years. Why did anyone come together anymore if this wasn’t what they found or what they sought?
Reid turned to her with this look that burned and made a tremble roll down her spine. “Do you think I could kill the fox?”
Belle kept looking at him even though she was worried he’d drive off the road, drive them into darkness and water.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think you would.”
It was getting late, and Belle wondered where the fireworks were. She’d never heard of secret fireworks in Hood River. She expected that suddenly they’d appear in a wide prairie below the mountain surrounded by a crowd of people, greeted with explosions of color.
She didn’t want the drive to end. Sometimes it was easier to tell a person the truth if you weren’t looking them in the eye. If you were only talking to them in small pieces, a glance at their elbow, their profile, the soft part of their wrist. If you revealed yourself to a puzzle piece of someone else’s body—they’d have to put themselves together before they could understand you.
Reid began to hum as he pulled off I-80. There were no gas stations or shops, it was just one of those exits off the highway that led to land and nothing else. Not even a streetlight.
“Do you have friends who own property out here?” she asked.
“No.”
Reid’s headlights created an orb that plowed through fog. They drove up into the hills. The dirt road didn’t even have a sign. A sea of evergreens seethed around them. Belle realized with a surge of panic that she had no idea where she was. She’d never been here before. It was not Hood River.
“I think we should turn around now. It’s getting late and I have to be at work early.”
Reid stopped the car. He got out first and walked around to open the door for Belle.
“Ready, sweetheart?” he asked.
“Wait!” Fog flooded through the open door. She could barely see his face in the darkness. The dense woods muted all noise and Belle felt trapped underwater. The only sound she could hear was her own heart in her ear. “Wait, you haven’t told me about the saddest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten,” he said, taking her hand.
And there you have it folx!
Live long and prosper,
Sammie