Louis was out looking for roadkill again. The rain clattered against the windscreen and the wipers fought to keep it away for long enough for him to see where he was going, and what might lie at the sides of the roads. The roads were quiet, which didn’t bode well. Poor weather decreased visibility, making accidents more likely, but it also kept people away and in their homes: not creating roadkill.
It didn’t take long. A fox. It lay in the gutter in a position of discomfort: twisted slightly; paws raised, defiant; fur orange, white, with a flash of red. Perfect. The sadness never went away. His cause was one in aid of animals, so seeing them suffer, having been swept aside by the urgent uninterruptible constance of humankind, wrenched at his heart. But then his mind turned to the taste, the sustenance he lacked, the flavour of meat he had put aside for so many years. This was the loophole, and its presence made him salivate.
He parked, exited, rounded his car and stood by the beast. Hands on hips and leaning, he surveyed it. Dead. For sure. It was the mouth that gave it away, with its ajar lilt, its half-gape. It was an unnatural pose, suggesting a desire to announce to a room something untoward: a pensive master of ceremonies. But only the rain slapping the tarred surface offered some accompaniment to the wake.
In the Ford Fiesta’s boot: a shovel - wide, silver and strong - for snow, and a black refuse sack to protect the inside of the car. With one scoop, he lifted it up, tied the bag’s ends, and placed it with unnecessary softness back into the rear of the car.
Home was warm, and he shook off his wet coat and placed the bagged animal at his feet. The cabin was an unassuming wooden box, cluttered with artefacts he had gathered over the years: a loose hubcap, a road-sign declaring an upcoming flood, the rear-bumper from a tired Mercedes. And bones. The skeletons of the animals he had collected and eaten over the last decade were sat on every shelf. There were pieced and tied together with wire (after having been allowed to rot away to nothing in a shallow grave and then soaked in hydrogen peroxide) and arranged neatly in line: rabbits, hedgehogs, foxes, badgers, even a baby deer. It seemed the least he could do to mark their part in offering him sustenance.
Louis moved to the kitchen and washed his hands, ready to prepare his dinner. He peeled and quartered some red onions and carrots, chopped leeks and cauliflower then tossed it all into a thick pan and watched as it fizzed on a high heat. He then added oil, garlic, and then - after a minute or two - a generous glug of white wine. While it reduced, he began to prepare the fox. He wasn’t squeamish, which some might find incongruent. The idea of an animal dying in order to be eaten by him, he found repulsive, but to handle its corpse was not something he minded. There was pleasure to be found in the raw condensing down of life. It was an argument he often used to defend his veganism: how in this mad, chaotic world, with so much variation, can we look upon a whale, or a skunk, or a pelican, or not remark at its similarities to us? We are all one and the same: rib cages, jaws, skulls, phalanges. Yet, we abstract ourselves from that fact when we choose to degrade the other species. This act of preparation was a cathartic partaking in the lived experience: this is what physical life feels like, albeit after the fact.
All the same, he takes a breath before the knife comes down. Not usually, but now it feels necessary. Something slows his hand, makes him tentative, cautious. The silver in his hand reflects the blue flame of the stove and the thickening sauce fills his nostrils. And the fox opens its eyes.
He stumbles back with a shriek, the knife tumbling from his hand and landing erect in a wooden floorboard. The fox turns its head as the concussive sleep that had heavily shrouded it dissipates ever so slowly.
Once dead, now alive: the fox stares. And he stares back. The moment is wild, as both beings become their primal selves: alert and cautious and calculating. The fox finds its feet and shakes its fur to announce its consciousness - perhaps to itself - and stifles a yawn, without taking its deep black eyes from the prostrate man before it.
Louis becomes dumb in the wake of the uniqueness the moment brings, and it takes a long time for him to realise that there is only one appropriate action for him to perform: open the door and let it out. A less conscionable person might attack the beast - this thought had briefly run through his head before being tossed aside with a healthy pinch of shame - but this was impossible for Louis. The animal was not dead, and so had to be maintained as such.
To keep the situation calm, he opened his hands and showed his palms. The fox’s eyes moved from one palm to the other and then back again. A quick lick of the lips and his head dropped an inch, a sign of wariness, preparedness, anticipation. Louis knew that he had to be slow and steady so as to not fright the creature into wild panic. He briefly imagined the bubbling stew and the rows of skeletal remains tossed into a cartoonish brawl as the fox became a spinning, scratching and biting maul.
Louis reached the door and found the handle with an outstretched hand, all while their eyes were fixed and staring. A thick breeze tugged the door open once it was released and then Louis retreated, reaffirming his hands as open and out-facing, to the back of the cabin. The fox allowed a quick glance at the door, then another slightly longer one, and then it hopped down from the counter. It limped to the door - a front paw hovering an inch from the floor - and paused before the blustery wet outdoors. Their eyes met again, and Louis felt as though he might weep. The pained animal was now to be free in a world nowhere near home, because of his selfishness. He felt the shame of having affected this fox’s life. Of having considered eating it! Now it was brittle and beautiful and visibly shaken by the preceding events.
“You can stay, if you want?” Louis offered, aware of the cold and wet outside, making it clear that this was a safe space for them both. He rolled his eyes in the silence, as he realised he was now talking to an animal.
The fox sniffed the air between them and dropped its snout, as its black eyes considered the situation.
“You are kind.” The fox’s voice was deep and seemed the shake the cabin as it rumbled from its mouth. “Too kind, in some respects.”
“You are talking?”
“In a sense, yes.”
“What… how?”
“This will all fall away soon, as it did for all of them.” The fox glanced at the skeletal forms that crowded the shelves and then again outside at the unrelenting rain. “It is quick, and painless. Don’t be scared.” The fox limped its way out of the cabin and was gone.
Louis tentatively climbed to his feet and eased his way into the frame of the door. He peered out, wincing as the thick, cold raindrops found his face. The day was darkening, and the heavy cloud limited the light further: there was nothing to see but swaying trees and the smothered frontage of the cabin. He breathed in the damp air and it tasted like his childhood; lost in the woods with his brothers and searching for treasure. It beckoned him and he obliged, walking out into the closing of day, feeling the cool wet of the rain and the thin billowing breeze.
The light came from everywhere and it was blinding. It were as though the sky had been ripped away to reveal the harsh, surgical brightness of its foundations and Louis blinked into it with a hand shielding his eyes. And then it all fell away.
The engine was still running on the Fiesta as PC Collier pulled up in her own car behind it. The rain was clearing but the reminder of its heaviness ran in dense streams down the sides of the road. A rumble of thunder heaved in the distance as she exited the police car and made her way over to the victim. A woman sat on her haunches, ashen pale, and beside her lay the sprawled form of the man she had hit.
“I didn’t see him.” The woman began to say, her words clogged with fear and sadness, “he was just in the road I couldn’t see him.”
PC Collier offered a thin smile of reassurance as she eyed the body. He had a snow shovel in one hand and a bin bag in the other, his eyes were wide, and a soft smile played at his lips. No sign of his roadkill, she thought as she pieced together what had happened. She kneeled down and checked his pulse - a futile endeavour - and sighed. A fox darted from the bushes several metres ahead. It paused and eyed the scene before disappearing into the burgeoning night, the rat-a-tat of his wet steps caught by the laughing wind.