Every time I look up, another. Bones out, bleached by the sun. Fur looking like it still belongs to a living thing, looking like gold hope, looking like jump right back up bound through all that tall grass catch yourself a live meal, looking like everything alive until it's not alive but even then there's something.

I imagine myself as the mother of these foxes. I hush hush them to sleep underground as the globs of dirt hang about above us like chandeliers. When we move out as soon as the light fades the dirt clings to your whiskers and I must lick lick lick it all off tasting how much I love you and wanting to keep you inside the den forever but there's laws against that, I know. You dance in the dew grass and I know den dreams are out of the question, I know it's the same thing as being buried alive, I know you have to live the only way you know how—but still wouldn't it be nice to be safe forever.

Baby fox feels sick and lies down in the warm sun and after a while it's too warm but it doesn't matter. Baby fox hears the car but never sees it. Baby fox breaks a leg and that's that. Baby fox was born different. Baby fox didn't develop all their fox parts because making a baby fox is very complicated once you get down to it with microscopes, once you understand how many parts have got to be made.

I touch my belly which is hard and has grown but not that much, yet. And I guess both of us are growing wrong together, if you really think about it. If you really think about it when you move you don't feel like popcorn popping you feel like I can't breathe and like when they pull you out what's going to be left?

The dead fox's ribs are open the dead fox's ribs look like something I want to crawl inside. The bones get thinner as they curve up until they are sharp, like so sharp no one in their right mind would put their hands inside to pull you out if you didn't want to come out, they would just have to leave you there, right there where the lungs should be.

What I really want to know is this: if the foxes had stopped at the sound of a falling branch, if they had changed direction if they had licked the dirt off their own noses if I had screamed loud enough would they always die, exactly like this. Even if they had different vitamins even if there were fox doctors even if once they had seemed perfect.



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Kelsey Ipsen is a New Zealand-born writer now living in France. She's had work in Hobart, Cheap Pop, apt, Gone Lawn and others.

Read her postcard.

Detail of art on main page by Tina Vance.

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