unraveled

the fall

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          The trunks of the trees were like bars of a prison except that freedom lay on the wild, green scented side, not the civilized, village side. She remembered wanting to warn the Officer of the Cervauxia foxes lay just beyond these leaves but she held her tongue. Officers didn't like little girls who believed in mythological foxes. What they did like was believing that the glorious foxes were a mere chapter in history books and old lady tales. She wanted to punch officers.

          She took in a deep breath remembering the sweet deceiving scent of the trees; they seemed like paradise with their brown leaves, the color of mediocre dreams and toasted bread and umber branches that arched as if reaching for the canopy of leaves on the forest floor to pick up and put back on their bare skin. Inside the forest, the air was glazed. It was like being underwater, in a world apart. Birds twittered like choir in a church praising their deity that was the forest itself. Nia had always thought that calling this place 'a forest' did it a massive injustice, it deserved a magical name with twisted vowels that didn't sit properly with their neighbouring consonants not a domestic and simple name like 'forest' because the spiked, dry trees on the other side of Cervaux was a forest but this was ... something else. This was a safe haven, it was a sort of hell. It was so beautiful, it was terrifying. It had lily blue butterflies and poison ivy. It had periwinkle faisies and blood red thorns. And it had its foxes, its magnificent, hungry foxes that changed color with the season. Fluffy, matte, daisy White in Winter, intimidating, attention catching, scarlet Red in Autumn, baby, bubbly, azure Blue in Summer, and grinning, malicious, obsidian Black in Fall. She remembered sneaking through the trees catching a glimpse of a bushy red tail. Or a blue ear. It just so happened that no one else was ever able to see it. They either always looked too late, or in the wrong place and by then the foxes had left. It's a pity, her mother said each time Nia promised she saw the Cervauxia fox. How convenient it must be for you to be the only person to ever see them, her mother used to taunt. Until that day in the carriage Nia had only ever survived on crumbs of their existence - a flash of gleaming teeth or a black snout or a blue ear. But that day, she remembered clear as day when she had strained her neck and looked out the window. Only to see a black Cervauxia fox walk right alongside their coach. Switched Nia walked by one side of the carriage but all she needed was to think a few years back to know that the fox padded on the other side. She stopped peering through the carriage window and looked ahead instead. Giving her past self a sense of privacy for somthing that had felt so intimate like touching souls and four leaved clovers and scraping teeth. She remembered its matte fur, its gleaming black eyes, the growling sharp canines. It was... majestic. The fur was as black as the space between the stars, its paws padded on the village mud but they left no imprint behind. That day, Nia called to no one to come look at the fox. She didn't poke the Officer and prove to him that the foxes were real. That day she sat quietly in the carriage, her hands folded into her lap, looking into its eyes. The fox looked back. A bond cemented between them. A secret bloomed. This moment, these few minutes in the eternal cycle of time were theirs, their secrets, their seconds. The fox's gaze had been esurient, fiendish, searing and it was aimed at everyone in the world who wasn't Nia. She had held it all the way through with her blue, bored, bland stare.

          Later on, she wouldn't have known how long that fox had followed her. Nia wouldn't have known when she'd fallen asleep.

Asleep.

Asleep.

Awake.

          Nia jerked awake from the Switch and she was back in the tent lying on the wooden floor with her back completely soaked with water cold enough to make polar bears flinch. Her eyes opened to the red and blue flaps reaching a dark apex at the top. The Joker was standing quietly next to her looking down with vicious eyes. His lip curled but he said nothing. She wasn't in her body, she was somewhere inside still trying to leave the village in Cervaux, trying to stop following that blue carriage. She felt herself move and stand up but mentally she was a thousand miles away. Unconsciously reaching for the boy, she realized that he had already left and that they had an audience. A little far away from the Joker stood a woman. She looked about thirty or fifteen. Dressed in a silk purple gown with a white fur jacket, she resembled a spider with her slender and long limbs, and her bony face with hollow eyes. The air in the tent was taut, like an invisible spider web stretching from end to end ready to collapse and entangle its victim with one wrong move. Her cheekbones were chasms in her face leaving the visible portrait of her face a mere line from forehead to chin with two eyes on each side a pointy nose and thin lips. She seemed like a person who would sell children or cook them in a cauldron. She looked at Nia analyzingly as if already deciding what sized cauldron she would need to cook her. Without a word Nia got up and with a nod from the Joker, she left the tent feeling the woman's gaze follow her like an insect on her back.

          Nia stomped across the snow to her own tent - a small brown circular thing with two cots inside a table where two plates rested fancying grey sludge and corn. There were two cobs on her plate and none on the boy's. This felt like a routine, one she'd done so many times she didn't need to actually be there to do it. The boy wasn't on his cot. She stepped through the brown flaps into the heaving and coughing cold wind outside and listened. A few brown tents away she imperceptibly heard feminine moans and manly grunts. With a look of disgust on a face that was lightyears and swirling galaxies away from the Officer's face she was still seeing in her mind's eye, the padded paws on mud she was still hearing in her ears, Nia retreated to her tent and slept ignoring the cold plate of sludge.

          In her dreams, she was back in the carriage. Except she wasn't a child of the past anymore, she was herself as she was in the present. The fox was still there and so was she. The world could twist and break and shudder apart but the two of them would still be there, always be there, staring at each other. 

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Author's Note: Hope you all enjoyed this part!! I would love feedback on it or ways to improve. And I would still love to talk with you all <3 Thanks for reading!!

Love,
Cora. ✮