A baby fox was killed on Highway 70 sometime Sunday night. I saw him there on Monday morning when I drove up Nine Mile hill. His head was so chiseled, his nose so pointed, his fur so distinctively red, he could have been sleeping. Except that he wasn’t.
On Tuesday he was still there, but there was less of him.
On Wednesday, he was no longer recognizable as having once been a living, breathing, perhaps still nursing creature.
On Thursday there was just a dark stain on the road. When it rains, even that will be gone.
I’m listening to a book on CD called Being Dead by Jim Crace. I’ve read other works by Crace: Quarantine, an imagined story of the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert, and Pesthouse, an utterly fantastically wonderful book about a red-haired woman named Margaret and two brothers and a terrible vapor/plague thing that kills millions of people.
Being Dead is the story of two middle-aged professors who are killed by the sea and not discovered…. I haven’t finished the book, so I don’t know how long it will be before Celise and Joseph are finally discovered, or even if they will be. The sea could rise up and take them.
Whether Joseph and Celise are ever found or not, they will vanish from the earth. Like the baby fox killed on Nine Mile Hill.
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