60 for 60: The White Fox

By Hannah Maureen Holden

Young adults who move back in with their parents after a period of living independently are known as “boomerang kids.” Once the subject of moral consternation by a commentariat convinced that excessive avocado-toast expenditures are all that stand between debt-burdened millennials and home ownership, “boomeranging” is no longer considered a troubling generational trend, but a fact of life. The Pew Research Center reported that, in February 2020, nearly half of all 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. lived with one or both parents. In the months that followed, the disruptions of the pandemic meant that the percentage of young people in the U.S. living at home broke a record set during the Great Depression. 

When I encountered Rebecca Curtis’s “The White Fox,” originally published in the 2007 issue of Columbia Journal, I imagined that the short story might focus on its newly unemployed narrator’s adjustment to returning home. Though the narrator’s age is not given, we know that they have lived elsewhere long enough that, in the opening lines of the story, they recognize that their childhood bedroom has fewer windows than they remembered. From there, the narrator progresses through strained interactions with their family and their home, culminating with the family’s refusal to help the narrator as they battle with an aggressive white fox on the lawn. Propelled by dream logic and infused with menace, “The White Fox” depicts a bewildering homecoming unlike any other.


The White Fox

Rebecca Curtis

I moved back into my old room, which had fewer windows than I remembered—three instead of  four—and was darker, even though the sun was about to set and it should have been luminous. It should have glowed yellow, but it was dim enough to make me wish that all those years ago, I’d chosen my sister’s room, which received better light. When I’d quit my job—or been fired, depend­ing on how you looked at it, I was not performing well and they asked me to leave—my parents’ house seemed the obvious place to go. I hadn’t seen them in many years but they were not surprised that I’d come home to stay. They said very little, in fact, about my return, even though when I was younger they’d warned me not to come to them if I needed money.

The room still had the large canopy bed with cream-lace canopy and ivory-bottom ruffle, which I had chosen at thirteen and was now ashamed of, and in which I was laying. From the bed I could see my two bureaus, with their gleaming veneer of cherry wood and gaudy brass knobs. It was through the kindness of my parents, I realized, that I’d acquired this room. The closet door was closed, a long dark gap visible at its bottom, and the room was dim enough that I knew if I closed my eyes I would fall asleep.

I went downstairs to where my family was sitting in the den, which was filled with light. I saw through the large picture window that the lawn still rolled greenly down to the road that rose past our house, past the white Colonial of my grandmother (who was gone now) and on up the hill. The drooping fronds of the willows that surrounded my grandmother’s house rustled in the slight summer breeze. The sun had sunk beyond sight to the west, but a pinkish-orange light was all around the darker forms of hill, road, and house.

My father was reclined in the leather chair in the den, wearing his red and white striped robe and reading the paper. The chair was tall and wide, with a heavy, dark brown ottoman at its base. My sister was kneeling on the carpet by the ottoman and writing in a note­ book—work for a case. She was a lawyer and quite successful. I was aware of her great concentration as she wrote—though to make us feel comfortable she tried to seem casual—and aware that her time was valuable. I heard my mother doing something in the kitchen—walking around, perhaps.

I walked outside so as not to disturb them, and because I knew it was one of the last chances I would have. That quality of light, that orange bloom that golded the tips of the grass, so often ended abruptly, and just as one became afraid that it would. Outside, on the grass by the road about fifteen feet from each other, lay a large white bird and a white fox. They were asleep, resting in the sun, each outstretched fully in what looked to be the most comfortable, relaxed way, almost as if they were running. They were both so white—in contrast to the green grass—that they made a picture. I noted the coincidence of their color, their parallel positions and their size. From tip to tip the bird was almost as large as a person. It had an ovular body supported by enormous wings and a noble white head.

The fox also had a noble appearance and was as large as a dog. In sleep it was almost dear to me. I had never seen a white bird and a white fox sleeping so close by each other, as if they had made a truce. But just as I thought this, the fox’s head lifted, its body rose, and it lunged toward the bird, who had also lifted its head and struggled to its feet—though somewhat belatedly.

That bird, my father said, is going to get away from that fox.

He had come outside in his robe, still holding the paper. His glasses were on, and his robe flapped open around his calves, which were pale. He spoke with disapproval. And I understood what he meant and why he’d said it, but I realized he was wrong.

I’d seen this white bird, or others like it, get up from similar positions and run away from this white fox, or its brothers. But in this case they had been lying too close, and the fox had awoken first. Also, the bird had been slow, perhaps because tired. The distance between the enormous white bird—it was standing, pushing its chest forward in preparation to run—and the white fox, which was already lunging, its black lips pulled back—was only a few yards, and I felt that I could not bear to see the fox kill the bird.

I’d seen it before, though from a distance. I had always been inside the house, and mostly been glad I was not the bird. But on this day, seeing the bird’s weakness and its mistake, I could not bear to see the fox kill it, and I lunged after the fox and grabbed its face, holding its jaws in my hands.

My father turned away, and walked back into the house.

The fox’s body contorted and its legs quivered. It was struggling to close its jaws on my hands. I found I could hold the jaws open, just barely, and I was, I realized, trying to rip them apart. I moved toward the front door, holding the jaws in my hands as the fox attempted, by climbing my body with its hindlegs, to reach my neck. I was surprised at my own strength. Somehow I managed to drag the fox through the front door (which my father had not bothered to close) and into the den.

I realized that I could not rip the fox’s jaws open, and neither could it break itself from my grip.

My father was once again sitting in his chair; my sister had not moved. She was writing some things on some paper while looking carefully at a book. I asked my father if he would get me a knife. He looked up at me over the paper; he was still wearing his glasses. If you look, he said, I think you would see that right now I’m reading the paper.

I looked at my sister. Will you get me a knife, I said.

I can’t, she said. She explained that she was working on a case, and in this singular instance she did not refrain from pointing out that she was paid at a very high hourly rate and that other people were waiting eagerly for the results of her efforts.  It obviously pained her to tell me this; and yet, I realized, she’d been waiting to do so for a very long time.

The fox was struggling in my arms, its hind legs clawing my stomach, ripping tears in my shirt and leaving long bloody scratches. I had slipped my hold a bit.

Don’t you realize, my sister said, that my work is important?

I think you’re not really thinking about my situation, I said. How you would feel if a fox’s jaws were snapping at you, very close to your face?

She glanced at me but did not respond.

I looked at the floor and saw, on the red oriental carpet, a tray of silverware. It did not belong in the den, but someone had left it there, or put it there; perhaps my mother. I could hear her moving from spot to spot in the kitchen. She was crying softly.

I grabbed a knife. They were not the ones I had hoped for—they were not carving knives; but one was a steak knife, with a ser­rated steel edge and black handle, and I guessed it would do. I shoved the knife into the fox’s open mouth and into its throat. When this did not immediately work I took the knife out and shoved it in again, much deeper. The fox’s white body, now almost cuddled in my arms, quivered, and its jaws snapped open and shut. I felt a terrible pity. At the same time, I knew that if the fox was not fully dead it could jump forward and close its jaws around my throat, and so I took the knife and shoved it into the fox’s soft black nose, then cut in a line, from the top of the fox’s nose, up its snout and through its skull. I had doubted that I would be able to do this, but the knife was sharper than I’d imagined, and when I was done I had cut the fox’s head in half and was able, with great effort, to pull the halves apart. Inside I could see the layers of red beating organs, the white rolls of its brain, and the soft fatty tissue lining the skull. The two halves were perfectly symmetrical. In my arms, the fox’s body shuddered gently and came to a stop.

In the moment when I had cracked the fox’s skull and peered inside it, I had wanted to die myself. I had recognized, several minutes before, that I did not know any longer why I had been so intent on rescuing the bird. I could have let the fox kill it. There were hundreds of white birds—in the season of their migration—several hundred for each fox. The fox had been doing what it wanted, perhaps needed, to do. It was a beautiful beast, sweet-looking now, because dead, and I guessed it had wanted to live.

My mother was still shuffling through the kitchen. I could hear her sobs. My father was peering at me over his paper with disgust. My sister had left the room.

I carried the fox in my arms out to the dumpster in the alley behind the house, where someone had thrown the body of a dog they’d had to kill. The dog was so large that its body had been cut into several pieces to fit in the dumpster, and it had been there for several days. To my surprise, it did not smell yet, even in the enormous heat. The alley was near-dark and dust coated the  pines in the woods along its edge. I dropped the fox’s white body into the dumpster—it had shrunken in death and fit easily—and closed the lid.

I heard a whimpering noise. The noise came from the box-like enclosure—a metal cage, though without bars or windows—where my former lover had put his dog for safekeeping while he was away. I understood that my former lover had had, for several years, some agreement with my parents by which he could use their storage facilities. This made sense because although I had not seen him in a decade, he had been my first love; and while my parents had never liked him, they were fond of him. He was a kind if hapless man. I guessed that he’d only been gone a few days, and had left the dog food and water for while it was in the box. While I was standing there, feeling uncomfortable, my former lover drove up in his car, parked, got out, went to the box, and opened it. The dog leapt into his arms and he petted it. Then, without glancing back, he walked away with it into the trees.


About the author:

Hannah Maureen Holden is a New York City-based writer, editor, and alumna of the MFA Fiction program at Columbia University. She served as the online fiction editor of Columbia Journal from May 2021–June 2022.