The Fox's Tower

The prisoner had lived in the tower at the center of the wood for moons beyond counting. Even so, the walls were notched with pale crescent marks, crisscrossed into a tapestry of patient waiting. Sometimes dew jeweled the rough-hewn stone floor; sometimes ice obscured by the walls' pale marks, and he wondered if the world outside had forgotten his existence.

There was a single window, set high in the wall, too high for him to reach. It was guarded by an iron grille in the shape of tangled bones and branching arteries. He spent many hours contemplating the grille.

One night, the prisoner heard a fox's sharp bark. "Brother fox," he called out, "I would offer you my bones, but I am trapped behind these walls."

To his great surprise, this fox, unlike countless ones before it, answered in a young man's voice. The fox said, "I have no need of your bones. Why do you insist on sleeping behind stone?"

The story was an old one, but the prisoner did not expect a fox to be familiar with it. "I offended the lady to whom I had sworn fealty," he said. "As a punishment, she set me here, to wait unaging until the forest should be no more."

"Well, that's ridiculous," the fox said. "How would you know whether the forest still exists or not when you can't set foot outside the tower?"

The prisoner was nonplussed. It had never occurred to him that the forest was not eternal. "Nevertheless," he said, "I am here."

"You must be lonely," the fox said, "if you are talking to a fox."

The prisoner could imagine the fox's genial grin. "Come and join me, then," he retorted.

The fox did not respond, but that night, as the prisoner started to drift asleep, he felt the soft touch of forsythia petals on his skin. And in his dream that night, he embraced a man in a red coat and black gloves and boots, whose teeth were very white. He woke expecting to find the man's fingers still tangled in his hair.

On the next day, the prisoner waited for the fox to return. He heard nothing, not even a bark. But at night, he smelled the sweet, mingled fragrance of quinces and peaches, and once more he dreamed of the man in the red coat

On the third day, the prisoner knew to be patient. He spent his time counting all the crescent marks, although there were so many that he kept having to start over. That night, maple and gingko leaves fluttered from the window in a dance of red and yellow. "A night is a lifetime, you know," the man in the red coat said in his dream.

On the fourth day, the sun was especially bright. The crescent marks seemed paler than ever, almost white against the stone. When nighttime came, snowflakes landed in the prisoner's cupped palms. He fell asleep to the sound of a fox barking four times.

On the morning after, the tower still stood, but nothing was instead it but the illegible crescent marks, and soon, they, too, would fade.

for chomiji

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