They gather at his backyard every night. They sniff the pine-infused air, dark noses glistening with moisture, and orange-furred ears pasted to their skulls. Ivan watches through the patched screen door, the fine net stitching shallow indentations across his forehead.

The foxes are four in total: a vixen and her cubs. They prowl the swath of scraggly grass that connects his property to the outskirts of the forest. The cubs don’t seem interested in him. They chase, tackle, and nip each other, orange-black-white balls of yarn, tumbling. The vixen’s movements are slower, more deliberate. She doesn’t go near his cabin, only watches him as he stares back through the mesh screen, in his robe and slippers and skin coming apart at the seams.

Plum dusk gives way to muddy night, and the cubs yap and run back into the underbrush. The vixen lingers awhile.

She looks familiar. Painfully human. And he can’t tear his eyes away from her.

Theirs is a small village. On the rare occasion Ivan cycles to the shops for supplies, he hears people talk even when he doesn’t want to listen. The story goes like this: murderer; imbecile; hermit.

The rest he’s pieced together with the doctors’ help, but mostly on his own. He has all these photographs in an old biscuit tin. Baby photos and school photos and church choir photos. Then there’s Vera in a white sundress. Vera in a pearly wedding gown. Vera under a white morgue sheet. This last photo, shown to him while he was still in the hospital, isn’t actually in his possession—not outside his nightmares, at least.

What he knows but doesn’t remember: He was driving to the city on ice-slick mountain roads with his wife and kids when something darted in front of his car. Despite trying to swerve, he hit the creature and lost control of the vehicle. Fur and guts stuck to the grill of his car, which is how they could tell afterward that it was a red fox.

What he knows for certain, without rhyme or reason: The foxes in his backyard are Vera and the kids.

Now, he may have huge chunks of memories missing and little metal screws embedded in his skull, he may not remember how to tie his shoelaces so he only wears holey house slippers, but he hasn’t lost it—not yet and not completely. It’s not that his wife is a vixen, the three cubs their triplets. But maybe his family’s souls are trapped inside the foxes’ bodies. Maybe this is Vera’s reincarnation, there to torture him the way the Furies would torture murderers and breakers of oaths (to have and to hold and most emphatically to not kill in the mountains until death do us part).

At night, he hears them scratching and screaming by the vegetable patch outside his window. He lies awake in bed and counts the knots in the wood-paneled ceiling. Over and over again, he whispers, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you. I’m sorry I can’t feel sorry for what I did.”

by Andy K. Tytler, Features Desk
19 Esinat 7.00 RST

When veteran volitite miners Irro Tonhamgra and Ephrea Burold heard the shouting in the corridor, they assumed it was just the latest in the near-daily scuffles of that endlessly rainy winter. But then came the order from on high: lock it down.

‘We started the lockdown procedures, just going through the motions, you know, following orders,’ Tonhamgra says. ‘Didn’t realise anything was squint.’

We are sitting in Tonhamgra’s frontroom, a small but cosy space with a large picture window letting in the afternoon sun, and providing a view of the quiet street on the northeast side of Ofsoli, where Tonhamgra has lived since first starting as a packer at Undipetra Stand. Now Ofsoli is known for its trendy shops, quaint and affordable single-family detached homes, and excellent view of the stand, but back then it was just a place for the workers to live.

Burold sits on the sofa beside me, working his way through his third cherry biscuit. He lives a block away, also at the same address he was assigned when he first got the job in the laundry room on Rig 12. Each day they alternate hosting each other for lunch, then take a walk along the shore to watch the sun set over Undipetra. Both assert the daily walks and homemade meals are the secret to their longevity. He will be ninety-five this year, Tonhamgra ninety-six. Although Burold adds wryly that it might be all the cherry biscuits.

‘It wasn’t the first time we’d gone into lockdown, not by a long shot,’ Tonhamgra continues. ‘Not even the first time that winter. Everyone was on edge, what with all that sour-rain. It was the fifth week of it, and five weeks inside doesn’t suit anyone, let alone the Aviai.’

‘The whole place thrummed with it,’ Burold tells me. ‘Tempers flaring at the smallest thing, little scuffles and things breaking out a dozen times a day, accidents, sinks, mini-collapses through the roof.’

Tonhamgra nods. ‘The walls felt like they were closing in on us. There was nowhere for a moment alone, and all the time the rain, no sun, and the knowledge that you’re trapped. The whole rig was wrapped round by this crated sense of anxiety.’

She sighs and falls silent. Burold leans back wearing a pensive expression, his brow furrowed. Surrounding them on the walls of Tonhamgra’s front-room are old revolutionary posters and framed newspaper articles, including that now-iconic image of Tonhamgra at the march on the capital two months after the riot, hands up, arms trying to shield her face from the Civic Guard’s acid spray. The scarring on her left cheek, neck, and hands is gone now, long since replaced by skin grafts. Not so on her arms. She tells me when she catches me staring that she chose not to remove it. After all, she points out with a tone hovering between humour and reproach, she earned those scars, and she has nothing to hide.

After a lengthening period of silence, I prompt Tonhamgra to continue, but it’s Burold who picks up the story.

‘I was just about to put in my key so Irro could start the lockdown when we heard the cry for help, to wait, to keep the door open,’ Burold says. He’s still leaning back, his hands clasped together, and speaking without looking at me. The cherry biscuits are forgotten now. ‘We just sort of looked at each other, like “What now?” We both knew the official procedure is hermetic seals on all doors, no exceptions, but we’d also never been in a lockdown where there’s someone in the corridor begging not to leave them to die.’

Enter Tweil*, the Avia on the other side of the door.

The day my brother died I told him guinea pigs once grew ten feet tall.

“They weighed two thousand pounds,” I said, “and had tusks like elephants, which they used to defend themselves.”

He was looking out the window. I wasn’t sure if he heard me. The IVs in his arms weren’t working. On the table beside the bed was a picture of us with our old guinea pig Thoreau, whom we had stolen from the Institute where my brother was now housed.

This was about the time the coughing began, back when we thought his difficulty breathing was something he’d grow out of. We lived on the edge of the Institute and above us rose the bone-white buildings. For sixty years the Institute had been a home for tuberculosis patients. Scientists grew guinea pigs like Thoreau to inject them with serums and anti-toxins in the hope they might find a cure for the disease. When they finally succeeded and the buildings began to empty of tuberculosis patients, Mr. Wilkins, the last custodian, took care of the guinea pigs. When he died, we knew they’d be all alone.

The morning we went to save them, my brother had to stop often to hit his inhaler. We rested in the shade of the buildings among the old-growth pines. Pine trees were once thought to be an expedient for the cure of TB, and many of them had stood for hundreds of years. The Institute, despite the disease it holds within it, has always been beautiful. Our mother worked there for ten years, since just after my brother was born, but now she sits at home watching soap operas all day where people are suddenly struck down by terrible diseases.

At the top of the hill my brother said his lungs were burning, but he made it to the bunker where the guinea pigs were held. We had a key we’d stolen from our mother, and when we went in we saw them there in cages. There weren’t many left. We opened the cages and carried the guinea pigs—so small and warm in our hands, their hearts beating madly beneath their frail chests—outside, where we let them go.

The last one my brother kept. He named it Thoreau because they shared the same first name, or so I thought at the time. But maybe my brother already knew what was inside him—Henry David did die of TB, after all. We took Thoreau home, stopping often for my brother to hit the inhaler or rest beneath the big trees, me holding Thoreau and wondering what had been done to him in the secret rooms of the Institute where the scientists had, supposedly, saved the world.

We had him for less than a year. My brother would not cage him, and so Thoreau sometimes chewed through the baseboards and got beneath the house. Or he’d dart outside when our mother went on the front porch for a cigarette, and I’d have to catch him because my brother could not pass through the smoke.

The last time Thoreau got away my brother coughed so hard he began to shake. When he took the kerchief away from his mouth, we saw the fine spray of blood. Above us, the bone-white buildings stood like sentinels.

We always thought it was asthma, that he would eventually grow out of it. Turns out he was one of the first to get the new strain. Turns out tuberculosis can linger in small bodies and old buildings much longer than the scientists thought. We didn’t know then that the old diseases could come back. Or maybe my brother did, because he wanted desperately to find Thoreau. We looked under the house and all through the neighborhood and finally across the highway where the dark woods closed in. I could see my brother stopping often to draw in deep breaths and I thought he was dying, but I couldn’t get him to rest.

“We have to find him,” my brother said, voice almost unrecognizable, the handkerchief turned dark red now. In a month he’d be unable to get out of bed. Six months after that the Institute would re-open its doors, and he’d be the first patient admitted. The World Health Organization would send out its warnings, but it was already too late. The guinea pigs would be brought back. More tests run to try to stop the new strain that had sprung up all over the world. Some of the guinea pigs would escape the sterile halls where they were poked and prodded with needles, and before my brother died we could look out the window and see them all over the grounds of the Institute.

“That one looks like Thoreau,” he said once, not long before the end, which reminded me of the day I thought he was dying. His indrawn breaths sounded like sirens, or the first coming of some great cataclysm.

We never caught Thoreau. I saw him the day before my brother died, as I was walking back down to the house across the grounds of the Institute after visiting hours. He had grown as large as a house cat, but he ran when I got near. The next day my brother said Thoreau probably didn’t want to be caged anymore, which was why he ran.

“Did guinea pigs really weigh that much?” he asked. He would die in the night, alone. He looked so small in his bed. He had lost close to 50 pounds. The thin skin of his arms was bruised from all the drawn blood. We could see our house down the hill, and I knew he was imagining a world where Thoreau was as big as a mountain. Too big to be poked and prodded by men wearing sterile masks. Too strong to be brought down by any strain.