Skol

The fox slinked through the streets unperturbed by the drunken, singing stragglers veering across the damp pavements. Her paws pit pat pattered on the crème slabs of Sandringham Road as she darted in and out of front gardens and communal patios, the human beings that usually occupied them fast asleep or far away engaged in gluttonous acts. The city was so peaceful in these moments, the roads no longer veins of pollution and possible death but avenues, boulevards down which animals and humans could parade with their tops off, the cool dew of the approaching morning bunching on their chests. With the human gaze only intermittent, it was left to the swivelling spherical cameras hanging from innocent-looked poles to monitor the fox as she did her nightly reconnaissance, sifting through the discarded cans of Skol and silver bullets of nitrous oxide to find the good stuff. On this damp, peculiar and unnerving night, peculiar because of its unseasonal warmth, unnerving for the indication of impending ecological disaster, the fox was cornered by a strange figure. The figure was lit from behind by the fake orange of a replacement streetlight bulb, his face in darkness whilst his receding hairline was perfectly lit. Fucking foxes, he snarled and stamped his foot against the slick slab of pavement. The fox stood her ground, quite accustomed to human proximity and she merely waited, waited for this moment of visibility to pass so that she could be left to her devices. I see ya trickster, a Reynard of sorts perhaps PERHAPS! I’ve seen ye in anthropomorphic form at the Railway Tavern, I ain’t mistaken! He stumbled to one side, the sole of his frayed Doc Martens seemed to suddenly try and throw him onto his arse, revealing the side of his face in the harsh counterfeit orange of the streetlamp. His face seemed burnt or at least disfigured, perhaps (once again) discoloured but the fox could not see clearly in this light. What was clear to her though was his eye, for he had only one, the other merely a pocket of scar tissue. An eye.

Skol

An anatomically perfect eye in all the right proportions. The fox looked up into this eye that now seemed to occupy the whole of the night and she felt high, intoxicated and suddenly nauseous. It blinked once, the two lids meeting for a moment, and once open she, the fox, was looking down on the slabs of the pavement from a greater elevation. She turned, only her hind legs now on the floor, her arms swinging in the void of the wet clammy air, the condensation forming between her suddenly free toes and fingers; turned and looked down the road from which she had come. With one step at a time, with a cool can of Skol pinched from a gap in a wire fence, she made her way back home, back to the bed from which she had been shaken by a delirious dream.