Fox and Granny

It happens in seconds, not minutes. 

They’re eating dinner in the living room, a lazy Sunday ritual. Potatoes, meatloaf, carrots, and Brussels sprouts. For fifty years, she’s always made sure he eats his Brussels. Two every night. 

“Alida,” there’s an unusual worried edge in his voice. “I’m not feeling well.”

Geoff pushes away his plate, tries to stand, but falls. She calls his name, tries to shake him, get him up, but only the television answers. 

The ambulance sirens splash their bungalow red and blue. The EMT’s boots leave puddles of melted snow on her hardwood floors. She knows it’s too late when the acrid smell hits her nose—he’s soiled his pants. 

-

Geoff lives with the help of dissonant machines and plastic tubes for another ten days in the Intensive Care Unit. Their children and grandchildren rotate through his
hospital room, helping her watch him, strapped into a strange bed, do nothing more than breathe. 

One afternoon while she’s watching, her throbbing panic lulled by the almost musical nature of the hospital’s rhythmic ventilators, percussed by an occasional moan or cough, the woman in the next room dies. The beeping of the woman’s heart monitor slows and then just stops, jarring Alida out of her trance. 

The day they turn off his life support, she holds his soft hand. Beatles songs crackle out of the speakers of her kids’ cell phones. He shrugs and shudders, sometimes, but he doesn’t open his eyes. His breath rattles its way out of his body, but he doesn’t speak anymore. An arrow of belated geese flies through the swirling snow outside of his window. 

Her eldest granddaughter, Lynn, the one with the unending supply of tears, brings his favourite McDonald’s breakfast sandwich: “A smell he likes,” she explains. It sits on his bedside table all day. When night comes, and his chest stops rising and falling, there’s nothing to do but throw the congealed egg and sausage away. 

-

After he retired, Geoff started spending more time on their back terrace. He loved it out there. When they decided on the golf course community, they had paid extra to get a house with a better view of the lush sloping fairways. 

He’d wait patiently, all winter, for the snow to melt, the air to warm, and the sun to stay up past 5:00 p.m. On the first nice night of each year, he’d gather up whatever book he was reading and insist they take advantage of the weather.   

Last spring, when it was finally pleasant enough to take their wine (his: white, hers: red) onto the back patio to watch the sun set over the 14th hole, a light breeze carried the smell of apple blossoms in waves, while she gossiped about a couple she had been golfing with that morning. 

“Helen and Glen are getting married. Can you believe that? At their age? He must be pushing ninety.” 

“He is. I guess as long as they’re happy… I say, let the old buggers get married!” Geoff laughed, swatted a mosquito away, and leaned over to light a citronella candle. 

“I think it’s just ridiculous. I mean, really,” she took a sip of her wine. “They’re running around acting like teenagers in love. It’s not as if their dusty old parts even work anymore.” 

A duck in a nearby water hazard honked in agreement. Geoff smiled. 

“And, besides,” she continued. “How many good years do they have left together before she becomes a widow again?”

“Now, dear. There’s no harm in companionship,” he reached across the table, took her freckled hand, and squeezed. “Where would I be without you? Probably wandering around in my housecoat all day and eating toast for every meal.” 

She clucked her tongue and waved off the comment. “Do they really need to flaunt it? What’s wrong with some propriety? Just live together instead of making a whole production out of the relationship. It’s not their first marriage. There’s a way you’re supposed to do things.”

“Are you telling me, that you don’t want to catch the bouquet?” he grinned at her and waggled his eyebrows over the top of his glasses.

She rolled her eyes, smacked his hand away, gently, and then kissed him right on the top of his shiny bald head. They stayed outside drinking, listening to the odd poorly aimed golf ball plunk into the pond, while the sky burned orange and the sun moved farther behind the hills in the distance. 

Just as the sun had almost completely disappeared over the tops of distant evergreens, a gaggle of geese made a noisy descent into the pond. 

“Here we go again. You know, we pay enough in maintenance fees that the condo board really should be doing something about this goose problem,” her voice grows more rapid and stern. “They do nothing but leave a mess, and disrupt our enjoyment of our property—”

“They don’t know they’re causing a nuisance,” he replied. “At any rate, I’ll talk to the condo association. There’s no need to get all worked up over some geese. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thank you, my dear,” she said over the honking. “I think it’s time to go in.”

As she gathered their glasses to get ready to go in for the evening news, Geoff stared at her, his elbows on the table, hands clasped around his faced like an awed wrinkled child.

“What is it?” she said. “Is there a bug on me?”

His faced cracked into a cheeky grin. “You know, you still have a fantastic ass.”

“Come on inside, dear,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “You’re drunk.” 

-

The ground at the grave site is hard and cold when he’s buried. He shares a resting place with her father, having agreed to join her family plot over his own. Her kids and grandkids, with their clattering voices, clicking black heels, sniffles and tears, float through her house in shifts in the months that follow. 

But, as winter dies away for another year, the visits get a little less frequent. She spends more time alone in his study going over the lists of bills she needs to cancel, investments that have to be simplified, and properties she must sell, listing them all on his old company’s letterhead written with his favourite ballpoint pen.

She’s at it again, working away, when the phone rings around lunch time: an anxious phone call from Lynn, who is wondering if she’s left the house lately.

“I’ve been busy,” she replies. “There’s no end to the paperwork that needs to be done after, you know…”

“Let us help,” says Lynn. “Please. I’m worried about you.” 

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Alida tells the quivering voice on the phone. “Death is a part of life. Just have to keep getting up every morning and stay busy.”

“Well, I really think you should talk to someone about it. About how you’re feeling.”

Alida laughs at the suggestion. Lynn with her soft life and her regular therapy can’t understand that she comes from a place and time where people dealt with their problems on their own.   

“Listen, I know you can handle a lot but everyone needs help from time to time,” says Lynn. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be a professional. Just someone—a friend, a neighbour, or me. It’s not good to keep your grief—” 

“Shit,” she says. “The geese are back.”

“What, Granny? What are you talking about?”

“Can’t you hear them screeching through the phone?” She wrenches down the window in the study and heads to the living room to do the same. “Some national animal—they’re just noisy pooping machines.”

“Granny, I—”

“I’ve got to go, Lynn. This window’s stuck and I need both hands.” 

-

Even with all the windows closed, the geese taunt her in bed that night. She’s had trouble sleeping since Geoff passed. He never snored, but a lifetime spent listening to his scratchy nighttime breath next to her, constant like waves lapping up on a shore, has left a stillness almost as deafening as the cacophony out back. 

Her sleeping pill and glass of wine have failed her. Instead of exhaustion, a dull rage throbs in her head, especially when she thinks about
another day spent yawning. 

Her head is heavy as she pulls on his tattered old slippers. It keeps swimming as she pushes aside canvas bags and leather shoes to find the safe where he keeps the pellet gun. Condo association, be damned. She’s getting a good night’s sleep tonight. 

 The full moon shivers in the half-melted pond and the big evergreen in front of it bristles as she slams the back door into its frame. The geese squawk at her interruption. Her lawn chair squeals as she pulls it across the patio. Two doors over, a neighbour’s porch light flicks on. 

She sits down, aims the gun the way Geoff taught her when they were teenagers shooting tin cans, just over the heads of some of those feathered bastards milling around the ladies’ tees. Her finger is on the trigger when one of the rose bushes that flank the patio starts to dance. 

The crickets’ song mimics the pulse racing in her ears when she sees a flash of animal fur in the moonlight. A dark slender paw pokes out
between tight green buds. 

“Hello?”

A fox clambers out from the shrubbery. Its ear twitches in her direction and it flashes her a grin. 

“Easy now.” 

She aims at the patch of fur between its eyes, but it stays very still. 

“My, my. You’re a brave fellow.” 

The fox’s fur is thin and patchy, with a long dark strip of it missing on its back hip. Its pointed black nose twitches when the wind rustles the pine trees and makes ripples on the pond.

“Are you here to help me with my goose problem?” she asks the creature. 

It pants twice and settles low on the soggy grass, its white-tipped tail twitching just beyond the bottom step, while it watches the geese argue below.

“Not much of a hunter. Sitting on the job,” she says. “Have these old farts on the golf course been feeding you?”

She rests the gun across her knees, which sends goosebumps racing each other up and down her body beneath her velour housecoat. “Alright. You may stay as we might just have a common enemy.” 

Someone must be feeding it, she figured. How would it have survived the winter they just had? And be so comfortable around her? Still, it does seem sickly. Could the creature take on a full-grown goose? 

“You know, you really shouldn’t be so friendly to humans,” its ears perk up when she speaks to it. “What if someone calls animal control on you, huh? You definitely wouldn’t like that.” 

It seems to sigh, and then creeps forward a bit on its belly. 

“I’m sorry. I know. I can be a bit… I’m just saying. It’s dangerous to start relying on one person as a food source. It’s important to know how to survive on your own.”

It lets out a gentle yip and turns, lips drawn back and teeth slightly bared, to chew at some invisible bug on its leg that she can’t see. An owl lends its hoot to the chorus below. 

“I know it can be hard out there on your own. But, you’re better off. Probably…” 

She sighs and rubs her face. She suddenly feels limp and heavy all over. Her voice is creaky and small. 

“I don’t know… I miss him.” 

The little fox rises and slinks across her lawn. When it reaches the hill just above the geese, it breaks into a trot. Seconds later, an eruption of flapping wings and throaty warnings. The fox manages to grab a mouthful of dark feathers before the flock takes off and it follows. She laughs triumphantly, and watches the moon climb a bit higher in the sky.