Omnivores

by Beth Sherman

The foxes showed up on a Thursday around noon. Julia remembered because she spent each Thursday at the Crown Royale Express with her ex-husband, Tim, a quiet, neurotic man with an easy laugh and nimble fingers. They’d stayed friends after the divorce and after they’d married other people. The room was only booked for an hour.

There were three foxes at first. Julia saw them as she got into her Toyota Highlander afterwards. She thought it was odd that the animals would be out in daylight and didn’t seem afraid of her at all. They were pumpkin orange, not red, and resembled the Akita her friend Stacy owned, only skinnier and less friendly. 

The foxes stared at Julia with unblinking green eyes. Even when she jabbed her horn repeatedly, they blocked the motel’s exit, refusing to move, so she had to use the service road and take the back way to Stop & Shop.  

At first, the foxes were a diversion.

The local news had started a Fox Tracker. People called in with sightings. Ten in one day. Then 22, 47, 61, 118. 

When Julia looked out the window in the morning, they had already assembled in the yard, staring at her five-bedroom Colonial as though planning a heist. Rangy and ragged looking. Unsettling. A pack of them. 

“A skulk, not a pack,” her son Tyler corrected. 

He was in the gifted program at school. Sometimes all the things he knew weighed her down, like being pinned by a large, ungainly statue.

Julia’s life was uneventful and the foxes gave her something to focus on. Before, she’d found herself daydreaming a lot, making pro/con lists about Tim and Larry, her current husband. Although she knew it was a little late for that considering she’d already re-married.

The town divided on a plan of action: kill the foxes, tranquilize and ship them elsewhere, or find a way to live with them. Then two cats were found murdered and a baby disappeared from its stroller, leaving a trail of dried blood. It would have to be guns.  

But the foxes didn’t cooperate. They climbed trees or dashed underground. They moved way too quickly. Faster than the wind or a bullet or an idea. 

Julia thought of those British films set in the 19th Century where the men wore dashing red jackets and the women rode side saddle and a pack of braying dogs hunted some poor fox on a lush country estate until it was cornered, panting and helpless in a hollow log. 

“Quaint but not historically accurate.” Tim said. “They’d outlawed the sport by then. Besides, you do know this is real, right?” 

The foxes made lots of holes in the grass around Julia’s house.

“They’re called burrows,” Tyler said. “There’s a front entrance and a back entrance.”

He was learning online now. A group of foxes had waylaid a school bus and carried off  three of the children on it.

“Do they scare you?” she asked Tyler, as they stood by the window, watching foxes tear up more of the lawn.

“No. They’re wonderful. The males are dogs and the females are vixens. All of them can run sideways. They’re omnivores. Do you know what that means?”

“I certainly do. I went to college, honey.”

She had to refrain from raising her voice.

They kept watching until one of the foxes attacked a bunny, tearing its fur off as easily as peeling an onion.

“Janie asked her mother if she could have one as a pet,” Tyler said. “How stupid is that?”

“You know what we should do?” Julia said to Tim on the phone late one night. 

They couldn’t meet at the motel anymore. The foxes made it too dangerous to leave the house. So, they had to resort to phone sex, which was pleasant though not as satisfying.

“What?” Tim said. “What should we do?”

And she heard the slightly exasperated tone that had driven her crazy during the six years of their marriage. 

“We should get in the car and take Tyler and drive. We could head south, to Florida. Sex on the beach.”

But even as she offered this solution, her mind rebelled against spending that much time with him. 

“Mmmmmm,” Tim said. “Lisa and I are planning to have kids. I couldn’t get away from work now anyway and . . . ”

Julia hung up the phone so quietly she wondered how long he’d keep talking before he noticed. 

Julia hated being cooped up in the house, but they really had no choice. Larry worked remotely from his office. Tyler was on a school Zoom call in the dining room. Her designated area was the kitchen. The kitchen! Even though she couldn’t cook to save her life. Hadn’t wanted to become the housewife/mommy/mistress she’d morphed into. Couldn’t talk to her son or her husband, both of them as distant from her as the moon. Was that normal, she asked herself. What ever happened to normal anyway? Normal had definitely left the building.  

The foxes had barricaded Julia’s family in the house. Waiting and watching, planning their next move. Grocery stores wouldn’t deliver anymore. Julia estimated they had about two weeks worth of food left. After that, it was anybody’s guess. 

She tried to count the foxes she could see and gave up at 49. They moved too quickly to count, anyway. At night, she heard them scratching at the siding, the roof, the windows, trying to get in. She could wait for that to happen. She was always waiting. For Tim to appreciate her. For Larry to notice her. For Tyler to love her. She was tired of waiting.

Opening the front door, she stepped outside. The fresh air felt like a tonic. Springlike. Earthy. And she breathed in one last gasping moment of sweetness before everything became a gorgeous orange blur.