THE FOX PRINCESSES by Jenny Drai
[The forest leaks out noise and light through lush sheaves of green. Birds in their nests, pink-necked babies waiting to be fed, featherless skin slick as lung-flesh. Human feet against undergrowth slicken the ferns and moss down to the ground. Now the small, breathless noise of two girls at play. They spread their arms, laughing under the crown of the sky. A blue dome, color so pure it has its own tone. The girls are two hearts, throats pulsing. Thump thump. Thump thump. They’ve been running through thickets and foliage, and now they flail about, out of breath. It’s a sticky hot day and the air cloys. Another sticking thing: thin red scabs line the inner side of one girl’s upper arms, patterns defying any natural origin. The marks whisper to the other girl: Try me. I’ll make you go numb. The second girl shuts her ears. A body has to have edges. The belief warms her stomach, a hot stone.]
Emily, full of raw blood.
Emily, the forlorn places in her arteries, and that’s why she’s out with Janie right now, even though, of late, their friendship fizzles and shocks.
Emily, her mother.
Her mother has seen the scars on Janie’s arms.
Now Emily’s not allowed out of the house.
For a while, Emily sneaks. Out a basement window while her fragile mother stress-naps on the couch. Woman under a blanket. Heavy weight, sweaty afghan. Gray mood all around, breaking.
A body’s edges sometimes get fondled.
Emily. Janie. Like sun touching skin. For years, they bend to each other.
Emily, watching. Dull gape, this pulling away.
Janie, of late. A girl consumed. Hollow eyes, a sunken face. She performs rituals for women who live in the trunks of trees. She believes they hold their power there. Last time the girls hung out, Janie wanted Emily to cut her palm, to smear her own blood against one gnarled trunk. Emily said No way. This is stupid. Janie’s rage, thunder clapping. She avoided Emily, but the girls were in classes together, neighbors to boot, and this led to an odd charade. Space, occupied. Together, apart.
Every body a flicker. Blink in, blink out.
About a month ago, though: Janie, sidling.
Up to Emily’s locker between classes or in line at the cafeteria. Small talk. Have you read . . . Emily mumbles but keeps her distance. Tangled stomach. Blood‑on-the-trees and the razor marks on Janie’s skin leave her feeling uneasy.
Skin talks. The cut is here.
Disregarded edges.
Emily, wishing for a closed body that’s safe.
Today is different.
Emily’s mother blew up into one of her sobbing eruptions. Volcanic.
Emily, wanting away.
Too much pressure in her house.
The school year almost over, her mind slid away from her schoolwork. Emily finds herself traipsing after Janie in the woods again. Easy breath.
Away from her mother’s clogged sorrow.
The girls reach a small pond. Flies hover at the edge of the muddy water, thick clots.
Emily swats the insects. Sweat runs down her face.
[The thin red scabs stop crying out. All around the girls, the forest sighs.]
Janie, a picked apart seam.
Hearing women, willowy bodies within the trunks of every tree. They protect Janie, safeguarded souls. Nature is a firm place. A woman enters a pact with a tree. While its scaffold may restrict movement, this lattice also nourishes. A woman can wait here until the world bends more to her will. Now Janie touches. There’s a switchblade hidden in her overalls.
Janie understands. Emily is under false power.
Emily’s mother is a rotten-hearted bitch. She says Janie is sick and Emily listened and –
Emily is a rotten-hearted bitch.
Friends since birth. Now Janie feathers away.
Emily in the heart of a tree, the trunk smeared with their blood – then Emily will understand. Alone at home, Janie kisses her skin with the razor’s blade. A sting, then numb. No comfort, rip, numb. Emily, these days, eats lunch with the soccer team, rip, numb. Her uncle. Rip, numb. The switchblade knocks against her breastbone, a comforting weight.
[Girls clatter through sun, air, wide clearings. They climb over blossoms and knotted roots. In this patch of forest behind their neighboring houses, they play a childhood game: fox princesses running from an evil fairy who lives in a ramshackle hut at one edge of the pond. Water plashes as frogs leap. A little way off, a woodpecker. Quick tapping, the proof of timber giving way.]
Emily and Janie, despite.
Janie wades into the pond, despite her white sneakers. She steps out, glistening wet. Emily wants to lick the moisture away. She’s that thirsty. Sweat all over, two damp stains at her armpits.
Pungent. Cell by cell, a body changes.
Three years ago, it wasn’t like this. No breasts. Girl, looser. Less important edges.
Emily’s mother, collapsing.
A youthful molestation unpacked in therapy. Now her mother perceives a world full of danger. Boys. Fast cars. Parties with alcohol. The terrible will come to pass. Emily ignores her, looks for every possible exit.
Janie’s voice, breaking.
She cracks a branch – pop! – with her hands. The only sound Emily wants in her head is the reason Janie does it. How does she keep the cuts from bleeding too much? Emily suspects the trick is not to go deep.
Emily wants closer.
To draw Janie away from the strange world she is building.
A body is a sheet of cells, sheets, folded into time, and Emily wants to press pause. To stop the rapid-fire division. Her mother is too much and Janie is pulling away. Emily misses her old friend. Without Janie, there’s no one to catch her. Now Emily follows Janie further into the forest. Janie’s saying something –
the fox queen will help us, she’ll show us how to hex the fairy, then we’ll run away to the new den. I’ve been there before, it’s soft and warm, lush and safe, and there our sisters wait, look at our fur, it’s glowing bright in the sun –
and though this feels childish, Emily wonders for one heady moment: what if they could find the fox queen?
[The forest is a seam. The trees remain anonymous. Not oaks, or maples, just stilts jutting out of the rich loam. Green canopies spread for shelter and shade. And the women. Encased in the trunks of trees in clouds of narrow silence. One of the girls refuses to believe in them, at least for now, but the girl with the switchblade in the bib pocket of her overalls feels the webbing of their skin on her skin, hears their low voices. The forest cradles the women, protected, imprisoned.
Now the girls arrive at a small clearing. Sunlight pools in the dirt and bounces off dusty ankles. The girl who doesn’t believe wipes her sweaty palms on her faded jeans, but the other girl tips her head and lifts her pale green eyes to the sky. She sees a hawk, backlit by sun, and watches as it circles. Ready to swoop down and gather its prey. This girl knows. The forest waits, and it waits.]
Janie, here.
Every day, waking.
In her narrow bed, to the same sound. Her mother’s voice, calling her name, sound drifting up the curved stairs to Janie’s bedroom.
Janie, hitting snooze.
She doesn’t want to leave the fortress of her room. Here, she knows where she begins and ends. Every morning, getting dressed, plastering clothes as a false second skin. Her mother eyes her but Janie hides her cuts, until the bright red front door of the house slams shut behind her. Her mother has told her father Janie needs counseling. Her father said no.
Janie’s father, his disbelief. He and his stepbrother are close.
Thick-blooded. Janie’s accusations, hurled at her parents after her mother wouldn’t stop asking What’s wrong, try to make the brothers water-thin. But hasn’t Janie lied about breaking curfew, stolen money from the emergency envelope in her mother’s dresser drawer, and other things besides? Her uncle says Janie came on to him, and more than once to be honest, though of course he rebuffed her: I don’t know, Craig. The girl’s fast for her age.
An argument is made of. Bones.
Each one picked up and turned over, the grooves studied for clues. Sometimes a bone withstands this process and is joined to other bones. Sometimes a piece breaks, smashed to smithereens. Janie’s father wields the hammer. His girl, the sheet of her skin, the web of her hair, crumbles before his eyes because he wishes it so. Flake flake. Flake flake. White dust flies.
See.
Janie’s father, he’s renovating. Her parents whisper-fight behind their bedroom door. She listens to the trembling snakes of their voices, her father’s tones drowning out her mother’s softer insistences. Without fail, her mother –
gives in.
Janie is a liar.
Girl shivering, breaking into slivers.
Janie is trouble.
Janie sneaks back to the nest behind her bedroom door. A heavy weight meets her mid-air.
There is no one to protect her.
Nowhere to hide.
She’ll have to protect herself.
Janie draws the first picture. A woman, nestled in a tree. Green everywhere. Roots stretch from the rich soil into the woman’s feet. The woman believes.
[Heat rises. The forest swelters, thick with gnats and gnawing creatures in the underbrush. One girl listens, a plan churning in her head. The forest is full of sound. Bird song rises, bubbles of notes in hot air. The bubbles pop. The eruptions create maps. Now both girls move further into the forest, beyond easy hearing distance of the squat ring of houses. The knife is secret. The woods beckon. Peeling off a thin scrim, pushing that away: Come in. Come in.]
Emily, originally.
Let’s look, this spyglass to her heart.
Emily promised to smear blood on a tree, when Janie needled and begged.
I need your help.
This Janie scared Emily. Sorry, can’t hang out anymore, she shrugged into the phone. Her mother caught her sneaking out the basement window and now watched close. To Janie, Emily pretended protest, but she hadn’t fussed. Janie’s sobs stung long after they hung up. Janie needed too much. Like her mother. Flurries of tears.
Janie, shaking off.
Emily had betrayed her. Her bitch mother had forced her to.
Janie went to the forest alone.
When Janie approached Emily after school, her friend said very little. Janie followed Emily home from a distance. She would ascend the cement steps of Emily’s family’s bungalow as if a drawbridge over a moat. The house became a tower Emily refused to leave.
Until today.
The girls move in the thick heat, skimmed in sweat, to different rhythms.
Emily, wanting.
Her mother begged to have her temples massaged. Emily wanting escape so she sought Janie out, despite her oddness. Like earlier times when the girls tumbled together through invented worlds. Free.
Janie, pulled down by anger.
Emily so casual with her, so cavalier. Janie holds up her friend like a downy feather to the light, peering to the shaft. Eventually, a body is replaced. Old cells die. Janie wants to collect them in the bowl of her cupped hands. To give them new life. Her friend as she was.
If she holds herself up to light.
She’s a bloody fox mouth. An eye raw after a fistfight. Her real body hangs about her throat in a leather pouch, hushing. Emily has to feel at ease so she won’t suspect. Only a great ritual will fix what’s been lost.
Then Janie.
She’ll rip open a tree trunk, shove Emily into a cage of rough bark. Under strange moonlight, twisting and bending as the tree grows. Now, a bird in the distance.
Janie, smiling.
The forest is always awake.
Emily, her brow wet.
Her heat-stuck throat. She mops at her thick hair.
A joyful story about loping.
Through brush, in the burnt-dull fur of a fox maiden. Running across the snowy field of her own white bib. Foxes are sly and clever and never have mothers too brittle to cook dinner or fathers who work late rather than come home. They pounce, leaping upon the rodents. Mighty huntresses.
Emily feels herself in the shape.
Girl, hoping for another world. Anything is possible. Where Janie would stop believing in nonsense and give up ripping at the soft flesh of her arms.
What else does Emily know?
The other cuts hidden underneath Janie’s t‑shirt. Her friend’s pale stomach.
Janie, writing in blood‑ink.
Her uncle’s name carved there. Emily, shuddering.
Getting sick, getting sick.
When Janie told the reason for the name, Emily tasted bile at the back of her throat.
Girl boxed in, trapped on all sides.
One side, a body looking for edges. Her mother, parking the white minivan at the curb after therapy. Withdrawn.
Another side, the body surrounding her.
Emily’s thick breasts, the swell of her hips, her rounded thighs – all shouting danger at the rest of her. She listened to Janie’s story with horror –
this is what happens sometimes. A man can look with desire or power and she might try to please him. She might not have a choice. She shuts her ears to Janie and her mother. She wears flattening sports bras and slouches her shoulders. Easier to breathe. To hide.
Emily creates her own world in a hardback black notebook. No fox princesses or evil fairy. No women in trees. Normal life, school dances, outfits chosen, the sorts of things Emily imagines a popular girl would think about. She doesn’t want –
to be who she is.
Now, a sudden breeze.
The wind. Ruffling her auburn curls where they hang loose in a bun. In the clearing, they examine a pile of stones declared by Janie protective magic against the evil fairy. But a body can’t stay in one place forever. The girls move again into a thick cover of trees. There’s cool shade here. Emily feels relief, out of her stifling house. Old camaraderie gladdens her. She swats a cloud of gnats and follows Janie.
Longer. Further. Into the fathomless.
[The forest rises and falls. The girls as they call out, muffled laughter, shoes scuffling. The girl with the sharp knife rips at time. Soon. Soon. The forest observes from a distance. The girls are so needy, wrapped up in private wishes. Girls are almost always too much. Even the girl who doesn’t know what is coming. She still demands eyes. On her flesh and thumping heart. But seeing, that costs. Energy. Attention. Think of the other girl, the one with the scars. What a hullabaloo. The forest only wants to continue.]
Emily, wondering.
Could she convince Janie to stop cutting herself, and that’s when –
Two girls, whipping through trees. Janie swivels to Emily, switchblade in hand. Her eyes drink up all the light.
Too much sound. Like a tuneless bell chiming.
Emily understands. They’re not playing. Janie’s the evil fairy. She sidesteps easily, suffering only one angry cut when she –
deflects Janie’s flailing wrist. Finding –
finding. Strength. Emily wrenches Janie’s arm behind her back, forcing her to the ground. One knee in the middle of Janie’s shoulders, pressed into the sweat-grimed cloth of her overalls. Afterwards, she’ll never –
remember. Exactly what she
said.
No more air, not enough to utter sound and draw breath and Emily’s shriek collapses to a stutter. Hair on her neck, rising. She’s not in her body. She’s leaving, tearing through her own pores. Her heart jumping in her throat brings her back.
Flesh-housed. Skin‑homed.
Still, Janie flopping. Emily knows if she fails to hold Janie down, she’ll get the knife in her throat. Her heart slams, gallops, but sweat makes Janie’s hand slippery and Emily wrestles the knife away with ease.
Out of her palm.
On her feet she gives Janie a kick in the ribs. Girl, howling. In pain, on the ground. A body, feeling.
Emily has the knife and she runs. The forest closes around her. She tears first through the clearing, through more wood. Her legs pump and they pump, they pump and pump, and she can make out the line of houses beyond the thick wall of trees. Her muscles flow into weak water. Knife still in her right hand. A thin line of red on the blade where it grazed her palm and now the cut smarts and leaks. She’s leaping over the chain link fence, she’s scrambling to the back door, whipping open the screen, tumbling at last into the kitchen. Where’s her –
mother?
Emily drops to the smooth kitchen floor. She throws the knife to one side, grasping her bloody palm with her other hand. She can’t talk yet.
Her mother leans over her, worry plain.
What happened to your hand?
Where have you been? You were supposed to be doing homework.
And finally, almost in a panic: what are you doing with a knife?
Garbled at first. What Janie cried out in the forest: You can live forever in the tree. Real fury in her rush. The whole story comes out, even Janie’s uncle. Listening to this, her mother freezes. But then she –
springs.
She shuts and locks doors, windows, every opening into the house. Then picks up the phone to call Janie’s mother. Emily can taste her heart at the back of her throat. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever settle down.
[Seasons come and they go. The earth turns. Birdsong spring, thunder summer, leaves fall. Only white-clad winter is silence. Piled under snow, this loam doesn’t nurture. Emily’s skin becomes a sieve. She can’t hold on.]
Janie, disappeared.
Three months in a psych ward for teens, and her family moves out of state. Emily never sees her again. There is only the forest. At first, Emily can’t forget. She runs from her old life. Her feet pound the pavement before school and around the soccer field after. She runs up the stairs to her room. She lugs soreness with her.
The silence in that.
Struggling for air, unnoticed, masked by daily hushes. Two years pass. Then three. Time sings all around Emily. She graduates, enters college in another state. Leaves her mother and the forest behind.
Goodbye green tapestry. Goodbye blue ache of sky.
Until the firmament crumbles.
An eerie voice, rushing in over Emily’s shoulders, a little way off.
A tree ahead shadows the path.
She’s walking home from the library in inky dark.
The chatter begins. Oh, her cold body. Frigid, even her toes. The hard noise has reached her stomach, where it plants a thorny root. World locked in ice. World, out from under her. The blood hurts in her veins. She can’t lift her feet, she just –
The tree, an oak, she can’t walk past it to the house she shares with eight other college students. A faint glow shines from the lamp on the back porch.
All around her, the night buzzes.
Her skin, it’s dissolving.
Janie inside the gnarled trunk. Switchblade in hand. Emily’s been raw all month, but this, this is new. Like an egg, she’s cracking all over the pounded earth, her shoes wet with the white, except it’s urine, not egg white, because she’s pissed herself. Every part of her turns to stone. She wants away.
Janie in there, within the rough bark. She wants to pull Emily in.
. . . you can live forever in the tree . . .
[The forest opens. Raw mouth, agape.]
Emily’s mind slips as she stands in the yard. What was dinner supposed to be? An undertow laps at her ankles. She can’t swim free. Janie swells in her head. How, that afternoon, her friend offered refuge from the untidy chaos of her mother’s moans and sobs.
[The forest, thick in her ears.]
Janie, her voice.
All around Emily in the tumbling-dark yard.
Harm saws at Emily, a razor. Janie’s voice spoils Emily’s lungs, her bright heart. Emily’s head thickens, full of clouds. She’s a thin slip in this noise. And yet –
some raw kernel inside her holds on and wants.
Another voice, low and warm.
Not sinister at all. It flows from her neck through her torso and down into her fright-frozen limbs. Emily’s head is so loud.
Run.
Emily listens. She pushes through her terror to the doorway on the other side of this raw minute.
Run. Run. Run.
– her mother locking doors after Emily ran in from the forest. Her mother shaking off her own despair, rising up to block the coming hurt.
Emily’s therapist asks her: What happened in the forest to warn you?
It’s warm outside and noise from the street drifts through an open window. The noise swells, covering both Emily and her therapist in a cool sheath. Who knew?
Leaves. Twigs. Janie swiveling
Crumbling and crackling. Breaking beneath digging‑in feet.
Emily understands.
Safety in noise. Her own voice. That good voice, how strong she was. Past the tree and up the porch stairs, into the house. The voice thrumming through her. Just the one word. Run. Emily had, years ago in the forest, away from harm toward the rest of her life. Now, she must run again. But not away, not this time. Emily thinks of the trees, the forest, the one with Janie inside. Emily thinks she can scaffold herself. She places a hand to the bark.
Jenny Drai is the author of three poetry collections. Her short stories have appeared in Pleiades, Another Chicago Magazine, and OmniVerse.