Hadi Atallah

Anything old, and for that matter anything round, was always absurdly beautiful for the little fox. With no one watching the moon, no voice or howl pursuing its eloquence in the sky, no voice but the cricking sound of the cold wind and the singing of crickets; the little fox hung on the other side of the world, opposite the moon.

“Mister Clement, this is my name,” the little fox smiled apologetically.

“Where are the others,” said the moon. But when the moon said those words the little fox had the illusion of actually hearing love. The love of a lost dream that had still existed somewhere among the stars.

The light in the little fox was unfailing, but there was difficulty in recognizing its kind. It was enough that the moon was watching Mister Clement. Probably she had seen the little fox go into discreet places as well. 

“How do you like my monocle?” Mister Clement said.

“You are not the same,” the moon perceived. “Do you want to be a wolf instead?”

“I try with a little more success than before to summon the image of a wolf,” Mister Clement the little fox replied. “And the place where there is no darkness is always imagined to be the future. You are the moon after all.”

“There is no place where you could be more certain that foxes are watched over,” the moon told Mister Clement. “Perhaps the sun should exist in your life after all.”

The morning was more bearable. Immediately after breakfast there arrived a delicate, difficult Mister Clement, his soul writhed with magic. And with a sufficient buzz of howls and groans all round, the sun then said, “It might be possible to exchange a few words.”

Mister Clement sauntered casually towards the hilltop, his eyes searching for a place at some landing where his mind could perceive the beyond. He sat down with a friendly smile. The sun beamed into his eyes. There was a silence unlike any other, as if Mister Clement’s surroundings abandoned the power of speech. You see, foxes listened to the everything that cracked or hissed and yet nothing moved. There was a silence beyond imagination.

Mister Clement had a hallucination of himself flying up towards the clouds. But then came a tremendous crash, which Mister Clement evidently suspected of having cuts and bruises. Seconds later, with a thundering metaphysical morphing, Mister Clement was sitting next to the moon while the world exchanged a few necessary words in low expressionless voices:

We always run for higher ground, don’t we?
But that eagle,
That eagle was hungry.

And it had already seen you, Mister Clement.