The Thought Fox

Reaches between dimensions

There was a dead fox on the Finchley Road, last night. Battered, but still recognisably foxlike. I wanted to nudge it somehow from the middle of the road to the edge, but there wasn't a way of doing it safely, and it would have been quixotic to be crushed whilst paying a pointless respect to the body of a dead animal. And then this morning, walking to the bus stop, I saw it again. It had been almost entirely subsumed into the matter of the road, and looked like a pressed flower. Except, that is, for one black paw, which had miraculously escaped the attentions of the lorry wheels. It rose above the tarmac, almost like a puppy, wanting to 'shake hands'.

There was something deeply strange (as well as sad) about the sight - it was almost as if a presence had reached through the membrane dividing dimensions. As, in a sense, it had: the two dimensions of the flattened fox, transformed into the three dimensions of the paw.

The pressed-flower fox made me wonder if perhaps I should add a codicil to my recent will, requesting that after death I'm laid out on the Finchley Road for 24 hours, to be flattened and desiccated, after which I could be neatly stored in the narrow gap between the fridge and the food cupboard, to be taken out if and when needed.

There are a few foxes in my books. They don’t all end happily …