Face-Slapping15 min read
The Fox, the Tea, and the Promise
ButterPicks17 views
"Mountain rain, fox wedding, stay away," my grandmother used to mutter when the wind took a strange shape through the pines.
"She told you that?" I said, and I always said it with the same lazy smile because I did not believe in warnings people dressed up as stories. I was born in a cold season under a thin moon, so they said. I was small and sharp as a crow's feather, and for a long time I kept the mountain air inside me like a secret.
"My name is Sofia Jordan," I told myself aloud on the day the red fox chose me as trouble.
"You can't tell them your name," Grandmother had hissed years before, thumb worrying the rim of a cup. "If a spirit learns it, it will follow. Names are ropes."
"It doesn't matter," I had answered, because I did not want anyone wrapping me in more ropes than I already had.
That mid-summer morning the forest smelled of rain and mud. I was ten and stubborn enough to think courage was something you wore, like boots. I found the mushrooms I was taught to find—lean, pale things tucked in moss—and then the red fox came between me and them and sat as if it owned the whole dark hill.
"Get out of there," I told it. I had always said things to animals as if they would listen, like a command. The fox cocked its head and did not move. It watched me with a look I would come to know: not hunger, not fear, but amusement.
"I said get out," I said louder, and the next moment I slipped on a hidden stone and hit the ground hard. The fox laughed like a small bell. I went to pick it up by the scruff of its neck because I was fierce; it did not fight but slipped free and darted deeper into the trees. When I recovered the mushrooms, they had turned to yellow paper and red clay under my basket. I ran, and the day folded itself into fog.
"I warned you," Grandmother said later, voice brittle with the kind of panic only elders have.
"I wasn't listening," I said.
You would think the mountain would end there with miscarriage-of-mushrooms and a frightened child. It didn't. The drums started in the white fog, like someone beating the back of the world. Figures in painted masks moved slow between standing stones.
"Mountain rain, fox wedding, people hide," the chant came and crawled under my skin.
I did hide, behind a stone. My heart hammered like an angry bird. From the crowd a man in red stopped and looked at me. His face was a fox mask, but under the parchment, his eyes were eyes that were not blind to small things. He sat on his haunches very near and spoke low.
"What's your name?" he asked. His voice slid into me like a thread.
"I can't—" I started, and Grandmother's voice in my head was a tight knot—never tell. But the eyes were kind, or at least curious, and I told him, "Sofia Jordan. Don't come after me."
"Don't say that." The fox voice laughed. "You frightened me, child. You ruined my betrothal. I haven't been so affronted in ten long years. You owe me a bride."
"You owe me nothing," I muttered, pushing to my feet.
Something bit my ankle. I screamed and fell into the dark. I woke up at the mountain edge, basket empty, clutching yellow paper that smelled like old fire. My whole leg burned like winter's teeth.
"Bad business," Grandmother said. "Go see Elena Clement. The mad woman in the next valley."
That night I dreamt a red-jacketed man with a flute named me in a voice as soft as snow. He said, "Two years you must keep, child. Ten years I cannot leave. You will remember my name—Tristan Calhoun."
"I don't want a name for my enemy," I told myself, and I did not know then that his name would press against my life like a thumb.
After that, nothing felt safe. My grandmother died—suddenly, horrible. Coffin, weeping, a night where the sky tasted like iron. They said it was fright. Elena said it was fox-work; that a fox's wrath could unpick the heart of any home. I bled anger like a wound.
"He's the only one I saw," I told Elena, crushing my teeth with the need for one answer.
"You can't hound demons," she said. "But you can learn. If a spirit tucks a name or a mark into you, it can be used to call or to bind. We will bind."
"Teach me," I said. I had no other shelter left.
Elena did teach me, in the crooked, honest way of people who had lived and not given up. She made me sit in cold and stitch and repeat old words until my mouth tasted like smoke. She sewed a red-wrapped stone for me to wear, a talisman that kept most dreams blurred. The fox mark on my calf faded and then reappeared when the world pleased itself to be cruel.
Years later I left the mountain for the city—university, a flat, a life as much like ordinary as a town can cook up. But the city could not shelter me from everything. At night I would sometimes feel eyes on my spine; at other times I bumped into trouble like it's bad luck tied to a belt.
"You're late," the professor said gently on the first day the visiting lecturer came. He was tall and soft-spoken—Emanuel Koenig. "You ask good questions." I asked about chemical points and molten rock because asking meant thinking beyond small fears. I sat in the back and counted heartbeats.
Then the man with the chestnut hair arrived at my gate one sleep-starved night. He looked like he walked out of a painting: pale, small smile, and when he spoke he left a warmness like sun on cold glass. He said, "Your music is loud."
"Sorry," I said and thought: odd man, keep away. He left, and I would later find out he was Tristan, loose in a late human skin. He did the strange, animal things animals do—appear where you least want them, vanish like a trick.
"Close the door," he said once when he stood under my porch as if he had always lived there. "For your safety."
"Why do you watch me?" I asked, because between his presence and the memory of Grandmother's coffin, I had learned to ask direct questions.
"Because you should not be alone," he said in his fox-music voice. "Because you call the storms."
That would sound like a confession if he wanted to be kind. But he never said he loved me plainly. He said things like "You frighten me in good ways," and "You are very bold for a little mountain child."
"You never told me I couldn't die," I said one night when he ducked in through the dream-doors and surprised me with questions like a bell. "Why are you here, Tristan? Did you kill my grandmother?"
"Did I?" His eyes were small ice pools. "I am not like you think. But I will be honest: I failed to stop something. I went after the wrong scents. I will fix what I can."
"You can't be trusted," I snapped. I had more proofs than trust. He only laughed as if I had spoken badly and patted my head in a nose-twitching, infuriating way.
"Tristan, I will learn to bind you," I told him. "If you mean to harm, I will unmake you."
"Try," he said.
My life in the city was practical, a stack of classes and the slow, tidy chores of eating and buying soap and not drowning in rumor. There was a girl in my dorm, Gracelynn Castle, who had all the spoiled sharpness of the kind of rich kid whose world could not be bothered with the poor. She sneered at my long pants in summer and called me names when the others were around. She didn't know I held a red-wrapped stone in my shirt, didn't know I kept a small fox's tooth in a pocket as if it were a key. She would come to matter a great deal less than she later did.
One evening after a lecture, Emanuel stopped me with a soft, quiet dread in his chest.
"Don't walk alone tonight," he said. "There's a man with bad edges looking for work in our neighborhood. He kills without planning. Your face came up on a list of risks."
"Why do you care?" I asked. He only shrugged, a professor's shrug, like a man who rescues learning without wanting drama.
"I don't like evil," he said.
We did not take the warning at face value, and two hours later somewhere between crosswalks and bad light, a taxi spun out, metal shrieking and breaking. Fire began under the hood like bad weather made of oil. I remember pulling at a door, banging at locks. Then a hand—Tristan's hand—suddenly covered my head like a shield and his body moved under explosion-white light like he was built to take collisions. He shielded me. He had a thin cut on his forehead like a silver thread. I heard the world tear and then go quiet.
"Are you okay?" he asked under the smell of gasoline and smoke, and even then his voice worried like wind.
"Yes," I said and the truth felt like a plate clinking there in a drawer: true but small. "You should get stitches."
He refused the hospital, a stubborn little animal. I disinfected his cut and wrapped him. While I dabbed iodine across his skin he made an odd joke that landed like gravel.
"I am a coward," he admitted, then flashed something complicated at me that could have been shame.
"You can be a coward and still save someone," I said. "It does not make you less."
He did not answer directly, only said, "You will hold the choice, and choices are heavy things."
After that night, we were both forced into a shadow contract: he guarded, I listened for tangles. When he could stand, he walked me to places and back. In the daylight he was a man—Tristan Calhoun, easy smile, pale and strange—and at night he turned into a red blur that kept me from nightmares with a strange tenderness, like someone clearing pebbles from a child's path.
Then the ripened drama of people collapsed into a single room with bright windows. The woman who had been hiding behind the blouse of a high-end life—Gracelynn's mother—tore into the house where we had followed an old thread and scattered a jar against the television. The jar cracked into bone-white ashes and wicked paper. The ashes stank of an old knife. It looked like a messy soap. But unlike soap, it tasted of something rotten: old grief gathered and left open.
"You did this!" someone shouted—my voice, maybe, because fury feels like a bell and the bell rings in your throat.
Tristan's face, ghostly without a mask at that moment, went hard. He stamped a pattern of small movements, as if counting the moments between breaths.
"You opened a wound," I told Gracelynn's mother, nails digging into my palm. "You killed a girl who loved her family. You lied and hid it in a jar."
"You're a liar," she said back. Her fingernails bared at me. "I did what I had to do to keep what I had. People are disposable. Did you expect gratitude?"
"You expect to hide it and hold it like an offering?" I shouted. "Why? Why would you—"
She laughed like someone wounded beyond shame. "Because I could," she said. "Because I wanted the life she was promised. I wanted the man and his gold. He wasn't for her—he was for me."
At that point the house blurred into a courtroom of fumes. The father—the man who had been called Ansomething, the businessman who had walked away into a better name—Edison Nielsen—stood framed in the doorway like a rock carved into disappointment. He was asking questions like a man made of paper. The two old parents stood near with soft, tired faces. The room smelled of wet cloth and the city's concrete.
"Why would you accuse me?" the woman demanded. "You have no proof."
"Proof?" I said. "Proof is the memory on the lake, the way your hands smell of cold water. Proof is the jar with the bone-ash and the symbol for the binding on your altar. Proof is the scream of that girl when you struck. Proof is that you were seen at the lake by four witnesses, though they were paid to shift into silence."
She denied. She bent her head and denied until the tops of her shoulders shook.
"You're lying," she cried. "That girl was always glories and grace. If I wronged her, she deserved it—she always deserved it. I didn't push her. I didn't—"
"Stop," Tristan said. He moved so softly I almost didn't notice. The room went quieter like the weather closing around us. "You can't undo what you did. But we can let the town look."
We took the truth like the burning of old rope. The town gathered. There were phones and small bright screens catching the light like fish. Elena, who was old but hard as a root, walked the public square with a calm that shocked me. She pulled out a small red bundle and placed it on the stone bench like a coronation—my talisman, the red-wrapped stone that had been with me for years. It flashed in the sun.
"She must face it in public," Elena said, voice hollow as an old bell. The mood in the square changed. People pressed like tide water along the plaza. The woman had a bundle of her own: letters, cheap ribbons, photos. She tried to fold them into apology. The crowd smelled of coal and rain-sweat.
"Do you admit it?" Elena asked, and the question fell like a line in water. The woman's mouth twitched, denial the first armor.
"I didn't," she said. "It wasn't me. I loved her, too. I would never—"
"Do you know her name?" someone called. "Do you know what you took?"
"She is my daughter—" said the oldest woman who wore the "mother" like a shawl. She was unfinished in her speaking, hands like torn paper.
We began to unpack the proof bit by gloved bit. I stood near, head buzzing like a stubborn hive. A camera offered light at a corner. A dozen phones lifted to record like a small flock of metal birds.
"Tell us what you did," Elena said, and it wasn't a question. It was an order.
The woman trembled. The crowd leaned. A child asked, "Is she the bad lady?" The press camera blinked like a star.
"It was an accident!" she said, first loud and outraged, then thin. "We fought. She threatened my position. I pushed—no, no, I didn't mean to—"
"She had bruises," someone yelled. "Her hair was pulled. Somebody heard a sound by the lake."
I went forward and pulled a journal from the woman's bag; it was like pulling a string from an old dress—pages and pages of jealous smoldering. It named times she had set traps, ways she had cut at the girl's life with rumor. A neighbor stepped forward and said, "I saw you there that night with a stick. You were shaping the ice. You were waiting at the rock."
"You're lying," she said, moving like a cornered bird. "It's conspiracy!"
Phones began feeding like small fires. The moment her denial wavered the crowd's breath became a thousand small cold things. The old mothers in the square covered their mouths. A man who had once been kind took one step forward and spat, "Why her? You wanted everything she had." He said it like a blade. Her face paled.
"Please—" she began, and the first step of breaking had the slowness of an old river ice cracking. Her fingers clawed at the air. She dropped to her knees on the flagstone as if someone had cut the rope of the world.
"Get up," a woman who had lost a daughter shouted. "Look at us. Look at what you did."
She looked up and the camera caught the smear of mascara and the desperation like wet cloth. She had been proud once; now she was a small crumpled animal.
"No! I didn't mean—" Her words shook. She tried to stand but her knees bent and she fell back, face flat to the stone. "No—I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I didn't mean—"
One young man in the crowd threw his phone down as if a coffin had been opened. "You killed her!" he screamed. Others echoed it. "You killed her!"
Men and women who had passed by their whole lives without incident had ones and zeros of courage capturing the scene. Someone took a photo and laughed, an ugly thin sound. Children put their hands over their ears. A woman began to chant, "Bring the jar! Bring the jar!" They pulled the cracked earthen jar from her bundle and tipped out bone gray ash onto a dust pan. The smell rose and people recoiled as if struck.
"You thought you could hide it," Elena said, low and steady, "and live with your bargains. Now we will not forget."
"Please, please," she begged, voice threaded now with pleading. "I'll pay. I'll pay. I will go away. I will—"
"Go away?" The same neighbors who had once bowed their heads now mocked, some with pity, some with loathing. "Go away? You stole a life."
The circle tightened. Someone recorded the woman as she lost all composure. She first clutched at the dirt, then pulled at her clothes like a child and finally folded into herself. Her face contorted from the face of challenge into one of total denouncement. She began to cry, the shriek turn into keening, then into whispered pleading for salvation.
"Forgive me!" she cried. "Forgive me! I will make amends!" She crawled and bowed with dirty palms smeared in the town's dust in a stunted ritual—"Forgive me!"—and the microphones drank her tears. She looked up, eyes swollen and raw, "Please, please—don't take me to the police. Don't—"
No one answered at first. Some scrawny men in cheap coats took no pity. A woman named Betsy, who had raised three daughters without much money and with stronger hands, spat directly in the woman's face. The crowd laughed and cried at once. Phones crowded the scene; some took slow, pitying video; some took sharp, surgical angles; some amplified the humiliation.
"You're a murderer," the same neighbor said coldly. "You are going to be recorded forever saying sorry and begging."
Her voice lowered to a whimpering whisper; the shame had become a physical thing, hot and raw, and the crowd fed on it and recorded each small motion. She looked at us and the world accelerated to a point of final judgement. She scooped at the dirt to rise and could not.
The sound stretched like iron underfoot: "Please—stop." She fell silent into a wet smear of remorse and stone and people.
It went on long enough to make me tired. I watched the way other people watched: some horrified, some righteous, some greedy. Someone clapped once, a sharp bark, then others mimicked like a bad choir. Children took selfies with their phones. A dozen phones live-streamed the kneeling, the begging. The woman didn't beg for her own life anymore; she begged for the skill of being forgiven like a coin-drop into a hard dish.
She became small, a wounded animal of fake apologies. The sound of her pleading bounced from the surrounding buildings and settled like dust.
When the magistrate finally came in a sensible coat—always collect the law to make things look tidy—he read the evidence, and the crowd hissed and pounded and the woman's face kept changing: first pride, then panic, then denial, then broken pleading. She finally let out a sound like a broke string and asked the magistrate, "Please—please bury me in a place no one remembers."
"You'll stand trial," he said. "Justice will be public."
And in the end, as the crowd broke up, a thousand small recordings were already spreading like seeds. She would be remade publically—exposed and stripped of all the small lies she'd dressed herself in. People took their pictures and walked away. Some ostracized her. Some called her a witch. Some called her a murderer. Some whispered that the girl she took would finally sleep.
I remember feeling cold after the crowd. Tristan touched my elbow and I leaned on him like a small boat on rough water.
"You did good," he said, though his voice was small. "You did very good."
"Was it revenge?" I asked.
"No," he said. "It was truth. The mountain will sleep easier now."
We buried Emma Bray properly by the lake. The old parents finally stopped searching like a machine without oil. I watched her grave, the small mound flatten with the rain, and felt something loosen inside me, though not all. A knot untied itself and left a loop.
A week later, Gracelynn Castle—the girl at school—came at me furious, knife in hand. She nearly ended what I had left of ordinary. The classroom turned to chaos. She lunged at me in a frenzy, yelling that I had cursed her family. She slashed a blade at strangers. "You brought this on us!" she shouted. Fingers tore at my clothes. My pants were ripped and the fox mark on my calf flashed into the open light like a sign carved in skin.
"They touch you because you survived," she shrieked. "They hate the living!"
I knocked her down and the teacher scooped the knife. The room filled with whispers that became a papery loudness: "Who is she really?" The rumor factory started again. In the crowd, people spat the words meant to chew me out: "wind god's daughter," "a curse," "a town secret."
My worst fear was not the knife but that they would take the mark as proof that I was unholy. But that night, the small red fox climbed onto my windowsill—Tristan, quiet and full of teeth—and licked my hand like a benediction. He curled at my boot and slept.
"You attract storms," he said once, half amused and half proud. "You are stubborn."
"And you will keep me?" I asked.
"For however long my body can," he said.
Two years, he had said once. Two years is not very long and not very short. It is the length of a seed waiting to become a blade of grass. He left me many times, came back in different shapes. Once he taught me a cooking trick in the middle of a rainstorm with a pot and a few vegetables. He was an unlikely companion, a troublemaker and a shield. He once told me, "If you go to my hill at the right time, you might be expected to stay. My clan is sharp about traditions. They call marriage binding."
"You're not asking?" I demanded.
"I never ask for what I plan to take," he said with that fox smile. "But I will not force you."
I thought about the choice for weeks—about stepping into the mountain and into a place where the elders might choose my life as an answer to a riddle or about walking away and hoping storms pass by. I chose, finally, to walk the path that led to his hill and knock on the door of an old woman in their clan. When I told his elder I would marry into fox-bound law to buy my life, she was a woman with eyes like river stones and a face of carved oak. She said, "Words are easy. Deeds are not."
I have made bargains since then. I am writing these words because bargains create maps. People in the town—Edison Nielsen among them, men like Cedar Jaeger and Emanuel Koenig who have touched my life in a thousand small ways—have folded into my story. Tristan taught me that even a fox collects his debts in a proper manner; Elena taught me that truth is a blade used best in public; Emma Bray taught me that dying in silence is a theft.
"Will you keep me?" Tristan asked once, in the onshore breeze when peach trees were young and it was too hot for night.
"I will not be a prize or a shield," I told him. "I will be my own."
We have a way now—he guards in red and in loose human clothes. I learn old chants and small herbs. Gracelynn is gone from campus, rumors trailed after her like summer flies. The woman who did the worst was publicly punished; her kneeling was a record of what happens when greed sharpens a hand to violence.
Sometimes, at dusk, I go out to the little peach trees I planted—three kinds—and I press my palm to the trunk. Tristan sits on the low wall, fox-tail braided into cloud, and watches the street. He once blew a note on his thin flute and a peach blossom opened, tiny and sudden, right in my hair.
"You are not family born," he told me once, "but you are chosen."
"Then don't call me curse-bearer," I told him.
"Never," he said. "I would rather make you my wife than my enemy."
I laughed then and bitterly and with something like surrender. The mountain says what it says, but the world below has its own slow laws. I keep my talisman and my name close. I say my grandmother's stories sometimes to the children who pass by and teach them how to collect mushrooms without touching the paper ones.
"What about your promise?" I asked once, early under an ink-black moon.
He did not answer with a promise. He only brushed the red-wrapped stone from the pocket that is now his, and he smiled like an animal who knows where the sun will set.
"Two years," he said. "Keep warm."
When I say it now, the sound of the small town is part of my lungs. The punishment scene at the plaza is a permanent scar on everyone's memory, a vivid, obscene thing—phones and shouting and a woman on her knees begging the world to believe her. They recorded her. They filmed her fall from pride into pleading. She begged and was spat upon; she begged and then fell silent. That public strip of shame is a mark that I will keep like a token of what being brave can mean.
"Will you stay?" Tristan asked later that week, knocking at my door as the storm left the sky like a torn curtain.
"For a while," I said, and I mean it. There are bargains and there are choices. I chose the path that keeps me breathing and keeps the truth in the light.
You asked me once, the mountain and the town and you who read this: would you make a bargain for life?
I did.
The End
— Thank you for reading —