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Agnes lives in a sewer. Everyone does now.
When she moved in, she didn’t have much to say about her room. Now that she’s lived in it for one-and-a-half human years, she still doesn’t.
What little there is to say is this; it is exactly six steps by six steps.
The walls are grey brick, the floor concrete. There is a pipe above the entrance which you need to duck under to avoid hitting your head. It hisses shrilly and spits out steam at odd hours and makes her room too hot for comfort when it does, so she visits the Fox’s. Kristofferson doesn’t mind. Ash does, but he doesn’t say anything anymore.
She knows when it rains because the roof drips in a corner. The water is grey and smells funny when it collects in a bucket.
The only furnishings are a bed made of fabric scraps and a painting on the wall. Mrs Fox painted it. It’s of a thunderstorm. It’s the most Agnes has seen of the outside in months.
When she first moved in, the concrete would tear at her paws. She would pace, six by six, spiralling, stuck in place as the world moved by above her head.
Those first few fox years, when she still held naïve hope close to her chest like a wish, had been a haze of six by six. Ash had joined her sometimes. Kristofferson too, on the good days. Those were the days when they sat together meditating and her claws were still, not picking at her thinning fur.
Mr Fox had told them all, in no polite terms, to stop behaving like kits and that a few scraped paws were nothing to cry about. Considering his tail was strung round the neck of the man who’d shot it off, Agnes shut up and listened.
Sometimes she feels she shouldn’t complain. They’re all alive, after all, with a roof over their heads (and above their roof a drainpipe, and three farmers with guns, and an entire world moving on without them). They have each other and they have food and they are safe, so long as they stay where they are. To ask for any more would be to ask for too much.
But other days the walls close in from six by six to four by four to nothing at all and even walls of fur and flesh don’t protect her from threats that don’t exist as she curls in a corner, torn paper thin, trying to muffle her sobs so the Weasels next door don’t complain about the noise.
When those days end, it’s like they never even happened. Agnes will even out her breath, comb through her fur and go find something to eat, and no one would think anything was ever wrong at all. No one would think she’d be shot if she poked her nose out the front door.
They thought they found salvation when they arrived. They’d danced under the fluorescent lights of a grocery store and feasted until they were sick from the artificial flavours, choking on forbidden fruit and excess like they never had when they were wild animals.
Familiar footsteps pad up the tunnel. She still walks as though in time with those footsteps. They stop outside her room. Kristofferson taps the back of his fist twice against the wall. “Agnes? Are you home?”
These days she’s never anywhere else. “What do you want?”
“Not much.” He never has wanted very much. Kristofferson slips off his shoes and leaves them by the door, even though his paws are still too soft for her concrete floor. He slides his back down the wall to sit beside her, legs crossed and paws pulled up to rest on his knees. Ash always make fun of him for sitting like that. “What do you want?”
“I want everything to be steady.”
“That’s a lot to ask, these days.”
“I want something to be steady.”
They both know what she means; she wants them to be steady.
They were steady, once. It was a dream – and a nice one – and sometimes they relive it in six by six, defanged and declawed though they may be. It’s a soft warmth now, after the initial explosion of stars and swirling feelings that had, like a flame to magnesium, consumed her whole. But nothing is steady now, save for the grey brick walls.
“I want to feel the wind again. I want to feel the earth under my feet.”
“I want to see stars,” Kristofferson confesses soft sin to the grey bricks. “Real ones.”
“I want to feel alive.” She doesn’t want to live every day as a means to an end, as a waiting game for when the world can resume. She will die before the men with their guns do; she will die if she stays down here of if she leaves. There is no end to this infernal dance.
“The closest we get to stars these days are Bean’s apples.” Kristofferson is matter-of-fact as always, as though the words don’t mean anything. Agnes knows him well enough to know better. “Mr Fox says Bean’s apples are better off for having stars on them. I think the stars are worse off for being on Bean’s apples.”
The Rabbits have a television. Mr Rabbit watches the news, Mrs Rabbit watches old human movies shot in black and white. When Agnes visits, Mrs Rabbit offers her biscuits wrapped in plastic and cider made from apples with stars.
Stars taste like sugar and plastic. Stars were never meant to be tasted. They were never made to be touched.
Kristofferson’s ear flicks as though brushing away a fly or a discomfort. “He’s wrong. The closest thing to stars are your spots. They actually mean something.”
To him, maybe. It’s a nice sentiment and all, but down here nothing means anything, not even her. Not when it all melts into grey. Apples rot and so does Agnes. Stars – real stars – hang in a sky that she can’t see and stay there forever even after they explode like magnesium brought to a flame.
“Do you dance?” Kristofferson asks.
“Not for nothing.”
“For me?”
“If you lead.”
“How do you feel about waltzes?”
Mrs Rabbit watches ballroom dances sometimes, dabbing at her unfocused eyes with the hem of her skirt, and Agnes knows that expression from how often it’s on her own face, knows Mrs Rabbit is thinking of the past. All anyone ever does down here is think of the past.
“Tell me about them, and we’ll see.”
“Dancing is a lot like karate,” he explains. “When performed to perfection, it becomes art. If you want proper dancing lessons I suggest someone other than me, I’ve never been more than adequate at it.”
Kristofferson’s adequate is perfection. Agnes refuses to believe the white fox isn’t a natural at anything he puts his mind to.
“I would recommend you speak to Kylie if you want to learn to waltz properly.” Kristofferson continues, “He taught me the hesitation waltz recently. It’s involves the combination of one slow walking step with one waltz step. You pause with the beat – ‘1, 2, 3, 4-’ or ‘1- 4, 5, 6’ depending on the music.”
Agnes has never had an ear for music or a body for dancing. “Sounds complicated.”
“It’s easy. I’ll show you.” He stands and offers her a paw. There is no music but the shuffle of their paws on concrete and the thump of their hearts, still beating as one after all this time. It’s enough. It’s got to be. “Remember, you weigh less than a slice of bread.”
She meets his left paw with her right; his pads are soft, hers calloused. His other paw hovers over her hip, afraid to touch. Her claws tangle in his white fur, afraid to let go. He leads, she follows and they spiral together in six by six, a hesitation waltz.