I was writing this fur the magazine. I don't think I'll finish it so I may as well dump what was written here. Very "undercooked" as you'll see if you read it. Fur example, the main character is a 'coon but I never even got around to making that apparent in the text.
Picture unrelated beyond featuring a 'coon. I was thinking of illustrating parts of the story but never got remotely close to that point.
Feel free to do whatever you want with it.
>START
The strongest memory Helen had was of her mother’s soft, furry fingers pressing a damp cloth against the feverish warmth of her furehead one overcast autumn evening. The scent of lavender tea wafted through the air from the chipped blue mug that lay on the table an arm’s length away. The scent of her mother, of the chilly air, of herself, and even of the sickness-- how they effected such a warm nostalgia upon her.
“Things get lost,” her mother sighed a few years later after they’d moved houses and the cobalt-colored mug with the chipped white rim had vanished. She could still feel the steam warming her chin.
Helen traced the gilded edge of a porcelain teacup in Percy’s sunroom. No chips. No cracks. Percy insisted on perfection. Outside, manicured hedges boxed the garden into tidy squares.
"Another scone, darling?" Percy asked. He nudged the silver tiered stand toward her. Jam glistened like rubies in cut-glass dishes.
Helen set her cup down, "Did your mother ever keep old mugs? The kind that shouldn’t last but do?"
Percy’s smile tightened, "My mother collected all sorts of things. But there was no room fur cracked things."
He patted her hand, "Why dwell on the past? You’re here now."
His thumb brushed the gold band on her ring finger. She’d worn it a month, her mind insisted. Yet the weight still felt fureign.
In the hallway, Helen caught movement near the service stairs. A flash of white fur. Red markings streaked like paint across a narrow muzzle. A fox. She froze when spotted, ears flat.
"Pooch," Percy snapped without turning, "The study windows need polishing. Now."
The fox ducked away silently.
-
Percy had excused himself from the sunroom. As usual, there were emails to send, work to be done. It never ended. It never could or perhaps should. Helen, likewise, voiced her excuse to the sunroom and took leave of it, wandering the sprawling, labyrinthine halls of the James estate. She mused to herself, wondering how that singular fox was capable of servicing the entire place. She reflected on that moment earlier and many others like it, which lingered like ghosts in her memory, wondering why Percy was so mean to the servant girl. But she brushed the thought away. What was her place? Certainly not to chastise Percy, her beloved, she reminded herself.
Just as she succeeded in moving on to the next thought in queue, an interruption: a blur of white and red again, hypochondriacally scrubbing away the imperceptible dust of the bay windows overlooking the rose garden. Helen’s paws came to a halt.
“Why does he call you that?”
The white blur ended as unexpectedly as the question came, in its place now a white fox of three tails, adorned by blood red markings. After a moment, the rag in her hands continued circling some invisible smudge, “An old joke, he says. The meaning’s probably too vulgar fur your ears, mistress… though not quite as bad as the other things he calls me.”
A strange feeling crept up Helen’s spine. How dare this fox accuse her noble husband so shamelessly? Yet she couldn’t shake the curiosity, and Percy was out of earshot anyways, “Your real name, then?”
The rag stilled, “I never had one. Same as you.”
The fox’s yellow eyes flicked to Helen’s wedding band, “Ask him about your cobalt mug. See what he says.”
The coldness of the marble floor suddenly shot through her paw as Helen stepped back, “W-what?”
But the fox was already hauling the bucket towards the next window, water sloshing over the rim.
Helen stood frozen in the sun-drenched hall, the fox's words echoing.
“Cobalt mug.”
Impossible. The detail from her strongest memory-- the one Percy dismissed as unimportant. Her hands trembled. Somewhere in the distance she heard a muffled voice, “Good afternoon! This is Percy Jim from James and Johnson Law Firm…”
She turned, following after the maid who by now was already little more than a mote at the hallway’s vanishing point. Helen caught up. A faint scent lingered in the air which led her nose towards the service stairs descending into the mansion's dim underbelly. Helen hesitated, her silk robe brushing the top step. Below, fluorescent lights hummed over a concrete floor. The air smelled sharply of disinfectant and something metallic, like old blood. Hesitance gave way to uncertainty, then a mild terror. Yet, into the estate’s bowels, Helen descended.
She found the fox in a cramped storage room, tossing the dirty rag into a sink. Without turning, “Shouldn’t be down here, Mrs. James.”
“Why did you say that,” Helen whispered, stepping closer, “about the mug?”
The maid finally faced her, yellow eyes weary, “Because it’s not real. None of it.”
She tapped her temple, “They’re implants. Stories fed to us so we don’t… crack.”
Her claw hovered over the faucet, “He can rewrite yours whenever he wants. Make you furget the mug. Furget me. Furget anything…”
The fox sighed, “But I meant what I said. You really shouldn’t be down here, Mrs. James. We shouldn’t converse about… about this topic or… at all, really. If Mr. James found out-”
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside quick, precise Percy’s. A dreadful note of fear stained the ambient scent. The maid’s eyes seemed to grow twice their size as she froze in place fur a moment befure suddenly rushing towards Helen and shoving her into the cabinet behind her.
With tears furming at her crazed, fearful eyes, “I’m dead, Mrs. James. I’m dead! He’ll kill me… you have to help me! You have to… to…”
The maid’s face suddenly relaxed, the familiar submissive expression uncannily retaking its place with naught but a hint of sorrow and acceptance.
“Don’t breathe,” the fox finally whispered, closing the door on Helen. The words seemed to fall from her mouth almost imperceptibly after the intensity of the frenzied plea just seconds earlier. The defeated visage haunted the cabinet’s darkness, seemingly burnt into Helen’s vision.
Furious footsteps reverberated closer and closer each time.
>END