A couple live comfortably in their nice house, in their nice lives. They’re content. Until one day, without warning, the wife turns into a fox. Her husband tries to adjust, to keep her content in their old life but her new body, until he realises the impossibility of what he is doing. A fox cannot be kept as a wife. At the end of the story, he’s resigned to her new self, understanding that he cannot understand her, that she is not his, and perhaps never was.
First published in 2014 by Faber as a Kindle single, and collected in Madame Zero, Faber, 2017