Once a year I give myself permission to indulge in real tenderness. I dip an overripe fig in honey and eat it with yogurt. Then I allow some man to worship me. I make him go down on two knees and pray.
“Pray for what?” he’d whisper.
“Pray for whatever you like, as long as you pray to me,” I’d reply. “I am your goddess.”
Then I’d fan my hair out on my bed, splay my legs, and he’d dip his head down, put his palms together, and purse his lips in concentration. Sometimes he wouldn’t know what to pray for, because his prayers had been answered. Sometimes he’d recite a novena he remembered from childhood. Sometimes he would take too long, and I’d watch him bend against the bed, his brows furrowed in thought. Sometimes he would start weeping, though this was rare. Then when he finished praying he would put his lips to my thigh and I’d arch my hips forward, and time would begin again.
Summer is a series of aches heightened, sharpened into blades. I watch it spin itself to the ground—the simmering sounds and scents of the city: lamb skewers frying on halal truck griddles, girls in puffsleeve dresses with their manicured toes crunching over subway grates, Chinatown dumpsters full of baby’s breath and rotten rambutan and slimy cockles, the sheen of sunscreen and sweat on the foreheads of commuters heading to Jacob Riis or Brighton or Rockaway. I smell and hear and see it all. I am always aching for meat. Months and months of listlessness culminate into a raw, bloodletting hunger. My sport is almost too easy for me, so I fantasize about switching roles, becoming my own prey. You look at your body in the mirror and want to consume it yourself. The taste of your own sweat, your own saliva, more thrilling than the taste of any other. The feeling gives you the impulse to go out there and find opportunities to defile yourself. To be defiled. To defile another.
I’m what they call a ninetailed fox. A hulijing, huxian, fox spirit, fox fairy, fox demon, fox seductress, exquisite fox, all the names I can and can’t claim as my own. Enchantment is my sport, and this city of ten million people and twice as many rats is my arena. I’m not heartless—I feed on the wicked. I observe from the margins—this in between, this unseen place between dawn and dusk, this cockroachinfested apartment, this fur, this skin. I love this perch from which one can survey the world, gather the infinite wisdom of the city. Every street, every café, every gym or club or hotel lobby—all fair game for bad men who come out to play. I’ve noticed in particular how straight men are not cautious. They don’t care about the potential dangers of inviting strangers into their homes or walking out in public spaces. They don’t think twice like most others do.
My home is a studio apartment on the edges of Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, close to Broadway Junction and the sounds of the aboveground J crisscrossing the A, C, and L. It was vacated half a year ago by its owner, this whole complex up for foreclosure, then gut renovation. Last month, as soon as the windows were boarded up and the last squatters departed following an infestation of centipedes, I moved in and made my den. Just one flea bitten mattress on the floor is all I need. Until the developers begin their gentrification, I am free to live in this liminal place and work. By work, I mean writing down all I learn from observing humans’ habitations, their conflicts with foxes, the politics of it. My current project is a guide to help other fox spirits like myself get what we want: Love. No, scratch that. Revenge. Eh, I mean immortality, transcendence. It’s a selfhelp book, if you will, a work in progress. Foxes are notoriously too proud to seek help unless from an actual god, so I fib a little here and there, like the lie that I’m already an immortal, that I already have nine tails. But we all lie sometimes to survive, isn’t that true?
The rest of the time, I spend hunting.
I locate my targets with precision and caution. Certain men believe they are systemically oppressed because women won’t have sex with them. They write manifestos about how unfair it is that they can’t find someone willing to fuck them, how humiliating, and they blame this on women. According to the logic of these poorly written manifestos, if a woman is sexually active, then she is a slut and deserves to die, but if a woman does not sleep with these manifestowriters, she is a bitch.
And some men move through this world with an ease that tells you vaguely what kind of life they lead, what kind of car they might drive, what kind of sheets they sleep in. When they wake up in the morning and walk outside their condos, they treat the larger world just like that—like the sheets they make love to their wives on, these men so wholly at home in what they do. And some men quit their jobs to go backpacking in Thailand or teach English in China, to distract themselves from their selfloathing,
