He did not move. He fixed her with the same stranger’s regard. Because he saw her differently, or because she was gazing back at him differently? What had happened in the garden had changed everything. She had believed him to be a kind of cure, but he had taken what she supposed to be their moment of greatest intimacy and turned it inside out. Skinned it. He’d run out on them, and now there was no them. Didn’t he know that without her, he was just a common garden fox? No name and no voice. “You need to come back,” she said to his flickering ears. “I’ll get more food, fresher food. You need to let me look after you. You need…” There it was again. The word rang in her head, and she stopped, openmouthed at what she had heard. The spade weighed heavy in her hand. No, she would not go there. Who was she to tell him what he needed, to presume to know? That was not what they had shared. He had brought her something different. All those weeks ago she had taken his first appearance in her garden as a sort of territorial theft, but it had turned out to be the opposite. He had given freely. Now he was going as he came. She could see he was about to go. She would let him, and she would take what he took. He thought he’d escaped, yes, and now she was escaping too. What was that expression this Ethan had used? Self-willed. He, her fox—the fox, she corrected herself—had never tried to control her, and she didn’t want to control him. The sun glinted on the spade as she lowered it. She watched the tension in his forelegs tighten. He gazed at her, head tilted, and she knew that every hair was judging when to flee.
She clapped her hands once, like some old bit of wizardry, and he ran.
It seemed to her that she had freed them both.
* * *
“NOTHING?” ETHAN ASKED when she returned to the garden.
She shook her head.
“That’s the beauty of a wild animal,” he said, shrugging. “They keep their secrets. Living in their wilderness at the edge of our world … Or in the case of the fox, not even at the edge of it. Because the paths to their wild world lie right at our feet. Which is great. Cause we need that. We, humans,” he clarified, seeing Mary’s look of stupefaction. It was dissolving slowly. She had the sense that she was only now coming back to herself.
“What day is it?” she asked.
“Friday,” he laughed. “The twenty-sixth.” He glanced at her as they walked toward the house and added, “of July.”
“See here,” she said, rubbing the kitchen counter. “He made these grooves with his claws.”
She listened to Ethan, telling her how privileged she was to have known such a guy, but her heart was in her fingertips, stroking the indentations in the wood. When his scent left the blanket, left the sofa, left her skin, when her fingers healed, and she’d straightened the house, they would be all she had of him. Those and the few tatty bits on the sill, the shoe, the glove, and that chewed old rag. She screwed up her nose; once Ethan was out of the way, she would drop them in the bin. But there was the magic egg, which was really just an empty shell. She lifted it for the final time, expecting to feel nothing because nothing was what it held, and nothing was the truth. And yet, even as she thought it, her heart quivered with a faint smile. She knew the egg’s secret, but its surprise, its real magic, was that the wonder stayed intact. Well, there was no harm in keeping the egg. Mary followed Ethan down the hall, watching his shoes pick up a few stray polystyrene balls.
After she showed him out, she had no urge to go straight back inside, so she sat on the low wall beside her path, hot with a summer’s heat wave. The truth was she had no idea what had happened. She could not say for sure if the fox was dead or alive. But then, he had always known things that she didn’t, and in the past the not knowing, the not understanding, had given her comfort. He was beyond her. He had extended her world, tugged at its corners, let her lose sight of its edges and of herself. Just for a minute she allowed herself to imagine that she had never met the fox, that she had come home from work on an ordinary Tuesday and woken the next day to an ordinary Wednesday. But the contemplation gave out. It was too horrid to picture the state she would be in now. If he had never appeared, she would probably have had to invent him. Maybe humans—people, she corrected herself, she had to get used to thinking of them that way again, especially when she was in the office—maybe people needed to unwind every so often. Anyone could see how much stronger she had grown. Some part of her was made for a bigger, freer, wilder life. She would always have that now. A bit of that. Not too much. He had left her, but he had left her in a better place. She leant back and stretched out her legs, and let the sun warm her eyelids. The color inside was pure gold.
He crossed the wind so. No one would follow–
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAULA COCOZZA is a staff feature writer at the Guardian and has covered everything from soccer to fashion to fourth-wave feminism. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue, the Telegraph, the Independent, and the TLS. She completed her MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she received the 2013/14 David Higham Award. Paula lives in London with her husband and two children. How to Be Human is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
About the Author
Copyright
HOW TO BE HUMAN. Copyright © 2017 by Paula Cocozza. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.henryholt.com
Cover design by Rick Pracher
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Cocozza, Paula, author.
Title: How to be human: a novel / Paula Cocozza.
Description: First edition. | New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039491 | ISBN 9781250129253 (hardback) | ISBN 9781250129260 (electronic book)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PR6103.O348 H69 2017 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039491
e-ISBN 9781250129260
First Edition: May 2017
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
How to Be Human Page 26
