The mink &; the fox

the mink &; the fox

there was once a pink mink
who,
during the dark days of December,
plucked her eyebrows,
packed her Polaroid,
filled a hip-flask with fish-flavoured vodka
and headed North to the great white wastes,
to the thinner and more lucid air
where all there is is seamless snow and the hush of potential
and where there is always a mythical silence to the weather.

in a remote forest along the way, she met a blue fox. they spent a
silent few hours circling each other, admiring each other's coats and
eyeing each other up, until finally the fox felt satisfied and safe
enough to sit still in strange company. so the mink demured and joined
him. she brought out her vodka and the fox shared a suck or two on his
harmonica and all was deliciously cordial. the late afternoon turned to
evening turned to night, and by the time the stars had begun their
slow, exhausting trawl across the sky, cordiality turned to familiarity
turned to flirtation.

"listen"
said the fox, licking his lips of fishy liqour,
"my dear mink, we are so very much alike. we are both on the run. we
are both young, healthy, well-groomed and have sparkling teeth. we are
of one mind. we're one of a kind."

"i agree"
purred the mink and raised one vaulted eyebrow.
"do go on."

"we are so beautiful, you and i, that we can do anything"
added the fox,
"and you have such a lovely and well-tailored pelt of pink that i am
sure you have a silken lining on the inside?"

giggled the mink,
"what can you mean ?"
and winked one heavy eyelid like a fan of ostrich feathers. she took
out her Polaroid and gave it to the fox.
"here"
she whispered,
"take my picture."

and so, in the blink of her made-up eyes, they were soon snapping at
each other and littering the white woodland floor with a cartoon strip
of dancing, laughing, playing the harmonica and sharing little midnight
snacks of mice and voles; of the mink blowing kisses and the fox
frowning darkly. both bristled from the follicles up and they soon
became too hot for their thick coats. so they unzipped each other and
slipped themselves shod, peeling off slowly and posing for each other
in their smooth and tender underneathnesses. before they knew it they
had made love one two three four five six times, pausing inbetween for
mutual photo sessions. the night slicked by in a salacious fable of
fluids, of fur, of musk glands and masturbation, of teeth, teats and
tingling skin. and when the vodka was spent, the fox tucked away his
bulbous white tail and the mink lit up a rollie.

"i'm heading North"
she said,
"to the great white wastes, to the thinner and more lucid air where all
there is is seamless snow and the hush of potential and where there is
always a mythcial silence to the weather?want to come ?"

the fox kissed one of her six full teats and said,
"i thought you'd never ask."

so, with the sunrise just about to make its first faux-pas, it was
beneath the pink blush of a morning sky that the mink giggled, got
dressed and linked fates with the fox.

they decided to catch a train
and charmed themselves aboard a wasteward express flashing false
passports and smiles. the fox tipped his hat to strangers and played
poker with the passengers, while the mink accepted flatteries and
fawn-coloured compliments.
outside, through the carriage windows, the countryside shivered fast
and white with shutter-speed and snow; great glossy tracts of
unmanageable land were rendered two-dimensional, like scenery set for a
pantomime or morality-play; while inside, shapely conspiracies formed
themselves between the crushed velvet upholstery and the hushed, smoked
glass.

"The fox is too louche"
they said,
"too in love with himself and too tongue-smooth for
our liking. No doubt he has a garotte coiled inside
his smokey jacket, or else a pen that propels poisoned ink!"

and:

"Look at the mink in her curvy fur collar and creamy
lip-gloss! So sure of herself and so snap-happy, so
clinically clickety-click with those cagey eyelashes of
hers - a cabaret vamp for sure, a spy maybe. They're
not to be trusted!"

the mink then found herself sitting amidst a miasma of question-marks.
she watched a sickly chocolate-box of landscapes sugar by, complete
with wild woods and fairytale dustings of snow, but she couldn't help
feeling that burning dark and bitter underneath were currents of
concentrated, volatile liquid, the ulterior centres of liquers or
Molotov cocktails.
she did not feel entirely safe.
she checked her mascara in a flurry of self-consciousness. it occurred
to her that events were conspiring - and that there were five possible
plots afoot:

1) this could be a tale of love,
of unzipped vulnerabilities and of saving each other's skin. there'd be
plenty of sepia flashbacks and misty-eyed dulcimer sounds from the
mink's tragic past or the fox's muddy origins. all very poignant and
widescreen.

2) this could be a tale of betrayal,
of telephone wires tapped and extra-marital beds bugged, smeared decoy
scents and spanner sabotage. it could involve blackmail:
black-&;-white Polaroids in manila envelopes or sexual trickery at
the very most tenuous edges of the civilized world, and all for the
ambiguous abstractions of Politics or Faith.

3) maybe a tale of clashing vanities:
cruelty, disfigurement, covetousness -
broken shards of mirror used to cut and scar and shred and marr and
leave the shivering, ugly little insides to suffer from exposure.

4) a tale of cloaked identity,
where they would soon discover that they were proven - by paper, by
blood and by those double helices of history (the twists of Fate and
DNA) - to be brother and sister, and where the collusions of the
gene-pool would mean the mink gave birth to a mutated litter of six, a
purple mix: a fink, a minx, a fix, a mix &; two rather raggedy
mox.

or finally,
5) this could be a tale of epiphany,
of mystical catharsis in the wilderness, of rapture and a shedding of
earthly skins, catching transcendence like hypothermia.

she snapped her mirror shut.
a terrible prescience was pressing down on her. she had struggled hard
to disentangle herself from all that fable-n?ir, but was somehow still
pursued by the cumbersome mechanics of Fate, which had moved heaven and
earth to make a moral point, to make an example of her. and even as she
and the fox hurtled toward the wonder hinterlands, she could begin to
smell, like ozone, the territorial smears of border-checks and
surveillance cameras. Paranoia rifled through her carpetbag and
rummaged in the pockets of her fur. it found microdots, cyanide
capsules, a revolver, grenades and the fox's secret dossier?

oh, duplicitous mink!
traitorous mink!
scheming and immoral mink!

?well, naturally she had none of these. but Fate would find something
on her person, had maybe already planted it. she could well imagine the
diabolical telltales that were being developed in some dark room in the
city even now, and almost wished she'd stayed safe on the farm. the
prospect of being allowed to get away and live in uncomplicated
amorality with her dashing fox was becoming as remote as their intended
destination, even as they sped closer to it.

it was after many card games and gulps of vole-flavoured vodka that she
finally put this predicament to the fox. he had the answer instantly,
as if he'd been waiting for her to ask but thought she'd never do
so.

"it's simple"
he said,
"we are only bound by our hides. we must divest ourselves of our
disguises, for they are what implicate us in this plot. let's leave
behind vain and anthropomorphic conceit. let some other wolf in sheep's
clothing make an ass or a scapegoat of themselves. we can slip the trap
if we just undress. are you with me ?"

and so,
from that point on they renounced the power of speech,
and as soon as they arrived at the blankness of the sleek, bleak
tundra, they shrugged off their mortal coats and froze flat into a
picturebook tableau,
bare, uncensored and entirely apocryphal.
untraceable by footprints or rhetoric, scandal or dental records, they
vanished very quickly and very ever after, leaving only a trail of
obscene photographs in their wake,
and no sign of a moral whatsoever.