Vulpes Vulpes - a short story by Frazier

Hmm, he thought. Those bloody foxes. The room was filled with the noise of vulpine passion. He rolled over to face the empty side of the bed before twisting back. His duvet was not over him. It lay screwed up on the other side of the bed. Every night he hoped it would be over him in the morning, like when he went to sleep. Proving he wasn’t the restless sleeper his ex-girlfriend moaned about.

‘It’s not just because you keep kicking me when I try to sleep Gareth,’ The memory derailed Gareth’s train of thought. ‘I’m breaking up with you because you spend more time planning to assassinate foxes than on me.’ Her voice always bothered him because it was a lower pitch than his. It was a similar concern to when his younger sister grew taller than him.

But he was glad to be single again. She was a distraction from his obsession.

He made constellations out of the marks on the ceiling.

If next-door stopped feeding them, his brain growled.

That family, they ruin this street. Pet foxes they have, how can I stop them.

His phone was on his bedside table. Protecting the switch of the bedside lamp from being turned on in the morning when needed. He picked the phone up to get to the notepad behind. The cover was a print of an oil painting of foxes, they were burrowing under a tree surrounded by snow. It was purchased by his ex-girlfriend and all she left behind when she moved out.

‘Don’t you think they’re cute Gareth?’ she mocked him. He couldn’t stop thinking of her waving the obscenity in his face. He knew she knew the cover would annoy him. The traumatic fox filled past he endured was a common discussion topic. The memories of his childhood home decorated with orange and white. Miniatures and statues of foxes covered every free surface. The only bedtime story he knew was Fantastic Mr Fox.

The day those foxes established their colony in his garden, he tried chasing them away with a spade. He was three hours late to his work as a firework. He began stealing from work. Fireworks filled his shed to bursting but he never figured out how best to use them. After two weeks of trying to balance fox eviction with a full-time job, he decided to quit. Devoting all his time to fox removal was the only way he believed he could achieve total tranquillity. Within a week of Gareth quitting his job, his girlfriend moved out, leaving only the notepad.

The day after Gareth decided to Sharpie in red letters:

FOXES

The letters adorned the top of the pad’s cover.

On the first page, a more detailed purpose was written.

Methods for Reducing the Population of Red Foxes (Vulpes Vulpes) on Earth or the Garden of Gareth Franklin Squirrel

By Gareth Franklin Squirrel

Over the next few months, plans sprawled across the pages. Detailed paragraphs, penny precise cost analyses and millimetre perfect technical designs. However, of the one hundred and twenty-seven plans he’d drawn up – from avocados (they’re poisonous to them) to a zoologist – only his first idea had been tested. It was, to him, the simplest solution.

The scheme to eat what next-door left out for the foxes was the foolproof solution no one could trace back to him. He had to scale the fence into backdoors garden with a knife, fork, and soy-sauce for the plan to work. He needs soy sauce because it’s essential for his stomach to keep food down. A condition no doctor could explain, and no dentist could accept. His last attempt involved him throwing the knife and fork over the fence. This step of the plan worked because no one from next door had since returned them. Although the fear of his neighbour finding the cutlery in their flowerbed kept him up at night. Planning for a rescue mission had begun, but it was deemed too great a risk and a distraction from the main objective. Gareth had to go to the charity shop to buy another knife and fork so he could eat food without his fingers again. The soy sauce meant they were perpetually sticky. He only ever owned one set of cutlery; believing it saved him washing up.

However, it was not the cutlery that made his operation collapse in on itself. It was when Gareth catapulted his two-litre bottle of soy sauce over the neighbour’s fence.

‘Gareth,’ a neighbour called. ‘A bottle of car oil has come over your fence. Do you want it back?’

Gareth froze at the sound of his neighbour’s voice. The noise came through the fence two more times before its creator walked away. In his shock, Gareth ran back inside the house and, for safety reasons, decided not to leave for a week. The mere thought of the memory made Gareth shiver. He pulled his duvet over his head to stop panicking.

He lay in bed tapping a pencil on his note pad. After thinking over last week’s debacle, he knew a new mode of attack was needed; the foxes were getting louder by the night. The hours passed with him scratching out the eyes of the foxes on the cover and sifting through page after page of previous suggestions. A bulldozer, chewing gum, a wasp nest.

Fireworks: Readily available from the stockpile I stole from work. But too loud, probably cause them to burrow deeper.

Petrol: Runs the risk of setting the shed on fire with all the fireworks in.

Crossbow on a tripwire: Annoying to reload and could hit a neighbour’s cat, which would be a faf to bury.

Lawnmower: Viscera. Which would be a faf to bury.

Cementing the holes: I’d need a team of other people for that.

Finally, an idea came up he couldn’t fault. The pages title said:

Barbed Wire

After circling the couplet of words several times, he checked over the plans he had written in the weeks prior. The decided quantity was one hundred metres; a number he had calculated after thorough measurements of his back garden. A total cost of twenty-eight pounds and forty-eight pence from Screwfix when buying two-fifty metre coils. He was concerned for the low reviews, but the top review was about it being good at keeping foxes away from chickens.

He clicked reserve then went back to sleep.

It took a whole day for his reservation to be ready in the shop. When the email appeared, he began planning his journey. A short walk, only thirty minutes. The best course of action. Leave at six AM to arrive for half-past. Allowing plenty of time for delays when the shop opens at seven.

Gareth mapped his route and prepared his clothes for the next day's excursion. Not a moment needed to be wasted. He went to bed early, excited about the possibility of completing the job he spent every moment thinking about.

He arrived at the car park at quarter past six. The forty-five minutes flew by as Gareth thought of how he would lay out the barbed wire. I could run a current through it.

The doors opened and he made his way straight to electricals. Two jumper cables were taken off the shelf and Gareth took them to the reservation collection.

‘I reserved one hundred metres of barbed wire,’ he told the woman behind the desk, also mentioning the order number. She brought the buckets they were packaged in out to the till. He paid for them and the cables, in exact change, then left.

A bucket in each hand and the cables around his neck like a scarf, he walked back home as fast as he could without running.

He reached his house and headed straight through his kitchen to the garden. He uncoiled the cable scarf and put the buckets down on the ground. He grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and opened the first bucket. The sight of the barbs made him put a coat on for an extra layer of protection.

The first coil was to cover the borough and cover the left-hand side of the garden. The second covered the right-hand side. He pegged some brackets into the ground to hold the wire down. A few he nailed into the shed because the ground around it was paved.

After surveying the successful protection of his realm Gareth began work on the final part. He cut the cable off his spare toaster and stripped the last two inches of insulation to reveal the inner wire. The brown live wire and blue neutral wire were both stripped to their copper. A clip of the red jumper cable was attached to the copper of the brown wire and a clip of the black cable on the copper of the blue wire.

The free clips of each wire were attached on a point of the mangled barbed wire. Gareth took the plug and walked back into the kitchen. At the socket, he slotted the plugin and pressed the switch.

Buzzing came from outside. Gareth looked out the window and saw the wire glistening in the sun across the garden. Then he looked at the shed. The panelling was smouldering around the brackets.

Oh, Gareth thought. The smoulders became smoke, and the smoke became flames. The flames lit the fireworks. He didn’t see the explosion; he ducked before the windows smashed in.