The Last Leaf to Fall
Shea Campanella
It went unspoken, but all of the locals had accepted that the grocery store on the edge of town was haunted. Residents reported cold spots, especially near the ice cream aisle.
I stood in the bread aisle, finding as much entertainment as possible. Some packaging shouted WONDER, crowding itself with bright circles in primary colors. More composed brands and the inconsequential ones with logos no one recognized sat averting their gaze. It was a wildly ordinary bread aisle. I liked it for the smell of bread which was so strong it forced you to feel at least a little bit alive.
As I was appraising an ordinary loaf, I felt a tugging on my shoelaces and glanced to see a small blue-green fox chewing on them. When I looked, it dropped the laces and bounced around in circles, excited for me to see it. The mint-colored fur was ruffled in different directions with the suggestion of having run through bushes without a care.
It calmed itself and looked up at me. It shifted its paws like a child clapping pudgy hands.
“That time already?” I asked it.
Yes! It didn’t speak the word out loud, but in the way it danced in place waiting for me to follow. Its eyes squinted up at me, full of unbridled cheer.
“Alright. Let’s go then,” I gave in early this season.
When it was just a plaything, I would take the fox here to visit throughout the nicer seasons. If I felt particularly brave, a few trips were made on bright winter days.
One year, when I was small, I lost the stuffed fox there. And for a long time after I’d consider it the worst thing to ever happen to me. I had dusted myself off from playing with sticks and dirt. I wanted to build us a fort for the winter so we could sit someplace sheltered. But I turned to pick up my friend and for the first time I found myself alone. At the time, I was so little and my body hadn’t the capacity to hold all of my strongest emotions. They spilled out, uncontainable, and so my only solid memory of that day was the way the soil darkened beneath my tears after I knelt and sobbed for many long hours. But I know I must have whirled around, crushing early leaves, tripping over myself to check all the best spots we used for hide and seek. Tears froze onto my cheeks. The night air turned my breath into white smoke signals as I warbled wishes to be found. When I couldn’t find my fox, a life-like apparition of my companion helped me walk home.
I’m told I was inconsolable after. For days I’d return and search for it with all the tools my 10-year-old self could get. But while the ghost version would stay with me, I could never find the toy.
Since then, I hadn’t seen it as much. Whenever I went to play in the woods it would join me, but it rarely followed me home after that first day. I wasn’t sure if that was because I had changed or if it was upset with me for losing it. But it always found me at the end of fall, no matter where I was. Even if I hid.
The beauty of our little tradition had aged into staleness for me long ago. I tried to explain that, how it was natural for things to become tired and overdone. How very human it was to grow past old interests.
But the fox still loved it.
After traveling for hours, we came to stop below a great silver tree. Its branches struck into the sky like frozen lightning and seemed to cradle the clouds itself. Reaching for acres, I was sure this tree would stand once Atlas crumbled.
My friend the fox tapped its paws in anticipation. It looked at me, its eyes bright and swimming with recollections of leaves past. Unable to contain itself, the fox took off and raced around the clearing. It leapt over a fallen log and stirred up leaves on the ground. It sped past the dirt entrance to its own den. It had dug a home between the roots of the tree, and though I’d never been inside I knew it must have woven through to the tree’s very heart.
I gazed up and searched for a moment for the object of our fascination. The last leaf this time was readying itself from one of the low boughs. It was close to us this year.
The fox came back to rest at my side. Its chest heaved as if there was air to run out of. I knew it was for show, to act like it was full of life and capable of pulling more in.
It beamed up at me as if this was a brand new event for us.
“We don’t need to keep doing this,” I chastised it. I tried to start this conversation again.
It bounced back and forth, touching its paws in different patterns. On pebbles and dying leaves, it spelled in a language we’d invented long ago. It stopped, finishing its sentence. I sighed because I understood. It’s important to us, were its words.
“Well, you can come alone if you want, I don’t need to be here.”
To the sound of leaves crunching, I was told, Yes, you do.
And so the fox had won another year.
I sat down and let it curl up in my lap. My fingers combed its thick fur. Wisps of soft blue light laced around my hand.
The moon made its appearance for the show.
My friend slid out from my lap and moved to the ground beside me. We sat silently, talking by tapping the dirt in our own variant of morse code.
It was as we were sitting there that the final leaf fell. In the past, we’d seen some leap, some make a show, some drop as soon as they could to be over with it, some dance with grandeur. This one was more passive than our favorites, but it fell in a way its own. Mainly it drifted gently, but in a final bid for defiance it twirled once in its last movement before touching the dirt.
The fox was satisfied.
It rose and stretched. It butted my hand with its head, then went to brush its face against the tree. Finally, it turned and beamed at me once again before returning to its home under the tree’s roots.
I walked up to the tree for my own goodbye. The cold silver surface looked primordial as it had since my youth. This was the bark that saw me cry in the cold and did nothing. It sat as if indifferent. And I let it. As long as it continued to care for the fox, that was what mattered.
I turned and faded from the tree and the fox and each leaf now on the ground. There was a grocery store in need of haunting. I left the clearing for the next three seasons, until the day I would be brought back and my friend and I could rest on the ground a while again.
Shea Campanella
Shea Campanella is an avid lover of storytelling, sage green, and cats. She has dedicated herself to that primary love by receiving a B.A. in Creative Writing and plotting to pursue a M.A. After working at her university’s poetry-centric Literary Magazine as Editor-in-Chief for 2 years, she is thrilled to set her sights further into the industry. She now plans to settle some of her short stories into homes of their own throughout the most endearing and fascinating magazines this world has to offer.