hold all weddings on Sundays.

It begins with champagne brunches—the upper-class way to drink before noon. They dip their narrow-tipped muzzles near the fizz, bubbles tickling their whiskers.

Just pour orange juice

to add twice as much class. They anticipate with flickering tails the parade. With delicate paws, vixens adjust pill box hats of mustard mushroom caps and moss. They gossip about the fox-groom—

A real jackal with bad table manners

and a den of minimal size. The ceremony begins—kits wearing oak leaf hats prance towards the clearing to the ready tone of wooden flutes.

***

Geneveive Betts’ work has appeared in (or is forthcoming from) Conversations Across Borders, Mom Egg Review, A Narrow Fellow, Press 1, The Bakery, Rougarou, Cricket Online Review, Clockhouse Review, Poetry Quarterly, CHAIN and in other journals and anthologies. She received her MFA from Arizona State University and currently teaches creative writing for Arcadia University’s low-residency MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons.

“The Foxes” originally appeared in NANO Fiction.