***
December 5, 2024 at 1:43 PM
Another letter bumped the Fox on the head. Luckily, it was without a bottle this time, a mere rolled tree leaf. The Fox called the Little Prince to take a look and stuck his nose into the letter smelling of delicious doner. Unfurled, the leaf turned out to be of a familiar heart shape.
“What, the Planet of the Giant again?” He scoffed loudly for others to hear. “We saved them just the other day, what did they tumble into now?… And what a lousy handwriting, like chicken scratch, I tell you. A cookie for the one who can read it.”
The Little Prince picked up the leaf. His gaze followed the lines slowly but steadily, meaning he did manage to understand that scribble.
“A good guess, Fox,” he smiled to his friend at the end. “Besides, this letter is for you personally, from your new friend, the hen. Listen to what she writes, Dear Fox! When you left our planet for the second time, I realised most clearly that you are my one true love. We had so much fun running through the woods together–”
“Wha?” the addressee jumped up. “What the freaking funk? What’s fun? I’ve barely saved my bacon from her! She’s nuts, I tell you! First, she pretends to be a woodpecker, then a fox terrier… And don’t you read other animals’ letters! Give it to me, I’ll read it by myself. Somehow.”
“Okay, go and try,” the Little Prince returned the leaf to him and chuckled. “And I still think that you two have bonded splendidly.”
“We have splendid nothing! That’s merely her fantasies and imaginations!” The Fox bristled with indignation and, letter in teeth, trotted as far away as he could get on a small asteroid.
“When you get to writing a reply, get back to us!” the Little Prince called him from half across their planet. “Me or Rosa will help you write it in pretty handwriting. You have paws, remember!”
“Reply, duh. As if I have nothing better to do.” The Fox stared at the text, and stared, and sniffed. A doner aroma stopped being so delicious. But at least he did manage to read the crooked letters. Or, he’d better not, because it said in the end that–
“Little Prince!” he shouted and ran back to his friends, with his tail between his legs. “I do need help. But not yours. Please shake the Geographer guy out of the Notebook, I need his knowledge and his academic standing. And his hands, too. That hen decided to train flying and follow me! I need to stop her!”
With the Geographer in his wake and a pencil with a paper sheet in his teeth, the Fox returned to the other side of the planet, far from the giggles and jokes about a wonderful couple.
“Please do me a little favour,” he asked the Geographer at last. “Write a letter to one wayward chick that foxes are predators who eat chicken for breakfast, for lunch, and dinner. Quote an encyclopaedic article if it looks more no-nonsense. And add that a fox and a hen cannot be together in any other sense than the food. And sign with all your credentials, please.”
***
The next letter landed at the feet of the Little Prince, but the Fox recognised the leaf and was the first to snatch it. And he ran away to keep the privacy of correspondence.
The hen’s legwriting didn’t get any better, and it took almost a couple of hours to decode a couple of lines. No, actually, it was four lines: “I don’t care if you are a predator or not. Well, nobody’s perfect. And you didn’t devour me the last two times, it must mean that we are made for each other by fate, and deep in your soul, you are a gentle vegetarian softie. Bye, I’m off the planet to reach you”.
The Fox rushed for help at once.
But the Little Prince advised him again to consider the proposal… proposition… of that crazy bird. Like, such a forgiving, tender soul. The Fox fled to the extinct volcano to consider the options. Not the relationship with a, a chick! No way! Some peace and quiet did good to his brain, and an idea descended to him from heaven. It was genial, and simple like anything of genius. Now he only needed a hand to hold a pencil. And a pencil with paper, of course.
“One letter kit, please, he asked the Little Prince with all his dignity to preclude any jokes, but instead, his friends and neighbours burst out laughing. “And please retrieve the Hunter for me. He will help me; I don’t want to distract you from steering our asteroid.”
Actually, he didn’t want to discuss one episode, long past but very sensitive to his ego. The Little Prince had had enough fun on behalf of his best friend that time.
“Hello, my little pal, where’s our hunting ground today?” The Hunter greeted him, lively as ever, and followed him to the other side of the asteroid. “I fail to see any game or forest round.”
“Hush!” The Fox silenced him, then watched the space in alarm as if fearing to see a small creamy-white spot approaching. “Today I can become a game. One bird of prey has sworn to hunt me down. Please help me shake her off my tail … No, not literally, and without your musket. Instead, we will leave a false trace on paper. Here is a pencil and the paper, sit down, please. I’ll tell you what to write. So… Dear Hen! I am the Hunter, a friend of the Fox. It is with a heavy heart I inform you of an accident. He was hit with a comet. It fell on his head and whacked all his memories. We’ve left him to have rest and rehabilitate on W5613, a Planet of Trains. You can find him there on Squirrel Island. Don’t mind if he behaves strangely, like, climbs trees and eats acorns. Concussion, you know. And sign. Okay, fine, and fold it into a paper plane and send it, please, in that direction. Thank you very much, you saved me.”
The Fox was mighty proud of his invention. Finally, the offending squirrel, looking exactly like him and making him a laughingstock of a bunch of schoolchildren, was put to good use.
***
The Rose nearly managed to pull the third letter under her glass dome. The Fox snatched the leaf from her tendril just in time. As a result, the leaf got punctured with his teeth a bit and took longer than usual to read, but when the meaning got home to the Fox—
“Dear Fox, I flew to the planet of rumbling steel worms on steel threads. Your friend the Hunter is really stupid, he can’t tell a squirrel from a fox. But a loving heart sees the difference; I saw at once that it was not you. Please wait a little bit longer, I’m coming after you.”
He plopped on his tail and stared at the folded leaf in panic, as if a whole hen could have jumped from under it at any moment. Why was she so smart at all the wrong moments and so dumb the rest of the time? And what could the Fox do about it now? She might well fulfil her threat and catch up with B612.
With a boost of terror, he invented yet another option, even more compromising and still fresh in the memory, unlike the squirrel story. The Little Prince wouldn’t be of much help in this deal, it requires someone of larger gauge and authority. The King. The more so that the King knew this particular story already.
Just to be on the safe side (from eavesdropping ears), the Fox beckoned the King to follow him to the empty volcano. There he looked around the shadows, up to the starry round of sky in the crater. No, no spies so far.
“Your majesty,” he whispered, and the king-longshanks squatted to hear him, “you’re the only one who can save me from a mismarriage, exactly in the same way you’ve used to save me from the crazy smith on the Planet of Gargand the other day. The time when you told him that I was your spouse. It was brilliant!” He added some flattery to win the monarch to his cause, and the King was instantly all smiles and nodded. “Please write the same thing to one lady in your most royal handwriting, like, I’m already married to you and thus not eligible to her. I’d write by myself, without bothering you, but I have paws. And I implore you, do not tell anyone about it!”
***
The Fox didn’t expect another letter at all, and it hit him right in the eye, so hard it must have left a bruise—invisible under all that fur, anyway. The Fox cussed a little at that nutty chick and examined the letter. This time, the letter was not rolled all neat and smooth but rather scrunched, and its killing force was enhanced by a stone wrapped in its middle. And the legwriting got even more crooked. The Fox had a really hard time deciphering it and even considered dropping this monkey business since the letter wasn’t very informative anyway. Just swear words. He read it to the end in hope of expanding his vocabulary.
No chance. The hen’s limits didn’t go beyond “cheater” and “liar.” Still, she managed to impress him in the end. With his tail between his legs, the Fox backed from the letter and ran to the Little Prince. Yet, when asked what was the matter, he opened his maw and froze. How was he supposed to explain all that absurd stuff about a squirrel, a queen, about being piss-scared by a mere hen? No. He’d cope all by himself.
“Don’t you ask,” the Fox uttered after catching his breath. “Be a darling, lend me a patch of paper and a pencil once again, and the Businessman as a secretary.”
And he led a new secretary to the volcano cellar again, but not for a dictation. A letter would be clearly not enough. The gravity of the matter requires something material, something from the bottomless peddler’s wheelbox.
“Listen,” the Fox whispered, “do you have anything to placate a pissed-off lady? I… one of my pals, that is, he’s in danger now exactly for that cause. A female is threatening to come after him and peck his brain out.”
“Oh, I get it,” the man leered. “It depends on the severity of your… okay, his fault. This bouquet of tulips suffices if he got home late and tipsy. If he forgot about her birthday, there is a hairdryer for all types of fur and quill. And if he cheated on her, then the only remedy is a diamond necklace. Quite expensive, yes, but his fair lady will eventually replace her rage with mercy.”
“Well, that’s not quite what I need.” The Fox observed the display of presents without much vigour. “I… my pal, that is, needs his darling to stop being pissed at him AND to lose any interest in him as well.”
“Thatsa piece of work,” the Businessman nodded, scratched his nape, and then retrieved a hefty stack of catalogues from the depths of his wheelbox and browsed through it. “Oh, here it is. It requires a multistage, multicomponent therapy. First, apply any of the remedies listed above to revert the anger, then switch to an uncharm. Among the uncharms, I can offer orange- or raspberry-flavoured anti-heat pills, a false beer belly, and ugly warts for a gentleman, and bankruptcy and mortgage documents identical to real ones.”
“Nope,” the Fox shook his head after some thinking, “a false belly won’t make me look any less hot and won’t scare her off. The mort-whatever thing, she won’t get it. I don’t get it either. As for the pills… do you have them with sunflower seed flavour? And the necklace, how much is it? Can I… my pal, that is, get a discount?”
“Fox!” An alarmed Prince’s voice chimed from above. “What’s happened? Why is your girlfriend so cross with you? Did you manage to hurt her feelings somehow?”
He leaned over the crater edge and waved with a crumpled and stained tree leaf. Darn, the letter! The Fox set back his ears and tucked his tail. He wanted dearly to sink into the earth (though there was not much earth to sink into at B612).
“There’s no way she’s my girlfriend!” he howled in despair. “I didn’t tame her, and she failed to tame me, no matter what she believes. We weren’t running together; rather, she was chasing me, and taming doesn’t work that way! The same with love, it may spark on its own or may not, and it’s useless to kindle it. I don’t have any affection for her, please believe me! She scares me. You, the Rosy girl, and my Shiny Blue are quite enough for me. That’s why I tried to shoo her carefully.”
And he got so carried away with venting his emotions that he retold the whole correspondence history.
The Little Prince jumped down into the volcano cave, squatted by his friend’s side, and stroked the red head. Still, his voice was deadpan serious.
“You’d better tell it all to her and not to me. I am sure you didn’t want to hurt her—but you did, with your scheming. It’s not fair, it’s outright dangerous: what if the Snake comes across her when the poor thing is in such distress, and he makes her do stupid things?”
“I did tell her! A thousand times or more!” the Fox replied. “As straight as a stream train. She didn’t seem to understand or care a straw, that stupid chicken chop.”
They both fell silent. It was the Businessman lost in shadows who broke the pause first.
“So, will you buy a necklace, or what?”
The Fox turned to him with a deep growl, and the human cowered behind his wheelbox.
“I still think you should try a letter,” the Little Prince pondered. “I don’t remember what it’s called when a person can’t understand what is said aloud but still can read. The Geographer would definitely know a special word for it. Or maybe your chick does not understand your fox accent. And she clearly knows how to read.”
The Fox shook his head, sighed, spun on the spot, scratched his ear with his hind leg, and croaked after yet another sigh, “Okay, okay, I’ll write to her, but by myself.”
And he turned away with a new paper sheet. What use is it to run away if the Little Prince would anyway loom over him and supervise? The Fox held the pencil in his teeth, pressed the sheet with a paw to the ground, and worked on the letters.
“You even got nearly identical handwriting—or pawwriting? —with her!” The so-called friend was clearly having fun. “Maybe you’d reconsider it. What if you have some more things in common?”
“Aoo, woppeeinginwoo—” the Fox mumbled at first, but then he dropped the pencil and repeated, this time clearly, “Stop peeking into other people’s private letters!”
“A sachet of flax seeds, maybe? For higher convincing value?” The Businessman peeped from his dark corner.
***
The Fox didn’t get any more letters. Still, he sighed with relief when he got into a different, inaccessible galaxy.
