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Yoon Ha Lee's work has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His collection Conservation of Shadows came out from Prime Books in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.
At the end of the world, your grave is written not in bitter libations or raven words or elegies breathed across broken glass. Under the dusk of a dreary sun you gather your bones close; across the husk of a weary world you leave behind shadows, but no footfalls. And in the meantime, the foxes come.
At the end of the world, all foxes are blind. Their eyes have been plucked out and fed to the everywhere fires, which rise crisp and golden from the mazed streets. With every gun's muzzle-blast, every bomb, every conflagration of inside-out expectations, foxes' gazes rattle through you, in constellations of laughter.
As for the foxes themselves, they have always known how to find their way through the dark gloved spaces, the scratched-up places. They sit at your feet while the stars fall and burn through the back of your skull. They show you how to find nourishment in the rag-pickings of Armageddon. And when you sleep, they circle around your dreams, in flashes as bright as suppurating flesh.
The End
This story was first published on Thursday, June 4th, 2015
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