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Unfinished Foxes

2023 Ned Stuckey-French Nonfiction Contest Finalist


In 1952, Dimitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut selected the most docile foxes they could find in government-run fur farms scattered across Siberia. They had an idea for an experiment: to turn foxes into pets. By breeding the friendliest foxes, the experiment produced over sixty generations of increasingly tame foxes, some with dog-like physical features such as shorter, broader muzzles, floppy ears, curly tails, and spots. These physiological changes are called domestication syndrome and include juvenilization (or prolonged adolescence), year-round breedability, and the feminization of features. To be domesticated, in other words, is to be a young, sexually available female forever.


§


Of the “Four Fs” trauma responses, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn, the fawn response is the most recently acknowledged. Psychotherapist Pete Walker coined the term in his study of complex PTSD, a condition that results from ongoing trauma, such as parental abuse or domestic violence, rather than a single traumatizing event. The fawn response is one in which a person tries to appease or be helpful in response to a threat instead of fighting, running away, or freezing. I fawn brilliantly.


§


My first boyfriend and I had sex for the first time during a rainy summer afternoon while Van Morrison crooned “Tupelo Honey” over the FM radio. The relationship started so sweetly, I figured there must’ve been something about me that turned it monstrous. Months later, he raped me in a way that left physical scars. He arranged centerfolds torn from issues of Barely Legal and Just 18 like a halo around my face while he did it—because I said I liked girls, right? He said this as if the whole scene was just for me, a gift. Like the girlish white panties with the tiny pink rosette on the front that he bought and insisted I wear. Like the drugs he fed me and the grow house he kept me in. Gifts—just for me. What can you do when someone gives you a gift except smile, and say thank you, It’s just what I wanted. When I studied abroad for a semester, he called me every day at five p.m. to tell me that I’d abandoned him, that I was the only thing that mattered in his life, that I was a spoiled whore, that he was going to kill my dog to punish me. I always picked up. I never disagreed. And when the semester was over, I went back to him.


§


There’s a scene from a fairy tale I read over and over as a child while stretched out on Mamaw’s scratchy sofa under the glass-eyed gaze of a mounted buck’s head. I don’t recall the rest of the story, only this: Whatever happens, he said, do not let me go. So, she threw her arms around him, and he turned into a snarling wolf, snapping his bloody jaws in her face. She held on tight and did not let him go. Then he turned into a searing bar of red-hot iron, and she cried out as blisters formed on her arms. But she did not let him go. Then he turned into a pillar of ice, and she gritted her chattering teeth as her lips turned blue. But she did not let him go.

Mamaw’s house was full of cigarette smoke and her terrifying, wall-eyed husband. He’d bring me little presents from his hunting trips: a turkey’s beard, a doe’s fluffy, white tail. I took these scraps of once-living things in my small hands, stroked them, told my step-grandfather, “thank you.” Later, I would learn that he beat my mother viciously, that he threw her down the back steps when she got pregnant at seventeen, that she married another monster to get away from this one.


§


In The Malleus Maleficarum, the infamous treatise on witchcraft written by Heinrich Kramer in 1486, women are considered susceptible to the Devil’s influence because they were carved from Adam’s rib and are therefore “unfinished animals.” I wonder if I am frozen in a state of obedience—forever agreeable, forever trusting—that keeps me trapped in a cycle of violence. Like the foxes, I am tame in all the ways that make men comfortable: a wagging tail, a laughing voice, a strokable softness. Is this why I fall for abusive men over and over? Because they want a tame thing to pet and a wild thing to break? My mother escaped her stepfather only to be nearly killed by her first husband, and I wonder if she somehow passed this fate onto me. According to Walker, “fawn types are the most developmentally arrested in their healthy sense of self.” I wonder if I am forever suspended in a state of blind trust because my mother died suddenly when I was a child and left me unfinished.


§


In Celtic mythology, the selkie is a gentle, shapeshifting sea creature who moves between seal and human forms. While male selkie stories certainly exist, most are about female selkies who shed their sealskins to dance or bathe at the water’s edge and, while doing so, have their sealskins stolen by men. The selkie cannot return to her seal form or the sea without her skin. She marries the man who stole her skin and gradually wastes away for want of her ocean home. In some stories, her child finds and returns her sealskin to her, ending her imprisonment. In some, the husband-kidnapper burns her sealskin, and she is doomed forever to remain human.

Selkie myths fall under the motif of the Animal Bride in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of Folklore. Stories like Beauty and the Beast or its ancient predecessor, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, are categorized under the Animal Bridegroom and are more familiar to modern readers. The difference between the Animal Bridegroom and the Animal Bride is that the bridegroom is a beast only because he is under an enchantment and may be returned to his true, human form by the love of his human bride. The Animal Bride, on the other hand, is an animal that takes on the form of a woman in her private moments of pleasure, usually when bathing or dancing. She may only be kept in her human form through the will of her human husband. He never forgets that her true form is that of an animal.


§


In 2006, the year I graduated college and met the man who would become my husband, The Decemberists released their prog-rock-tinged album The Crane Wife. The album is based loosely on a Japanese Animal Bride story, in which a crane transforms herself into a woman for the love of the man who saved her from a hunter’s snare. While the man who would become my husband was in fact a hunter, he felt like a safe place. He treated the woods like his church, and he looked at me the way humans look at a wild creature in that heartbeat of stillness before it flees. We drove down backroads at night in his pickup, windows open to the cool air, oblivious to the foreshadowing of the tragedy yet to come as we sang along with Colin Meloy’s reedy tenor, “All I ever meant to do was to keep you.”


§


The fourth generation of selectively bred foxes included three dozen pups. As researchers approached their cages, one of them, a male named Ember, started to wag his tail at them in greeting. Fawning like a dog. Or, to use scientific terminology, exhibiting solicitous behavior.


§


An amnesia seems to settle on each Animal Bride, a suspended period of blissful forgetting. The marriage is a happy one, at least for a while. What could this be but a fawn response? The word fawn comes from the Old English fagnian meaning “to rejoice.” I took to domesticity with busy hands and a willing heart. I moved seven hundred miles away from home to live with him. A dedicated vegetarian for years, I started eating the venison he brought home every winter. I threw myself into learning to love what he loved, from Stephen King to college football, while the things I cared about slipped quietly from my mind. My sealskin was gone, and maybe I was better off without it. I didn’t need anything; I could not have even told you a single thing I wanted. And I couldn’t remember being any other way.


§


The Siberian fox experiment has been described as a light-speed version of the domestication of dogs. But there’s a huge difference between the co-evolution of two highly social species over several thousand years, who essentially chose to befriend each other for mutually beneficial reasons, and breeding foxes in cages to be nicer to their captors. It’s important to note that these experiments began on fur farms. The nice foxes got to keep their skins.


§


By the twentieth generation, the foxes started vocalizing in a new way. Trut calls it the “ha ha” vocalization, noting that it sounded a lot like human laughter. The experiment nearly ended in the early nineties due to the fall of the Soviet Union, and not much was made of these new vocalizations as researchers scrambled to keep the foxes fed and alive. In 2005, Svetlana Gogoleva, an undergraduate at Moscow State University, studied the domesticated foxes’ unique vocalizations. When run through a spectrometer, the “ha ha” vocalization and human laughter look nearly identical. Gogoleva hypothesized that the foxes learned to imitate human laughter to bond with us.


§


One by one, my hometown friends fell away and were forgotten. We only ever spent time with my fiancé’s friends. These gatherings were usually in crowded bars and centered around sports events, an overstimulating combination that I dampened with alcohol. There were good jokes, though, great banter, and the grad-school kind of heated intellectual debate. Whenever I laughed too loudly or inserted myself into the discussion, my fiancé would pinch my thigh under the table and hiss into my ear, “Stop using your dyke voice.” And I’d shut up, methodically drinking my way back under the radar.


§


There are many examples in folklore where humans lose entire decades of their lives while under the spell of supernatural beings. I wonder if it is the same for the selkie. If, upon her return to the sea, she finds her seal-bodied people greatly aged, her name an unfamiliar shape in their mouths. I wonder if she struggles to remember how to swim, if she finds the cold water a shock to her long-numbed body. I wonder if she ever finds herself thinking that drowning would be a gentler thing than starting over.


§


The timeline begins to bend here, as if under great pressure. The next few years of my life swirl downward in an increasingly violent spiral. Think of shipwrecks. Think of groaning steel, of capsizing, of survivors-turned-flotsam sucked under massive propellers. Think of the icy, silent depths waiting just under the surface.


§


I am cowering, my hands shielding my face from flying chunks of drywall. I am curled, fetal, in the dog’s bed as the man who is now my husband repeatedly kicks through the wall above my head. How did I get here? Maybe I was dragged out of bed by my sleepy ankles. Maybe I bounced off the dresser after he threw me against it. Both happened, at one point or another. The trajectories of my body and other objects flying through space blur together. The dog scratches desperately to get out at a door that’s been ripped off its hinges and replaced. Our house is filling with holes.


§


Fifty years ago, scientists administered electric shocks to dogs in cages. The shocks were inescapable at first, but when the scientists opened the cage door and administered the shock again, the dogs wouldn’t leave to get away from the pain. They stayed in their cages. The scientists called this behavior “learned helplessness,” but researchers only recently realized that the helplessness wasn’t learned. It was an involuntary response. Overcoming the urge to remain in the cage is learned. An open door is not a lesson—we must teach ourselves how to escape.

I left my first boyfriend immediately after he set off for work at the Irish bar. I called a mutual friend to come help me, but he balked, afraid of my boyfriend’s reaction. So, I packed everything I owned into my station wagon and drove to my dad’s house, my black lab riding shotgun.

I left my husband the day after Valentine’s Day by sleeping with my coworker. There were lines I knew that, once crossed, you couldn’t come back from. I didn’t have the courage to leave on my own, so I used a person as a door and stepped into a new life.

In my tiny apartment, alone and safe for the first time in eight years, I sat on the kitchen floor and ate a flank steak with my bare hands, blood and juice dripping down my forearms while Gillian Welch sang “Revelator” on repeat.


§


According to Walker, emotional intelligence is developmentally stunted in fawn types, as well as relational intelligence. This may be true, at least for me, because I couldn’t comprehend anything more nuanced than this: I fully embraced my new role as an adulteress because it put me beyond the pale. Beyond redemption, maybe, but more importantly, beyond reach. This time, there would be no going back.

The first time I went grocery shopping after moving out, I had a panic attack. I was standing, frozen in front of the dairy case because the only thing I could think to buy for myself was orange juice. And I couldn’t remember what kind of orange juice I preferred. My husband preferred no pulp, the kind blended with pineapple—but only if it was on sale. He preferred strawberry jam, Miller Lite by the case, his bananas lightly freckled. My hands tingled and I realized I’d been holding my breath. I set down my empty shopping basket right there on the linoleum and walked out. Back in the safety of my car, I started shaking and had to wait for it to subside before I could drive. I had no idea what was happening to me, so I started shopping at a different grocery store. The shaking never really stopped.

I began to identify as feral. I’d been a tame thing and was now a wild one, like an alley cat or a mustang. It was useful to romanticize the way I often avoided eye contact. The way I’d flinch and freeze, my exaggerated startle response. The way I’d space out, blackout, dip out of social situations without a word.

Teeth and claws became totemic. I was so removed from any capacity to fight that I had to invoke the tools of an animal. I wore a fang in my ear, a dog’s tooth that had been sold to me as a wolf’s. At Mardi Gras, I painted my face into a gaping maw lined with teeth like a bear trap. I tattooed the words bare fang into my skin with a needle and a thimble of ink. These gestures comforted me a little, a blanket of mythos to bundle up in while I snarled and shook and stared.


§


One of the urges behind the Siberian fox experiment was Belyaev’s theory that humans domesticated themselves. While he never undertook the experiments, he hypothesized at length about replicating the fox experiments with chimpanzees. The result, he figured, would be a chimp that is as close to a human as a domesticated fox is to a dog, one in which humanity could see its own evolution mirrored in real-time. “The social environment created by man himself has become for him quite a new ecological milieu,” Belyaev said in a keynote speech at the XV International Genetics Congress in 1984. “Under these conditions, selection required from individuals some new properties: obedience to the requirements and traditions of the society, i.e., self-control in social behavior.” What better way to perform self-control than to self-negate? While I know my fawn response isn’t a genetic trait, looking at it through the lens of the unfinished foxes helps me get closer to forgiving myself for surviving what my mother couldn’t.

Following the friendly foxes, I search through stacks of books on evolutionary biology. I read about bonobos and chimpanzees, foxes and wolves, about how we humans domesticated ourselves by choosing gentler mates. Scientists wonder: if we’ve bred ourselves for cooperation, and violence no longer holds any evolutionary advantage, why do we still have war? The subject of abuse never comes up in these books. They can’t tell me why we inflict violence upon and make captives of the ones we love, nor why it always seems to happen to the same people over and over.


§


It happened to me again a few years later. Of course it did.


§


Wild urban fox populations in the United Kingdom are now showing symptoms of domestication syndrome with shorter, broader muzzles and smaller brains. “What’s really fascinating here is that the foxes are doing this to themselves,” says evolutionary biologist Kevin Parsons, in a 2020 BBC video clip.

I can’t help but think of the shame I’ve felt for abandoning myself, for allowing myself to be treated the way I’ve been. The poisonous secret voice inside that still whispers, you did this to yourself. I can’t help but think of the Fox from The Little Prince crying when the Prince leaves him to return to his Rose:

And when the time to leave was near:

“Ah!” the fox said. “I shall weep.”

“It’s your own fault,” the little prince said. “I never wanted to do you any harm, but you

insisted that I tame you…”

My mother finally found a safe space in my father, a man who would never steal her skin, a man whose every story of my mother features her wildness, her spark. She got away, but she didn’t survive. My father told me that he believed her overdose was an accident. I think that the years of violence just caught up with her and she decided to slip away. I think this because I am her daughter and because I too have been in that place where the pain of the world condenses inside you like the heart of an imploding star.

When does it ever really stop? Sometimes I wake up feeling like I’m half-out of my skin again, defenseless on a strip of exposed sand. The original definition of “cower,” from the Middle Low German kuren, means “to lie in wait.” Sometimes I wonder if all that time I spent cowering I was just lying in wait for my soul to come back to me. Sometimes I wonder if being unfinished means the best is yet to come.


 

An excerpt of this essay was first-place nonfiction winner in the 2024 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards.

 

LINDSEY PHARR lives and writes outside of Asheville, NC. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Longleaf Review, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing an MFA through the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. A full list of publications and honors is on her website www.lindsey-pharr.com and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram @lindsey_a_pharr.


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