Fairy Tales, Fables, and Ghost Stories [001]

Fox spirit stories are really common in East Asian mythology, and I’m sure this story exists elsewhere in another form, but this particular version of the story I took from the novel Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller.

“…a big fox visits a country school. It is late at night and the students have decided to sleep in the schoolroom because it is too dark to walk home. All but one of the hundred students have fallen asleep when the one awake hears a soft guttural voice counting pairs of shoes outside…all the way to one hundred.

Through the window, the boy sees the snout of a fox, but as it crawls through the window, it takes the shape of a beautiful young woman. The boy thinks he must be dreaming and rubs his eyes. He strains to see in the darkness and notices: the dirt from a newly dug grave lodged under her nails; the blood like lipstick staining her mouth; the glittering of a hunter’s eyes in the night.

The boy crawls away, hiding in a far corner of the room. He watches the fox girl count the students with a kiss that steals their breaths. With each kiss, a boy stops breathing and dies in middream.

When she approaches the corner where the youngest boy is hiding, he creeps back to his sleeping place. Sick with fear, he lies down among the dead bodies of his friends. When the girls reaches the end of the row of students, she growls. ‘Only ninety-nine! There is one missing. How can that be?’

She rushes outside to recount the pairs of shoes. One hundred. She counts again, to be absolutely certain, and all the while the boy inside tries not to move, tries not to breathe. After again finding exactly one hundred pairs of shoes, the fox girl turns toward the door to recount the boys. Just then, a cock crows. The demon drops to all fours and scampers into the nearby woods. The clever boy is saved, the only one out of a hundred to live.”

Tags: fairy tales, fox stories