Rain pelted the side of the apartment building like meteorites crashing into the moon. Brigid had never seen anything like it as she stood gawking at the bubbling mass of dark clouds that had smothered the sky in a thick blanket nearly two weeks ago.
Now. Well, it looked as if hell had sneezed, and Brickehdge the windshield that took the battering.
The first week in Brickhedge had all the usual excitement one could expect from moving to a new place. Meeting fun new people—and some not so fun, as Brigid explored her new home. The weather promised fun, spring-like temperatures, and sunshine to get out and stroll the town.
Then the fucking moisture system stalled out over the state.
When it began to sprinkle during their third trip to the local coffee shop that week, Brigid had overheard the discussion between two bovines at the counter. ‘April Showers,’ they had called it. They laughed and prodded each other like old friends, the sort of female companionship Brigid lacked in her life.
Oh sure, Eligh was close enough. They’d flirt with hot guys, then dish on them that evening. The big gay bear tried his best, but she felt even he knew he was not a solid replacement for actual female friends.
She shook her head at the path her thoughts had taken her down. This was a mental bitchfest about the weather, not her lack of friends. Get it back on the road, Brigs.
Two weeks. Two solid goddamned. Weeks of nonstop rainfall.
“April showers, my freckled ass!” She said, only to hear her voice bounce off the bare walls of the lonely apartment. Eligh had long since gone to work that morning, leaving her to bitch and complain to an audience of zilch.
The first few days, she’d found ways to kill time, namely unpacking everything in her new room. Unboxing and washing clothes, then folding them and putting them away neatly afterwards while her favorite Wolf Alice album played on constant repeat.
Today was the day she had to mentally sure herself up for, for today was the day she was to tackle her underwear box.
She decided it’d finally come time to cull the shit she’d amassed over the years. Hell, her first training bra was still hanging about, and she had outgrown that within months of buying it.
Foxes simply didn’t own bras, or sexy panties, for that matter. Their bodies didn’t develop like other beasts; they lacked curves and really shapes of any kind. They lacked body fat in general; it was genetic across every fox species—thin, pencil-like bodies. No breasts. No ass. Straight and narrow in profile. Evolution had done nothing to serve the species in the modern day, either.
Brigid, however, was an extremely rare exception.
Still standing in her room, glancing outside as rain pelted the window pane in a constant pitter-patter, the fox wore nothing but a black pair of shorts and a sports bra.
Finally she turned her attention to the full-sized antique mirror her grandmother had given her decades ago. Grammy had no idea how useful the gift had ended up becoming.
A box marked “undies” sat before the mirror, still taped up from the move. Brigid had worked on convincing herself from the very second the move had been set in stone that certain pieces of fabric in that box would be tossed out as she began her new life.
Nearly three weeks later, the box still remained sealed.
Dragging her black claw across the sealed slit, the box popped free with a burst of floral-scented air. Everything here had been washed prior to being packed.
Prying the top apart, the very first thing she saw was the training bra her mother and sisters helped her pick out. The day flashed back before her eyes in a rapid series of inaudible scenes.
She was thirteen when she first started developing breasts. Her older sisters had caught sight of the growths pressing against her shirt one day and immediately began theorizing that Brigid had cancer—that the growths were actually tumors. Brigid herself had thought nothing of the changes in her body at the time, but the fear of having cancer certainly scared her—the memories of what had taken Pop-Pop from her and the family still fresh in her young mind.
One visit to the family doctor later, it was confirmed to Brigid that she was developing in ways that foxes simply weren’t known to do. Not her mother or her mother before her. Not her two sisters, or even the receptionist outside, who was a big-eared Fennec.
Brigid chuckled to herself, recalling how she’d asked her doctor—a large-chested poodle—if she was “going to grow big boobs like that.” The doctor burst into a fit of laughter while concern flashed across her parents’ faces. A pair of red foxes that, if not for their radically different hairstyles and color, one would have trouble telling the two apart if they were to turn their back on you.
Opening the black trash bag beside her, she tossed the training bra into it without a second glance. Next was her first real bra. She’d developed rapidly between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, resulting in multiple trips to Wal-Mart and Kohl’s over the years for new underwear.
She’d been confused once for a “midget wolf” right before her nineteenth birthday, thanks in in part to her now pronounced hips—cutting a wholly unique figure for a fox—and her breasts, which had grown to the point that she was about to cross over into the D-cup bra range.
As she rummaged through the vast collection of underwear, her snooping brought her face to face with bitter memory after memory of exes long passed. Granted, there’d not been too many. Enough to count on a single hand, and probably no more than two of them actually saw what was in the box.
But still.
Brigid was very sentimental. When a new relationship formed, one that felt had the sticking power, she’d go out and buy or order a new bra for the occasion. She’d pick the brain of her new boyfriend, trying to figure out what he’d like to see once the shirt came off… Besides the obvious.
She loved the idea of having a bra that was bought for her special guy—that only he would ever get to see; that it’d be their special thing, or one of them at least.
Only one of her relationships ever got far enough that the bra would actually be seen. The others had shown their true colors long before it got far enough along. Most made it clear that they couldn’t stand how slow Brigid was taking things.
By the fifth break-up, all she could do was shrug and flip them off.
She sighed, “Bunch of fucking garbage memories in this box.”
By the end of the venture, only two of the newest matching bra and underwear sets were left, the rest tossed into the trash—bad memories and a whole lot of misspent money, all in the garbage where it belonged.
The wind died off some as the rainfall intensified. Letting rip the loudest rumble of thunder the fox had ever heard. She groaned, agitated, her growl almost as loud as the thunder itself. She just wanted to go out and explore! Surely it wasn’t always like this up here?
The screen on her phone lit up. A picture of Eligh with a lampshade on his head that she’d taken at their first New Year’s Eve party together showed her who the caller was.
“’Y’ello?”
“Brigid, hi. How are you holding up over there, girl?” Eligh answered, his normally deep, gravelly voice sounding tinny through the phone’s speakers.
“Fine, I guess. I’m just finishing up the last of my unpacking. How about you?”
“Settling in. I got my office up and running, finally. You should come by later and check it out.” He replied. The sound of the chair and the monster leather it was made of groaning under his bulk.
“Yeah, I’ll swim right on over, Eligh. Good idea.” Her voice coated with more sarcasm than she’d intended. Oh well.
“Eh? You should take a look outside, Brigs. Look towards Town Hall, girl.”
“The fuck you talking about? Didn’t you just hear—“She pulled back the curtain that concealed the window behind her bed and revealed, to her astonishment, a rapidly clearing sky! Bright blue eating away at the drab grey that had become eighty-percent of the identity of this town for her. “No fucking way!”
The last rumble of thunder had been the long-lasting storm’s final death howl as the stalled tropical moisture system finally made way for an approaching cold front from the north.
“Now, will you please come and visit my office? Here, old on—“ Then, several seconds of silence and a CashApp notification later, “There, bring us some coffee. We’ll hang out for a bit. I want to introduce you to everyone here.”
“Be right there!”
No comments:
Post a Comment