from After Peter

His name was Peter David Kelloran, Peter D. Kelloran, as he liked to appear in print, and he was a painter. He died in his bed at the Maitri Hospice in San Francisco at the age of thirty-three on the afternoon of May 10, after he decided he could no longer care for himself in his apartment at the edge of town, where he had lived until then. There was a solar eclipse that day, and his passing occurred during it. He had spoken with his mother that morning on the phone. His dementia had parted enough for him to tell her he loved her. "And then he started to go," his friend Laura Lister says. The room was full of women friends of Peter's and they laid hands on him in a circle. Laura recalls the phone ringing, and she took her hands off him to answer it. "He lunged up off the bed." He went slowly. "I begged him to go, begged him to let go at that point. He needed to go. He wouldn't go, though," Laura says. "And then one of the male volunteers came in and he took Peter's hand in his. You could see the change. Like a light came over him. And he was gone."

from Edinburgh

The Lady Tammamo was a fox who fell in love with a man and took the shape of a woman in order to marry him. Her hair remained red and so she was feared, for at that time in Korea the only people with red hair were said to be demons. She was very beautiful, in the way of fox demons, and her husband loved her. And she loved him.
She bore her husband children, all sons. After some trouble in their village, for which she was blamed, they left and moved to a tiny island between Korea and Japan where they settled and were accepted by the fishermen there, who had seen many things and were not afraid of her. I’ll be safe here, she told her husband. And she was. Rumored to be from Mongolia, she told people, when they asked her where her clan was from, that it was a place where the sky bent the earth.

When her husband died and his family came to burn the body, she stood by him and stoked the fire under him. Her husband’s family watched her, afraid. Would she turn back into a fox, now that her husband was dead, and kill them all? Make their skulls into helmets and hunt the fishermen? She smiled at them, pressed her hand to her husband’s cold face, and stepped up onto the fire, which then rose until the family could not see them. The fox can breathe a fireball, if she likes, and it burned husband and wife both to ashes.

Her children, now without their mother, never learned to be foxes and so her descendants have lived as ordinary men and women since. The village sometimes wondered why Lady Tammamo fled into the fire when fox-demons can live to be hundreds of years old. Some felt they’d been wrong, and that perhaps she hadn’t been a demon after all. The children, seen sometimes selling their fish in the markets, were so beautiful and kind to everyone. You couldn’t see the red in their hair unless the sun shone right on it, and then you’d see it, red threads among the black.

My father tells me the story of her when I find a red hair on his head, growing from his left temple. This is all that remains of her, my father tells me, when he tells me the story. And he pulls the red hair out of his head and hands it to me.

When I show the red hair to my blond mother, she laughs. He always pulls that hair out, she says. I had a red-haired great-grandfather, you know.

My hair is brown. But in my beard, the red threads grow. I shave them. My name is Aphias Zhe. Aphias was the name of a schoolteacher in Scotland five generations back on my mother’s side. Zhe is the name every man in my father’s family has been called by since that first day we fished the sea between Korea and Japan, five hundred years ago. Aphias became Fee in the mouth of my friend Peter, and Fee became Fiji in college. But Fee is the name that stuck, because Peter gave it to me.

This is a fox story, of how a fox can be a boy. And so it is also the story of a fire.