Dale saw the fox in the ditch and thought about his rent.

The fox was golden, caught in an iron jaw, leg bleeding into the mud. Dale was forty-one and his truck had been repossessed three weeks ago and his ex-wife had the kids on weekends and he paid child support when he had money which was often not. He stood in the parking lot of a shuttered Walmart and looked at the fox and looked at his beer and thought about the three weeks of late rent and the transmission on his Uber car that was making a noise like a dying cat.

He got out of the car anyway.

He pried the trap open with a rock. The fox pulled its leg free and limped into the woods. Dale got back in his car and drank his beer in the parking lot and the beer was warm and the Walmart was dark and nothing had changed.

Two weeks later, a guy in a yellow raincoat showed up at the gas station where Dale sometimes hung out.

You got any beans? the guy asked.

Dale said no.

I will give you beans, the guy said. Big ones. The kind you have never seen. If you give me a bag of flour every morning at dawn.

Dale thought it was a scam. But the guy handed him a sack of beans first. They were enormous, creamy white, and heavy. Dale took them to the farmers market on Saturday. A woman in a green hat offered him twenty dollars for a pound. Normal beans are two dollars a pound.

Dale said yes to the deal.

Every morning at five, he met the yellow raincoat guy. He gave a bag of flour. He got a sack of beans. He sold the beans. He made money. He paid his rent. He fixed the transmission on his truck.

For eight months, it worked.

Then the yellow raincoat guy stopped showing up.

Dale waited at the gas station for a week. Then two. Then he stopped going.

His beans ran out. He tried to grow his own from the last sack, but the seeds did not sprout. They were probably GMO, sterile or something. He took the remaining beans to the market anyway. The green-hat woman looked at them and said: They are too sweet. Nobody wants them anymore.

Dale's truck got repossessed. He went back to the gas station, but the yellow raincoat guy was gone. Nobody there remembered him. The attendant said there had never been a guy in a yellow raincoat. Dale looked at him for a long time and decided not to argue.

Dale sat in his kitchen with a bag of beans that were now going bad. They smelled like sugar and rot. He thought about the fox. He wondered if saving it was a good idea. Then he decided it did not matter. It did not matter what he did or did not do. The fox was gone. The beans were rotting. The truck was gone. The rent was still late.

He threw the beans in the trash. He drank a beer. The beer was warm.

He heard a fox's cry from outside. He did not go to look.

OTMES-v2-E1F6A7-039-M3-270-3R42I-V5C5 E_total: 3.9 | Dominant: M3_Satire | θ: 270° | Rank: 3 | Irreversibility: 0.50 | Innocence: 0.50