by Idris Grey
On otherness and the search for belonging.
The first time the tiger found her, Holly was utterly unprepared. It announced its arrival with a roar that made her blood run cold, her heart hammering in her chest as she turned to face it. Despite the many years she’d waited– despite her ever-expanding doubts– it was here. It had finally come for her.
“Took you long enough,” she managed, painfully aware of the strain in her voice. English, she was speaking English, but it was the only language she knew, and… and the tiger would understand (probably) (she hoped). It kept its body low as it stalked forward, seemingly undeterred, each delicate footstep winding her nerves even tighter.
“So, you’ve… brought me something, right? A gift, from my mom’s legacy?”
Its jaw slackened, watching her every move with glowing eyes, a low rumble in its throat.
Holly faltered. “My mom said you brought her a sword. A sword would be nice. Or a ring, or. Or anything, really. I’m not picky. But you’re supposed to have something, and–.” She swallowed. “… you’re definitely not supposed to kill me.”
The tiger bared its teeth, drawing her attention to its snarl. There was no gift; and if it wasn’t here to accept her into the family, then why was it here? What did it want from her?
It was close enough to pounce now. She tried not to think about how she must look, pale and ignorant, with her distinct lack of tiger-words. She tried not to think about how it would feel to be torn apart by its claws, skin peeled away by its sandpaper tongue. She tried. But its stare pierced straight through her.
“It’s just a dream,” she whispered, as its vicious grin widened in anticipation. “You don’t need to run.”
She ran nonetheless.
She had known about the tiger for as long as she could remember. Ti-girl, they called her, splaying their fingers over their cheeks like whiskers and snickering. The boldest among them asked what it was like, coming from a tiger family, but she never knew how to answer. She didn’t feel like a tiger; she barely knew anything about them. Her mother was the only true tiger of the family, marrying into a western bloodline and passing her genes to her child. They had always lived in the West, far from the jungles that the cats called home.
They’d visited the jungle once or twice, when Holly was young. The tiger family was pleasant enough, but it was clear that she didn’t belong among them, with their dark-striped skin and foreign tongues. Sometimes they would crowd around her, staring, and her mother would ask gently, “Have you seen the tiger?”
“That’s okay,” she reassured her daughter each time, “it’s not important. You still belong.” It was true, if belonging meant hovering in a corner on the outside of their conversations, a stranger in a land that the western world insisted she was a part of. Sometimes her mother would talk about the dream, and the gift the tiger would bring when she was ready, but the years passed, and the tiger didn’t come. For a while, that was a relief. She didn’t want to be called ti-girl, she wanted to fit in, and some part of her hoped that the tiger’s absence would convince her peers that she belonged among them.
Time crushed that hope into resigned acceptance. It didn’t matter that the tiger had forgotten her; no one cared that she had lived among them, tiger-less, from the time she was born. All the West saw when it looked at her was a tiger, dream or no dream. But when she had long accepted that she would never see the tiger, it began haunting her.
“Holly? Are you still there?”
She hadn’t realized she was dozing off until her mom’s voice pulled her back into wakefulness. “Yeah. Sorry. What were you saying?”
The motherly scorn radiating from the phone was palpable. “Have you been staying up late again?”
“Not… exactly. I’ve just been…” Jolted awake every few hours by the tiger– clearly unworthy of the family legacy– a disappointment to her mother– “… having trouble sleeping.” The dreams were getting worse. The question dangling on the tip of her tongue slipped out before she could bite it back. “Um… so, you know the tiger dreams you used to tell stories about? I was wondering– no one’s ever been, like… mauled in their dream, have they?”
“Eh? Of course not! Nothing is more important to a tiger than their family, and the tiger is our family– we would never turn on each other like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely! I hope you’re not worrying about this again. You are a tiger woman, whether you have the dream or not.”
Holly had her doubts.
The tiger had become part of her nightly routine. She would sleep; and when she slept, she dreamt; and when she dreamt, the tiger tracked her. Terrifying though it was, the more you studied a monster, the less power it held over you. Routines were familiar, and familiarity stifled fear. Each night she focused on her mother’s certainty as she drifted off to sleep, reciting her words like a mantra to summon lost courage. Eventually, it worked.
That night, the tiger came for her like it always did. Its presence seared the back of her neck until she met its gaze, the rest of her dream blurring to insignificance in its looming shadow. There, its massive paws; there, its swaying tail; there, its lips pulled back to reveal its teeth. Except this time, with clenched, shaking hands, she stood her ground, even as it loped lazily towards her. Each deliberate footfall marked a syllable of her prayer: It. Won’t. Hurt. You. It. Won’t. Hurt. You. She knew she was dreaming, and she remembered what her mother said, but her muscles twitched with fight or flight all the same. It. WON’T. Hurt. You. Don’t. Run. Don’t! Run!
“You won’t hurt me,” she stammered as it came within striking distance, “because you… y-you’re family.”
The tiger stopped.
It considered her for what felt like an eternity through its blazing, unknowable eyes, watching with intent. They were closer now than they had ever been, but the fatal rejection she had feared never came.
The moment stretched. The tiger exhaled. Eventually Holly did too, releasing a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. The beast didn’t budge. It seemed her mother was right: the tiger wasn’t here to harm her.
“Am I–” her voice splintered in her throat. She swallowed the shrapnel, swiping at her eyes with the back of her hand, and tried again. “Is it true? Am I really…?”
This time, it was the voice in the back of her head that stopped her. This was too good to be true. It had to be. The absence of rejection wasn’t acceptance, and the tiger bore no gift. It was her fault. She had once prayed that the tiger would forget her; how could she expect it to welcome her after she had hidden from it for so long, after she had fled when it finally found her?
She awakened with tears in her eyes, and a knot in her chest.
Holly spent the day telling herself she could accept being doomed to exist in the sliver between her family and the rest of the world. The tiger had made its point– she was seen, not accepted. It was done, and it hurt, but she would stuff the wound with time until it stopped aching. She could learn to stomach it if the tiger stopped stalking her. But when sleep came, her stubborn trespasser was close behind.
“It’s just a dream,” she whispered, as the tiger marched closer. “You’re just a dream!”
The tiger stopped just as it had before, close enough to touch. Not simply a dream, but her dream; without her, it wouldn’t exist. What if it wasn’t just a family tradition, but a piece of her subconscious making itself known? That thought gave strength to the trembling hand she reached towards its massive head, closing the distance a hair at a time.
Part of her still feared the tiger, but it remained motionless in front of her, radiating warmth. Its head was solid beneath her touch, its fur rough and familiar. She splayed her fingers over its cheek, combing through its whiskers, realizing that she was right. “My tiger. My dream. This whole time I’ve been asking what you wanted from me, when I should have been asking what I want from you.”
The tiger’s mouth hung open as always, its gleaming fangs exposed. Holly knelt beside it, her fingertips still tangled in the scruff of its cheek.
She thought of standing uncomfortably with the tiger-family, a washed-out ghost in a sea of stripes.
She thought of their eyes on her, and the meager handful of broken sentences she could offer them.
She thought of the dissonance between her mother’s words and what she felt, an outsider in both worlds.
But most of all, she thought of the gift that she was too scared to ask for.
There was a rumble in the tiger’s throat, soft and low, as its teeth parted. She stared into its cavernous maw, past rows of lethal enamel, and dreamt that she saw something waiting for her.
Holly closed her eyes; took a deep breath; and reached.