Consider this: a bald woman breaches the barriers set up by the zoo, by the system of the zoo wherein it is required there be bars in order to prevent just this event.
Consider the tiger: Siberian, asleep, one massive paw resting over bridge of nose to block sun from eyes. Asleep and sun-blocked until the smell of a bald woman breaches his dreams.
The smell of the bald woman: skin, and blood, and disease. Consider that, because the tiger suffers—here, in the zoo, and in the way that any living creature is bound to suffer—he is more keen to the suffering of others. Has grown, surrounded by the sound wolves make for their dead, the ripple of pain that calls the moon. By rhinos, ramming their horns into thick walls of rock, into each other’s creased gray faces. By the sleeping body of his mother, her gruff and pleated snore that rose and fell with no particular rhythm, by which he’d always slept. Until the snow came, and she grew slow, and sleepy, and cold, and stopped licking him behind the ears. And he nudged her with his nose, wanting milk, and she did not wake up, and he tried again, and she remained still, and her tongue hung purple from her mouth, and his throat cramped and began making high, tight, thorny guffs, and they came for her body with cloth and with metal and then she was gone. How quickly her big body disappeared.
The bald woman’s body as she runs toward him is small, and quick.
The tiger’s body, that night in the snow. So heavy. The snow pulling him down, his thick fur coming off in patches. The wolves keened, the monkeys chittered, the people oohed, ahhed, pressed their faces to glass. He waited for someone to bring his mother back. The tiger waited, and waited, and waited.
The bald woman is running. He is still waiting.
Medicine, small hands, needles in his hide, like bee-stings, shooting cold pain through his bones. They thought he was sick. He grew and his sisters were moved into other cages and then he was alone and people brought him meat but all he could taste was blood. The river smelled like blood. The grass. The snow.
He is still waiting.
The undertone of the bald woman’s smell—thick beneath the tiger’s nose—is blood. Blood blood blood. But the bald woman’s blood is new blood, different blood, desperate blood, with its own kind of body, with hands that reach, with bared teeth, flashing. The smells she makes are low, and scratching and the tiger feels them beneath his fur, and his skin, into his bones. They are begging for something. They tug at the tiger. They lick and scratch at him behind the ears, wrapping their hugeness around his jaws and prying them wider.
The tiger. Big body. Big teeth. The tiger also suffers. From grief, and from entrapment, and from hunger. Endless hunger. They toss rabbits into his enclosure, sometimes a deer hide, but it is never enough. He tears through small bodies, spindly legs, and feels emptier than when he started. Hunger snakes through his big, endless belly, and his throat. It makes low tones in his stomach in the dark, where he shivers, and licks his lips, and waits.
He is always waiting.
The bright red of the bald woman’s gown, as she runs, is a flare. It is a warning. It is an invitation. She is so close he can taste the chemicals of her need—sharp and acidic—on his lips. Her blood is so loud and it sparkles and it howls. He is lonesome. He is starving. He has waited, and waited, and waited. Of course. Of course he obliges her.
This thing called the genuine heart of Sadness. Bodhichitta. The bald woman had it. Had studied it, in texts, when she’d needed to. In the small marigold-colored Pema Chödrön book she kept in the bathroom. Bodhichitta. She’d traced the word a hundred times with her fingertip. Soft spot, like after heartbreak. Fontanel of the heart. Thought it would go away when she went away. Thought she might not feel her own organs so acutely in death. Thought they would become a collection of particles, like the rest of her, no different from droplets of water in a river. Thought she would join that river. Thought she could return to herself this way, by leaving herself.
Before all that, when her fontanel heart still pounded, distributing clean blood to working organs, she hadn’t yet become the bald woman. She’d been the mother, and they’d taken her breasts, before they made her bald. First the right, then the left. She’d nearly become the one-breasted woman. Cyclops-tit. They’d all laughed about it around the dinner table. Her daughters snuffling quietly, pretending to think it was as funny as she did. They were too young to be convincing. Better, more earnest copies of herself. Stirred the beef bourguignon on their plates but didn’t eat it. She’d spent all day with The New Essentials of French Cooking, stew pots, pearl onions, meat. Wanted to show them she was still alive, still their mother, still capable of elaborate things. She cracked herself up. She still had all her hair. Wouldn’t need to lose it, yet. It was boring, all of it, really. Nothing new, nothing a million other people hadn’t done before. How dull. How incredibly quotidian was her disease.
Would have cyclopted herself. Begged to keep the one. Covered it tightly with her hand like the doctor might reach out and twist it clean off if she didn’t protect it.
Doctor said if It went in one It stood a good chance to go in the other, that’s just the way. Said it to the mother in her examination gown on a cold metal table. The gown: blue paper, almost the texture of a Japanese lantern. She could have glowed under the right sort of lamp, iridescent which chemicals.
Two to One to Zero. Baby-head heart. She didn’t need the organs; they all felt vestigial.
And then, months later: It danced its blooming, thriving tango straight to the vagina. Hers. Her vagina. Such a coarse, moist word. No one liked to say it, even think it. A word spoke to stun. A million euphemisms. Pussy. Twat. Cunt. Box. Yoni. Punani. Her body was rejecting its womanhood. Squamous Cell Carcinoma. Ridiculous name. Like some secret chapter of a Sorority. The Squamous Cell Carcinomas. A cheerleading team. A softball league. A dance group. Birth canal cells, deciding ten years after she’d finished giving birth to turn their backs. To rebel.
The word they used: “debulked.” They would “debulk” her of the thing widening inside of her, setting up separate meta stations of growth and attack. She’d read that women kept the fetal cells of their children in their bloodstreams for decades. Thought of this often, that when her daughters teen-aged—started twisting away from her towards drugs, sex, as all daughters do, as she did—she’d still get to keep them, as they were. Their cells. In a place no one could reach, not even her.
But, as it happened, there was no part of her unreachable. So, they carved out all her proof. Like pumpkin flesh, they scooped away their healthy cells, their baby cells. Her mothering. Scooped out that word from all their mouths.
Cyborg-vagina. Filling Station. Ha Ha, she joked with her husband, who did not laugh. He’d married a woman, and he would be left with something sexless, shapeless, hairless. Like one of those dogs she’d seen shivering in the park—weird, papery skin, no fur. Ugly, alien. He’d be left to care for her as she grew backwards, into baby state, again. He’d always wanted a third and she’d said no. Difficult pregnancies with the first two. Bed rest for months; hardly carried them to term. Had to trick them into staying put by moving as little as possible. Tedious months lying on a couch. There would be more months on a couch, now. What would be at the end of it this time? Blank. More couch. Nothing.
And, then, soaking up the map of her body like a sponge, it found her cervix. Then, the tubing poised above, flared out to either side like wilting tulips. Then the ovaries. That glut of eggs, gone obsolete. Ping ping ping, like a pinball It flew. She wondered what would make her still a woman. Wondered what that word even meant. Realized she could emerge as anything, after. She didn’t know. Didn’t know what she’d be left with. Felt her Bodhichitta shivering, soft as pudding in her chest.
The bald woman’s body. Confetti shreds of flesh. The tiger licks his chops because they are coated in her and he doesn’t want to lose a single drop. The moment after the bald woman’s body meets his jaws is total stillness. Only a moment, before the screaming begins. Big, hot sun. The pavement shines like metal. Harder than it was before.
The screams are horror screams and they are big and wet and he hears them at the back of his ears. But he is so busy, licking and eating and shredding, trying to reach the center of her, to make sure she is not wasted.
Children, he thinks, scream worse than the hyenas, who keep him awake at night for no good reason and leave him anxious, pawing the earth until he tires himself out. The screaming surrounds the tiger and he doesn’t want it and a barbed roar leaves his throat, and then another one. It feels good to speak so clearly. It feels good to shake flesh from bone while the people back away, shoes covered in the bald woman’s blood. He likes the new looks on their faces, because it means they are finally watching him, and his tiger danger, and his tiger anger, and his tiger pleasure, and the blood in the snow, and the blood in his mouth. Before, they had seen only the stories they’d told themselves: that his cage made them safe from him. That he was trapped. That he was fixed in place, eating their food and drinking from the streams they’d built him, and that these things kept the tiger safe, too. But the tiger has known a long time that no one is safe from anything. And now, they all know it, together.
Think of the body: a messenger. Not to be blamed. The tiger’s body is a home he’s never fully lived in. A home that always felt too big for his own desire, that he never properly grew into. His sisters, he heard, were sold to another place, far away. They’d separated them early because they’d been afraid of what he’d do. After they’d taken his mother, his head felt like it was trapped, permanently, in a cone. His eyes went wiggly and dark, his vision tunneled. He hurt his sister, once. He did. She’d lost an eye, because of him. But it was only because he couldn’t see where he was going or what he was doing. Everything was blurred and dangerous, and when she nibbled him one day, playful at the back of the neck, he’d snarled and swiped. He saw the blood on his sister’s cheek, mottling her whiskers, and it made him think of the snow, and how he longed for it. It was the last time he’d seen his mother’s body. The grass soaked up his sister’s blood, but the snow would have held it on display, like rubies. Before the moon came up, big men in big rubber suits with shields and pistols took his sisters and he was alone, with the hyena cries and the hot dirt.
No one had ever really seen the tiger. They’d seen his bigness and his sharpness, and they’d missed everything else. But with the bald woman’s flesh in his mouth, he is a portal, an entryway, an entire universe beyond fur, and concrete, and children with chocolate smeared across their lips. His jaws become curtains into another room. Diaphanous swaths of fabric, and the body. The body, of course, goes missing. The body always goes missing, the body, the cage, the body. The tiger’s ribs swell to accommodate the bald woman’s body in his body, so he and the bald woman are stacked, held inside each other.
He wonders if there is any part of her still aware. He wonders what his body feels like to die inside of, and how long it will take to digest her, and how long he will get to keep her inside of him before she is something new again. The tiger feels safe with the bald woman’s death inside of him; he feels alive. He feels, for once, important.
She is mostly bone. The wide of her armspan. The center of her chest glowing like moon-snow, making every frozen thing glitter. He is still the tiger, but with the bald woman inside of him, he knows everything now. Everything she knew. This is what it means to digest her. He wonders if he will be rewarded, somehow, for helping her escape. Extra deer hides. A wider river, full of fattier fish. He licks his paws and puffs his chest and shakes blood from his whiskers. His heart ticks, ticks, ticks in his ribcage.
Alarms roaring. Men. Rubber suits. Gleam of metal. The sun is so hot on his back. Maybe they are coming to return to him all that they have taken.
The gog-eyed visitors crowd his cage, mouths agape. They are waiting to see the fortune of their lives in relief. They are waiting for what happens next.
The bald-woman-mother is stunned by memories, here, in the River. The River is the only way she can think to describe what it is that surrounds her. And perhaps—the mother considers—this is how it feels to be in the womb, too. Awash in amniotic fluid, drinking and eating and pissing and shitting by dint of who-knows-where, because it’s everywhere. Because you are cradled by everything. And it’s calm. And you’re undisturbed by wondering, or by needing, or by asking for more. There is nothing more to ask for.
The mother is scattered in the great flow of it all, but feels her body sometimes, whole, like one giant phantom limb. None of it quite makes sense. The rest of the time—when she is unaware—is almost like sleeping. Like a painting made by a child in therapy—great islands of dislocated color, surrounded by white.
She remembers her daughters sleeping, as infants. Her first, always, pressed into one corner of her crib, thumb in mouth, face almost pained. Her baby the total opposite. Slept directly in the center of the crib, laid out like a corpse. Hands folded over her chest. Always, somehow, on display. Ready to be viewed in some preserved version of perfection. Sometimes, the mother would pad into the neighbor’s garden in dark middle-of-night to pull a fat blood-red rhododendron from their fastidious patch, stick it lightly between her sleeping daughter’s hands for her husband to find when he checked each night, nearing morning, but still too dark to earn that name. He’d always slip back in bed amazed. Another one! he’d whisper, pulling her tight to him at the waist, breathing his sleep breath into her neck. We don’t even grow those whatever-you-call-‘ems!
He was always ready to be amazed. Ready for the miraculous. Would press articles into her papery hands—stories of women who’d “beat” it, like it was a sporting event they’d signed up for, trained months to compete in. She read the articles, and felt small, and tired. She’d never been good at sports.
And after years on hiatus, after her body had already begun to devour itself, she returned to her little dalliance with the flowers. She missed it—that time, the ease with which her body used to move. Started creeping again, barefoot, into the dirt of the neighbor’s garden with her shears. Returning with her hands full. Even when moving around in her own skeleton felt like being stabbed, she did it. She was still alive. It was the most living thing she could think to do. A ghost, she reasoned, could linger and hover, but not touch, not grab, not uproot a beautiful thing, laced so resolutely to the earth. The neighbors saw what she was doing, but they never asked her to stop. Knew she wouldn’t be thieving off them much longer.
Back at home, taking small, careful steps, she tracked dirt across the tile floor of the kitchen, as she used to do. Still wanted to leave a trail—to see that her body could move, and drag, and track something, anything, across space. It was worth it, climbing the stairs, pausing at each one for more breath. Worth it to kiss her daughters again as they slept—teenagers now, their dreams thick, impermeable cauls, impossible to penetrate. Worth it, to kiss them on each cheek, on their foreheads, sticky with hairspray or gel or a misplaced rim of Manic Panic. Worth it, to catch her breath, nestled against the warmth of her husband’s hale, hairy, muscular back, how it dipped into two clefts just above his bottom, beckoning her like curved fingers to nibble him there. The delight of his flesh. His solidity. His aliveness. And then, his face, after he woke and found his daughters, blooming again after so many years. He never stopped checking on them in the night; always had to know they still breathed.
She’d never told him. Never. Until days before the Event at the zoo, with the tiger. In bed. He’d wept into her neck. Said he always knew it’d been her, with the rhododendrons. Said he wished she’d never told him. He’d liked it better, them agreeing on some magic they both knew wasn’t magic at all. But, no. In fact, it had been magic—those nights so long ago, and more recent—sometimes terrible and hard, the not sleeping and the swollen leaking breasts and the weird hormonal fugue. But wildly thrilling all the same. That same thing pretty much everyone in the world does at some point. It didn’t matter. It was theirs. It belonged to no one else, could be defined by no one else and in no other moment but those moments. Waking and sleeping and dreaming and breathing and eating and doing the normal things normal humans do in the space of their own completely magical air.
Blood, ricocheting through the air, through the slats in the cage, splatting onto the faces of children and their parents and everyone else who didn’t-see-it-coming.
It is not the tiger’s fault, but he knows her daughters will blame him. They will blame the bald woman for her selfishness. For her disease. They will comment on the suffering she has caused—on the blood drained from their faces the moment they returned from the snack bar, giggling and full of hot dog, to discover their mother’s bones, stripped of flesh, and the tiger, licking blood from his paws. They will always blame the tiger. They will not know to blame the power plant near the bald woman’s hometown that shot poison in gauzy spumes into the air throughout her childhood. They will forget to blame the bad water coming from the faucets or the influx of nuclear waste just over the state line. They won’t think of the laws in their state barring her from a quiet death—why would they? They will blame the tiger because the tiger has big teeth and big hunger. Because the tiger cannot defend himself. Because the tiger is easy target.
The sun is huge against his back. A mammoth eye, shooting beams of heat-light into his eyes, into the thickest parts of his fur. He was almost blinded as she slid through the bars of his cage. She’d looked more alien than human. She asked him to take her apart, and he did, and it was simple. Everyone watched, and then they came closer. The tiger was giving everyone a story to tell the rest of their lives. They wanted the best view. He wanted the meat. He wanted to be full of her.
How quickly she disappeared in his mouth. How nicely her bones, cleaned of flesh, clicked against his teeth. How he sat, licking his massive paws, after, and how good it felt to be full, and clean. How they forgot he was an animal. Part of a tribe, from which he’d been long separated, by death, by sale. How they forgot she was. Fair game. How they’d never considered that she’d had a life, so many moments before this moment. Had hair, and parents, and a past trailed behind her, all of which she collected in her arms like field daisies as she ran toward him and asked him to return it all to her, whole, and he said yes, yes, yes.
Different memories, older memories. Her stint as a topless dancer, when she dropped out of college. Nineteen. Her hair, dyed flame-red. The trick she’d do with her tongue and the stems of maraschino cherries. Where she got her nickname. Grenadine. Swinging her glittering tassel-tits in the faces of men, crowded around tables or pressed up against the padded bar before the stage. She hadn’t been great at it. Could never quite get enough velocity to her swing. The other women treated her like a little sister. Loved her. Braided her hair as she sunk into their laps after a shift. 2 a.m. and drunk on loose bills, wadded into their purses. She was tiny and clumsy. Kept the job six months because she couldn’t bear to leave these women. It was an old joint, out in the suburbs—the other dancers were mature women. Had children. Had loose bellies and tired breasts, kind eyes. Great at their jobs, though. Loved those men up, let them press their old hairy noses right into the center of their tasseled titties and just dig on in.
She was a kid to them. Another baby. Playing dress-up. Never asked her why she was there and not somewhere else, somewhere with younger girls and stockbrokers as clientele. She was where she was meant to be. Landed there because she’d been there, as a kid, with her own old man.
Her dad. He used to plant her at a table in the front section of the building, where there was a restaurant, with a box of crayons and a legal pad. Everything doused in grease, even the tablecloth. Waxy. Warm. Wood paneling on the walls and lamps with pull chains on every table. Paintings of moose and other forest animals everywhere. Bric-a-brac and nick-nacks, clutter. Almost seemed like the kind of place you were meant to bring kids.
He thought she’d be too young to know what was going on. Five years old. Said, Don’t leave this table, Shnoogie, ya’hear? A million nicknames. He already had a whiskey in his hand, ice-clinking. Had his leather jacket on. She’d loved the way it smelled. Spicy and raw. Got her own leather jacket as soon as she could afford it. Started drinking whiskey as a teenager and stuck with it, too. Worshiped her dad. Thought him the bee’s knees. He was. He’d kissed her forehead, said: I’ve just got to do a thing, Little Bee. Back before you can say Mississippi a thousand times.
It was the last thing she heard, singing through her ears, before she slipped herself between the slats of the tiger’s cage and began to run. She was running toward her father’s voice. Whiskey and leather and hunger and big arms and steak in a cast iron pan, hollandaise, wax and pomade, dark rooms, baseball statistics in neat ballpoint, butter-yellow legal pads. Back in time. Toward wall lamps and pull chains and moose heads and leather and healthy body. Back before you can say Mississippi a thousand times. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississippi. Mississi
The tiger remembers everything about these next moments. He knows he will die because this is part of the order of things, because he has followed his own animal order, because this is how disorder works.
He has swallowed most of the bald woman’s flesh when the shot is fired from a distance he can’t measure, because bullets exchange distance for speed, and everything is slow now, and so quiet, and because he’s still engaged in his meal. An act of grace no one can tabulate.
And time—like she does—stretches, stretches, holds him in her mouth as he holds the bald woman in his belly, her bones at his feet, as he waits for that oblong bite of steel to spiral through the air and graze his ear, and then another one, and another one, until the one that comes and pulls the sun from his fur, the solidness of his flesh from the ether.
When she was born, and introduced to light for the first time.
His mother’s long tongue between his ears.
The blur of her mother’s breast.
When she lay in her crib, watching soft things sway above her, curtains rise and fall, golden light peeling in and dissolving, later, into a deep, hazy blue. Her babyhood swaddled around her head.
His sisters as they watched him emerge into light and wet earth, deciding what to do: kill him or keep him. They kept him. They let him live.
The family dog, spotted and long-furred, licking at her cheek. They put him down at the end of summer. He was too old for joy but he still attempted it. It made them sad to look at him.
Before she was born: her parents. Whiskey, beads of ice, a dive bar outside of the big city. Her mother’s hair, frizzy enough to resemble a halo in the neon of a Coors sign. Her father, hulking and soft-eyed. Both of them weak-kneed and dead-broke and drunk.
Gunpowder making clouds and hot shouts above his mother’s head.
Her father’s truck, parked by the river. Soft backseat, cracked leather, a tuft of stuffing peaked out.
A tundra. Snow and blue and cold. His mother’s eyes, flashing as they grabbed her. A net.
Summer bugs, making their frantic noises. Cattails dipping their heads low. The cracking of metal, gunshot, fireworks making glitter in the sky.
A sharp thing whizzing into the wet dark, embedding itself.
In his mother’s belly, he grew eyelids and fur.
And there she was, the very first moment of her, before she was anything. Just a collection of cells, uncertain yet if they would stick.
A low hum, a snap, everything shifting, the taste of milk at the back of his throat. Everything gold. Everything tumbling. The tiger—a drop in the ocean. The whole ocean. Salt-buckled blue.
He misses the ground. He misses sleep. The bald woman rides his back, hair down to her ankles.
A glittering curtain. A flash of breasts. A man’s voice, hollering. A tinkling sound. His paws, so tender. Everything lit up.
The bald woman and the tiger: knitted together.
The rushing ocean, a billion tiny droplets. Borderless. Full.
Kate Weinberg
Author
Kate Weinberg was born and raised in Baltimore, MD, and currently lives in Austin, TX. Her story, “Goating”, was published in Copper Nickel’s Spring 2022 issue, and she is recipient of a 2021 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, as well as fellowships at the Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her MFA in fiction at UC Riverside in 2019. You can find links to other published work and illustrations on her website.