Short story: Tigers in Europe

“Local authorities in Germany said Friday that they are ending a search operation for what was previously believed to be a lioness on the loose in the suburbs of Berlin….”
~ CNN, July 21, 2023

Wrote this story for fun last year in 2022, and seems like a great time to share this. It’ll be up for a few days.

Tigers in Europe

My second kill is a clean kill. It is unfortunate but necessary. I watch my victim for some days, listening to the murmur of her unspoken thoughts, the loneliness, the dreary sadness of her unchanging, safe weeks, everything she has been afraid of reaching for, and can no longer have. I listen, and I taste the current of her life of missed opportunities and hesitancies, the sourness of regret.

We are closer than she knows. I walk in her footsteps, on the evening before our last meeting. I see her eyes flickering towards the nature park, and once we both pause to look at the water tower, the rusted carcasses of abandoned locomotives. She is ahead, and she looks around once, rapidly, nervously. But even her sense of threat has been dulled by her immense boredom with the way she has spent her time on our earth.

She does not see me. After the transformation, I resemble your own kind, but you do not understand stillness the way my people do. The value of staying still without effort, of merging into a street, letting yourself become just one blade in a sea of grass.

I allow her to walk past me untroubled. I smell it: the unmistakeable scent of the creature who has given up, who treads the dull pace of their days without curiosity, without yearning, without knowing the electric singing of their own blood.

The next evening, I whisper to her, Come in.

It is late, and the cold makes me wish for a coat of fur. Though for many reasons, it would be unwise for me, even unseemly, to wear the pelt of an animal in your cities.

She shivers, as though she can actually hear the words, however softly I have dropped them into the freezing air.

It is quiet here, and there are only the forests, the trees growing tall and slender among the disused tracks, I whisper once more.
You will find what you long for in this darkness. You will not find it on the well-lit streets, in your tiny apartment where you switch on all the lights, despite the extravagance, to feel less alone when you return from your meaningless job. Come to me.

She does.

* **

When I’m nervous or stressed, I curl my fingers up in a ball, concealing my nails against the palm of my hands.

They are long, slender, curved, sharp.

It happened after the first kill. I changed, from my kind to yours. All of me except for that one part — the fingers, particularly the nails. Nothing that can’t be hidden with the help of a pair of gloves.

But the change took us both by surprise. I was not expecting it. Neither was he.

It’s hard to know precisely what killed him in the final analysis. Perhaps it was the shock. Perhaps. I like to believe it wasn’t. But it troubles me. It is good to have certainty about a kill.

I have learned much about your world in the three months since my form changed. That you swim in an ocean of language. Words pour from your mouths, your screens. Your cities are brightly lit and never silent, but you speak so much and so often, you have forgotten what it is to rest in quietness. The moon’s passage across the skies means nothing to you, carries no messages of comfort or danger. The earth’s speech, its invitations and enchantments, its tremors and its warnings, the whispers of tree roots snaking underneath the surface of your roads and apartments, these are lost to most of you. I have learned that you fear darkness and never seek to explore its many gifts. You can see, hear, feel, speak, but you do not live in your senses. You live like so many leaves in the storm, blown here, blown there.

* **

I am a service provider, to use your language.

I provide a service, a rare and merciful one, to those who are too exhausted to run, whose blood has already grown cold in their veins, who have become too deadened to live.

I can be gentler than you might imagine. I will not say she felt nothing; they always feel something. They catch the scent at such close quarters, and it fills their minds and hearts with terror for that one instant. But I have fine aim, and though my form has changed, my weapons remain sharp and well honed. It does not take long for their eyes to glaze over, for the terror to dwindle, for peace and stillness to enter their souls.

A strange thing. In that sacred moment as the blood spills from her open veins, her neck lolling to one side, she finds the strength to reach up and caress my wide open mouth. I can feel it now, the tentative brush of her fingers rippling over my teeth, her hand grazing the rough skin on my jaw before it drops back, bereft of life.

I take what I need from her. Her bag is a worthy black tote, scuffed and unremarkable. Papers and laminated identity cards are useful. Your kind no longer recognises kin or stranger without a string of the numbers you hold in such high value. I chose her in part because she and I could pass for the same age and our faces look similar. The resemblance ends there.

I take the gift of blood, lapping until her neck is clean, using her handkerchief to scrub my stained mouth. I wrap it around a stone, to throw into the river later. I am not in need of sustenance. It has been easy to steal what I need, because so many in your city live with their senses dulled. But I must finish this kill in the right manner.

I bend to her chest and tear out her heart with my nails. It is warm, bloody, pleasantly heavy. I wrap it in the empty brown paper bag that she used for her sandwiches, and it settles among the crumbs. I place the bag in the inside pocket of my overcoat, her heart against my heart.

It was a good kill. I owe her that much respect.

***

Later that night, I prowl the streets of your city, restless, needing to walk through the dark and through the light. No one stops me, even when I walk through empty streets, past closed museums, the only one of my kind or yours to be pacing through this part of the city in these freezing hours. I stay away from crowds. I stay away from the packed squares and busy nightclubs, the welcoming cafes where your kind presses together, never naming the herd’s fear of being alone.

A nightwatchman picks up my scent as I cross under a bridge. I wait, leaning against a pillar, not really wanting another kill, but holding myself in readiness in case he approaches too close, asks the wrong questions.

His nostrils flare , to my surprise. Most of your kind are not keen enough to smell me. I know that he does, that he is troubled by a carrion scent, the smell of monsoon damp and rotting undergrowth, a forest stink wafting through this cold European city of yours. But he shakes his head, doubting his own senses, and turns in the other direction, away from the bridge, away from the river. He will never mark this hour. He will never think to give thanks for the gift of the rest of his years.

You seldom seem to know when you are spared by life’s sharp fangs; you stumble through the days, ungrateful and unaware of grace.

***

Stranger, you who are reading these words I’ve left behind, I wish you could walk with me, one creature with another, sharing everything we need to share wordlessly, with no necessity for speech. Instead, I write these clumsy sentences on the bank of the river in the notebook I took from her handbag.

I wish I could make you experience — not read or feel or imagine — the freedom of my early years, the boundless and borderless space that was my home. In your cities you live in herds and hives, huddled together, and even the most solitary of you is not at ease in the wilderness. You search instinctively for a fence, a road, a barrier, a border.

We did not live that way. We roamed as far as we wished to, exchanging one wild place for another at will, learning the land, the bends in the rivers, the places where the trees and scrub clustered thick, the grasslands that rolled on and on like endless oceans. We stayed away from your kind, but once, I was careless. Only once.

Once is enough.

Between my shoulder blades, a sudden flame of pain. I feel the skin shrivel and tauten, from some unsuspected wound, but what could possibly have harmed me? It cools and dies down. I dismiss it from my thoughts.


***

I do not like the station. Your kind hurries past me, no one accosts me, but they leave a space around me, as if they fear contagion or something else. They cannot guess what I am, and yet they know. In their deepest, most animal selves, they know.

I do not like the train. I do not like the compartment. I dislike confined spaces. I spent too much precious time held in places too small for me. But I have to leave the city. This confinement is only for a night. I ignore my companions in my row, pretending not to see how they shrink from me, despite my well-cut clothes, my unremarkable handbag, the shoes I carefully stole from a hotel boutique, the delicate jewellery suited to a woman of my height and age, the efforts I make to blend in.

I am not their kind. They know it, no matter how I try to adapt to my changed form. They are uneasy that we must share this intimate space, however briefly.

I look away from them, out of the window, sensing their relief. A gaze takes up space, too. If they don’t have to meet mine, they have that much more room.

***

Some men believe that if they beat you enough, you will remain beaten. They believe this because it is so often true. When your kind has chanced upon my sort, they believe three things: that we will kill them if we can, that they cannot leave us alone, that they must kill or cage us.

Two of these beliefs are ill founded. The third belief kept me caged for years.

The couple in my row have asked the conductor if they can change seats. He points to two empty seats, further up the train. His face is impassive. Across the aisle, a young man, barely in his twenties, says loudly, “I am sorry that so many in our country are still so backward in their thought.”

I give him a brief smile. 

“I don’t mind,” I say. “I like the extra room.”

He seems startled to hear me address the situation directly, and turns back to his glowing screen, his youthful face flushed and warm. Two children in the row of seats next to his crane their heads, staring at me.The couple settle into their new seats. The man does not glance in my direction, but the woman can’t resist a brief backward look. I raise my hand in a genial wave, and she snatches her glance away, contaminated by me after all.

The night falls, friendly and comforting. Instead of gazing out at the passing towns and shrouded, slumbering villages that grow sparser as we leave the city behind, heading towards the border, I close my eyes and slide into sleep.

He appears before me, bloodied but somehow alive. The years recede. I am younger, so much younger that he looms large over me, blotting out the sky and the high, towering clouds, backlit in rose and gold by the setting sun. Once again, I am startled that he does not run from me, taken by surprise when I feel the piercing of my skin, when my limbs grow heavy, once again, I am unable to protest as they shove me into that tiny, foul space. The years pass. The leaden weight of the years, on board ships, in crates, in cages. The years of being passed from hand to hand as the cameras click, exhibited for the pleasure of strangers. The years of being beaten if I showed any fight at all, the years of his vicious, meticulous punishments if a protest, even a snarl, escaped me.

My back is prickling. The pain is fierce. It has spread to my spine. I pass a hand over my neck, and when I feel the bristling hair, I remember an old truth: you change, and change again, and believe each change is permanent.

***

“It smells terrible in here,” the woman says to the train attendant. They glance in my direction.

She has a right to complain. I can’t help it, I want to say. It is part of who I am; I cannot be any different.

But I try to calm my thoughts. When we are distressed, it shows.

I concentrate on steadying my breathing. I don’t look at the young man who came to my defence, but I can sense his dismay. The smell is feral, but subsiding.

The woman pulls out a perfume bottle from her pink purse, and pointedly sprays the air around her and her husband.

“That’s much better,” he says. “The stink…”

They both look at me, triumphantly.

The mother of the two children is chattering about a murder in the city. Wounds so savage, they suspect a wild animal attack. She thinks the children are sleeping, but the boy wakes, delighted: “A wolf! A bear! A tiger! No, a whole streak of tigers…”

The young man leans across. “There are no tigers in all of Europe.”

“But there are!” the boy insists. “I saw one in the zoo, and the zoo is in Europe!”

“But the only tigers we have are all in cages. Locked up in the zoo, and the circus, and in other places, so we are safe from tigers, yes?”

“I suppose so,” the boy says. “Maybe it was a wolf. A big, bad wolf!”

His mother shushes him, and murmuring, lulls him back to sleep.

I must stay awake. The border is only a few hours away.

***

In time, the first man I killed lost his fear of me. He had always mastered his emotions in order to make me do the tricks that brought him everything he wanted, me and the others whose lives he had stolen. But I could feel and taste the metallic prickle of his fear for years, behind the whips and the rest. I grew older, year by cruel year. My memories of home faded. My coat dulled, losing its sheen. My flanks grew slack. My head drooped. If he degraded me, I no longer cared. When he hurt me, I let the wounds fester.

He lost his fear of me. I lost my fear of him.

I raised my head one morning when he came in. He was slow to close the iron door. He did not hear my claws click on the concrete floor.My first swipe took off his ear, but he was alive, despite the gashes across his neck. And then I changed. From my kind to his kind. His eyes widened, and the breath left his body. That kill was messy. He may have died of shock, but I prefer to believe that he bled out.

***

I should not have fallen asleep. It is overpowering, the fetid jungle stench that swells, filling this train carriage. No one is looking in my direction this time. The mother has grabbed both her children, the young man tugs at his suitcase to free it from the overhead rack, and the couple are shouting, “Stop the train! Stop!”

The smell grows in power. Blood and meat, the odour of torn flesh. I look at my paws. The fur has grown on my hands. If I shrugged off my clothes, my back would sport a glorious pelt again, striped in bold orange and black. No one’s eyes are on me. I walk — I prowl — towards the other door. The leap is easy, the landing soft.

I do not know how long it will take to find a forest, to slip unnoticed into the shelter of low mountains where your kind does not venture. I have heard that these lands used to shelter wolves and other creatures. I do not know how many borders I may have to cross, or how risky those crossings might be before I find any sort of home.

But there are tigers in Europe. Not all of them are in cages.

(©Nilanjana S Roy, 2022, please do not reproduce without permission)