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We are never sure, when we run into them, if they are the original or the copy.
Eventually, we stop wondering.
II. THE TIGER
In the middle of July, a white Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows rolls down Broad Street. Talk gets around town. By the time the classic car comes to a stop in front of Margot Algada’s house, her neighbors know just who to call with a report.
“Well...” they say, and then trail into silence.
“Well what?” we ask. “Who is it?”
But this turns out to be a complicated question. On- lookers who get a glance before the tiger disappears into Margot’s house agree on only a few basic facts: Male. Six feet tall. Tiger.
“Tiger?” “Oh yes.”
Here, the accounts divert. One neighbor claims he looks like some kind of Sherlockian detective, with a long trench coat and top hat. “I wonder what Margot did,” we muse. Then another neighbor describes the tiger as a hippie type, with flowers in his fur and
a tie-dye shirt. “Some boy she met on the internet, come to whisk her away,” we project. A third neigh- bor is sure he is a magician, which stumps us for a while until we remember Margot has a July birthday.
We must see this tiger man for ourselves, we decide. We congregate.
To make the group look natural, Sherry Atwood, Mar- got’s neighbor across the street, throws a barbecue on her front lawn. We dress up for the occasion in floral dresses and straw hats, and Sherry opens a few bottles of white wine to serve in plastic glasses. She doesn’t actually have a grill, or food, so we get drunk pretty quickly. “Don’t stare,” we remind each other. “Let’s take turns.” Then one of us pretends to talk and the other looks over her shoulder. Switch. Switch.
Hours pass this way.
Finally, when the sun starts to go down and the bugs bite our exposed ankles, the tiger emerges. He is not a detective, or a hippie, or a magician. He is a regular old tiger, wearing dad jeans and a loose polo shirt. He
has gray streaks in his hair. He gives us a quick and curious glance and then drives away in the Lincoln, accompanied by soft rock at a reasonable volume.
Desperate for the scoop, we march over to Margot’s house and knock on the door. Maybe the tiger is her father. Maybe the tiger came to fix the dryer.
But Margot can’t answer, because she’s dead.
IV. THE TAIL
By August, the unexpected is expected. Our lost loved ones become names on headstones, and then nothing at all.
Most of us cope well.
There are outliers, of course. Marge, who can’t get out of bed without her husband there to serve her break- fast. Ricky with the missing leg, who drinks outside the west side gas station. And little Bobby Bacon, who loses his mother and father to the shower murders
of August 14th. They were never very good parents, letting Bobby wander wherever the wind took him, we remind each other. Maybe if they’d spent more time watching their son and less time in the shower, they wouldn’t have gotten killed.
We are kind people, so we take turns keeping Bobby in our basements and give him plenty of space. Eventually, however, he turns feral as a stray cat
and makes his home in a hollow tree. When Agatha McMullin loses her kite to its branches, she and her parents are too scared of the face in the crevice to retrieve it.
That evening right before sundown, reports circle of a flying object. We take to our lawn chairs, as we have done several times since the start of what we are now calling Crow Summer, and wait. Sure enough, there is the strange object—a pink mermaid with an undulat- ing tail—and little Bobby Bacon riding on its back.
“Good for him, getting out of here,” we say. But we don’t mean it—not a single one of us.
Jacobson is the author of many books, including Cairo in White, the poetry collection I Have Conversations with You in My Dreams, She also writes young adult speculative novels under her pen name, Annabelle Jay. She received her MA in Fiction at Johns Hopkins University, and is a PhD candidate in Fiction at Florida State University. Her short stories have appeared in Northern Virginia Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, among others.
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