The Tiger In The Mansuit: Part VI

The tiger looked up.  The building he faced rose higher than the apartment building making the sky look like a small slice between the manmade materials.  A few stars peeked through an unnatural haze that hung in the air.  The moon was full.  The tiger was exhausted and his eyes began to close involuntarily.  Each time the tiger noticed himself drifting-off, he would bring himself back to full attention and peer down the ally in both directions.  Nobody seemed to be coming from the street and the ally seemed to dead end into another grey building another few hundred yards the other direction.  After some time, the tiger could no longer resist his sleep.  His eyes fell closed and his mind rested.

The tiger dreamed that he was back behind the fences of the zoo.  He lay under the largest tree standing in the center of his compound.  The full moon filtered through the leafless tree throwing sharp shadows on the ground and across the stripes of the tiger.  The tiger was at rest but not asleep.  It was not usual for Steve to be around in the evening especially when the moon stood overhead, but the tiger smelled the trainer, but did not move from his position.  At once a loud horn blared jarring the tiger to his feet resonating in the air causing the chimpanzees to scream from their habitat several hundred yards away, and inciting the giraffes and elephants to join in the chorus.  The tiger stood; the hair on his back rose.  He still smelled the trainer but did not see him in any of the usual places.  As soon as the horn ceased echoing through the air, the noise was repeated.  This continued for what seemed like an eternity.  The noise of the horn melted together with the cacophonies shrieks of the surrounding animals.  The tiger ran circles around his compound but saw nobody until he woke in the ally sweating and rolling on the wet asphalt.  The ally was silent but the tiger’s head still rung.  The moon still stood overhead.

The tiger drifted back to sleep.  He stood panting under the large, leafless tree in the center of his compound.  The noise from the horn rung in the air for a moment then faded.  The tiger could feel a general sense of uneasiness from his captive neighbors.  There was a still silence.  The air was thick with dew that tasted like sweat.  A broken lamp in front of the tiger’s compounded flickered emitting a strobebing violet iridescent glow that swept across the tiger’s vision.  The tiger could smell his trainer.  Steve stood behind a thick plastic wall at the edge of the compound by the feeding area.  The tiger walked in that direction.  Steve entered the compound.  The tiger moved faster towards him.  Steve walked into the compound by a dozen or so paces then stopped.  The tiger picked up pace and was nearly a hundred yards from the trainer.  Steve stood his ground.  The tiger closed within twenty yards then Steve lifted his hand and shot the tiger with a strong tranquilizer.  The tiger dropped mid-stride, and slid to the feet of the trainer who removed an air-horn from his pocket and revealed a whip in his other hand.  Steve blasted the air-horn and whipped the tiger simultaneously for nearly ten minutes.  The tiger was paralyzed and as the tranquilizer moved deeper though his blood vessels into his brain, he grew tired, but the blarring sound of the horn kept the tiger’s attention.  The trainer concentrated his whipping on the rear right leg of the tiger, and after severely ripping the tiger’s skin and muscle; he left the tiger to bleed.  The tiger fell in and out of consciousness.  As time passed the tranquilizer wore off and the searing pain of his open flesh overtook his senses.  The tiger woke to the sound of men speaking.  He rose to his feet.  His clothes were wet because he had apparently been rolling in puddles in the ally as he slept.

Noticing the tiger rise to his feet.  Three men in aprons began yelling out.  The tiger looked behind him and say a grey wall at the end of the ally.  He looked ahead past the men who were now by the dumpsters behind the restaurant, and saw the street seemed less busy than the night before.  The tiger glanced upwards for a moment but could not see the sun; the surrounding buildings kept the ally dark.  The tiger’s muscles burned as he moved at a deliberate and cautious pace in the direction of the men.  As he got closer, their yells increased in intensity and volume.  The men moved to the side to let the beast through.  The tiger looked at each man and they each took a step back.  Their chests sunk in and their necks lowered.  The tiger huffed and moved at the same slow and deliberate pace.  When the tiger reached the street he heard a door slam so he glanced back.  The men in the ally were gone.  The tiger squinted as he stepped out of the shadow of the ally onto the main street.  The tiger looked upwards in all directions for a moment, sniffed the air and continued east on the sidewalk.

To Be Continued…

Inevitable

Good stands with evil

Spring certainly comes each year

But so does winter

The Tiger in the Mansuit: Part V

The tiger chose to take an alternate route back into the city instead of retracing his steps back to where the repugnant smelling vagrant may still be lying unless the man authorities have done something with the body.  The tiger’s mind digressed into curiosity about what men did with their dead, but he was quickly back on track and looped into the city from east.  The fields quickly broke into suburbs of houses lined with metal fences and the occasional jalopy sitting on concrete blocks on the front lawn.  The tiger continued towards the city without paying much attention to the houses until he noticed one not only with a metal fence, but it had bars on its windows.  The tiger was immediately reminded of his former life in his cage.  He hated the men because of the bars.  The tiger stopped and stared at the house.  It was a two-story house with green paint that seemed to blow away with a breeze.  The front door was black, and had a line of brass locks about a foot long lining the right side of the door.  Six windows faced the front of the street; four upstairs and two down.  All of them had a set of black bars attached to them.  All the tiger could think of was that this must be another place where they forced animals to stay.    He looked back at the top right window and saw a shadow pass behind the curtain; he looked down again at a patch of sidewalk directly in front of him where a weed had forced itself through a slight crack in the concrete.  The tiger moved onward and the as the blocks passed the houses crammed into duplexes.  Now almost every dwelling the tiger passed had chain fences in the front, bars on the windows and multiple padlocks on the front doors.  He saw countless men and their families entering and exiting these dwellings.  There was no apparent sign of the men confining any animals in these dwellings besides themselves with the exception of some small dogs and cats which seemed to live off the men.  The tiger found these tiny cats running around the neighborhoods and intermingling with the men to be a very curious thing.  He did not understand the nature of their relationship nor why the cats would tolerate such a relationship.

The tiger moved onward into the heart of the city.  The neighborhood opened into a multitude of plazas encircled by towering buildings made of steel, glass and concrete, and at the center of the first plaza the tiger came across was a small park of about fifty feet in diameter where a concrete path dissected and crisscrossed a patch of grass that was dotted with a few wooden benches.  The park was surrounded by a moat of avenues flowing with the loud traffic of cars, busses, vans and trucks.  After carefully navigating his way across the street, the tiger took a seat at a bench that faced the north avenue across from which stood a building at least 80 stories tall with a reflective glass face.  The tiger sat and stared at his reflection, which was interrupted by a pattern of vehicles and pedestrians streaming past in the tigers fore-vision.  As the tiger observed, he noticed the men who walked contained themselves to the set walking paths and those that operated the vehicles stayed on the wider cement paths – all this held true, except for the places where the two traveling paths intersected.  The man community, composed of males and females of all ages and colors transitioning about on some frenzy with faces full of intent, wove within itself like a panicked herd of wildebeests moving in organized chaos.  This part of the man community seemed to be in constant flux.

The tiger sat on the bench watching the traffic stream to and fro as the sun dropped a quarter of the way from overhead.  In this time several raggedy, urine-smelling men came up to the tiger attempting to say something with their hand cupped outward towards him.  He was able to shrug them off with no great difficulty – they moved on quickly as if that was the response they expected.   The tiger studied the movements of the man society until he was interrupted once again.  However, this time the man who interrupted the tiger was wearing the clothing of a man of authority and smelled heavily of musk.  This man spoke in a brash tone.  The tiger didn’t understand so he stood raising his hands chest level with his palms outward.  The man of authority responded with a half-step back but his tone remained the same – “Woa big guy, I just wanna let ya know you gotta be careful.  There’s a tiger loose from the zoo and its been killing hobos, so just watch out.  That’s all I’m really trying say here.  Have you seen anything, guy?” The tiger took a step back and put his hands back to his side; he was thoroughly confused because he clearly recognized the man call him tiger, yet this man was completely calm.  Maybe, the tiger thought to himself, this authoritative man in uniform achieved his position because he was so cool under pressure.  This made him very dangerous.  Needless to say, the tiger did not respond to the officer’s question, but the officer quickly lost interest in the large creature before him and moved on with his beat.  Even after the man left, the tiger stood shocked by this experience.  It took a few moments for him to regain his own composure. He decided it was best to move on in his journey, so he proceeded east crossing the street; the traffic was light.

He reached the sidewalk and glanced upward – the skyscraper looked like a reflective vertical road charging into the horizon of the open sky.  The tiger’s curiosity overtook him and he followed a man in a black suit into this particular building which had a large revolving door entrance that made wooshing noises as it rotated.  The man in the black suit moved briskly into this revolving entrance – the tiger just a step behind nimbly made his way into the same revolving compartment as the man he was following, who immediately looked back at the tiger with and said something in a sharp tone.  The man poked the tiger in the chest with his three middle fingers then left the compartment as it wooshed open once again.  The tiger was so surprised that he didn’t make it out in time and ended back on the street before he could realize what had happened.

The tiger continued to head east, and as the sun began to dip low in the sky, the sidewalks became crowded with formally dressed men.  As they passed the tiger, they looked at him with the hate of a man who wants to conquer others.  Although these men did not share the great stature of the tiger, they forced him to turn and stop short and sidestep in order to avoid a collision.  The tiger zigzagged through the droves of men in grey and black suits while the roads became crowed with large vehicles crowding each other in the streets making sharp noises at each other.  Now that the vehicles moved at a slower pace in the crowed thoroughfare, the tiger could see men sitting in these vehicles with angry scowls.  Some hung their head out the side of the vehicles yelling in a sharp demanding tone; others lifted their fists and pointed at one another as if one man was responsible for everybody going moving so slowly; and still others just sat in the vehicles staring ahead as if in a trance.  As the tiger’s attention was diverted from tiptoeing through the men on the sidewalk, to observing the men in the vehicles, he lost pace with the crowd and was bumped by three or four men successively and took a step in the street where a square vehicle that stood higher than the tiger screeched to a stop and blared a high pitch horn while flashing lights between two levels of brightness.  The man in the vehicle yelled out.  The tiger was uneasy.  The noise, the lights and the constant movement of the men and the vehicles around him confused his senses.  The tiger froze.  The boxy vehicle in front of him continued to attack him with his lights and horn.  The tiger tried to step back to the sidewalk but the flow of traffic was to great and nobody stopped for him.

The boxy vehicle now began to move closer to the tiger.  The tiger felt threatened by all sides, but instead of attempting to fight the vehicle, he forced his way onto the sidewalk knocking down several men in their suits in the process.  The tiger pushed his way through the crowd on the sidewalk.  Sprinted through a crosswalk forcing street traffic to slam to a stop.  The tiger darted around for several blocks until he came upon an ally.  The ally was a small space between two brick buildings.  One was a fairly nice apartment building with a fire escape stacking down its side and the other was a professional building with a large restaurant on the ground floor.  The ally had no lighting other than the moon, which became more luminescent as night began to overcome the city.  The ground was wet although it had not been raining.  Two large dumpsters stood about a hundred feet down from the street entrance and wrecked of rotten produce.  The tiger stepped slowly down the ally allowing himself to calm down.  Once he passed the dumpster and the noise from the street became less threatening, the tiger sat with his back leaning against the apartment building.

 

To Be Continued…