This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2022 by Carmen Maria Machado

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Introduction

Children’s clapping hand-games have long been a staple of sociological and ethnographic studies—a window into oral traditions within communities that can be mapped in terms of historical/narrative origins and tracked along subgroups and across time. As a child, I played many hand-games recognizable in the broader American tradition and across the English-speaking world—“Miss Mary Mack,” “Miss Lucy / Hello Operator,” “Down Down Baby,” and so on—but the incestuously regional hand-games unique to Never-Again, Pennsylvania (and their relationship to the events of the so-called Bloody Summer), long ago proved to be catnip for academics. While variations of some of the games—including their clapping patterns and lyrics—have been found as far away as Allentown, Harrisburg, and even some parts of northeastern West Virginia, the town of Never-Again has proven to be a particularly fecund landscape—the fertile crescent of the mid-Atlantic, at least when it comes to this subject—producing a dozen original hand-games with unusual subject matter. Some of those hand-games have proven to be oddly prescient—even prophetic. Even now, as the town’s population wanes from that of its heyday (294, according to recent census records), ethnographers and anthropologists from all over the world have made their way to this tiny patch of nowhere to study the phenomenon firsthand, the most famous being the late Dr. Lucinda Oren, whose writings, field notes, and recordings have been instrumental to my research.

My interest in the subject was piqued in my early twenties, during a cross-country trip in which I stopped at a gas station in Never-Again, just off the highway. This was well after the dissolution of Stone and Thunder Park, though I confess I did not make the connection until much later. Searching for a restroom inside the building, I noticed a worker moving an ATM—presumably broken—onto a handcart. As he wheeled it away, I was startled to see a jumble of crude graffiti on the wall where the machine had stood: a wildcat surrounded by flames, created using a vivid, saffron-colored paint. The figure was not particularly artful, but strange enough to give me pause.[1]

Years later, I stumbled across the same image while doing some research for my master’s degree in folklore and public culture. Though on a different surface and in different paint, this version—found in the microfiche archive of a regional newspaper—was unmistakable: a red tiger, wreathed in red fire, screen-printed on every surface of the mayor’s office. In the photo, an unnamed assistant holds up a stack of papers, fanned outward, each bearing the mark; absurdly, the mark also floats in the center of her blouse. Accompanying it was an article about a rash of graffiti vandalism in the area—this very image, repeated over and over in inappropriate and impossible locations.[2] The article did not say what I know to be true now: that this spate of criminal mischief took place a mere three days before the violence that would wrench this community out of obscurity and onto the national stage.

Never-Again is a small rural community in Lackawanna County in northeastern Pennsylvania, approximately twenty miles from Scranton. It was the home of the Lenni Lenape, and later settled, quite violently, by English, Irish, Scottish, and German colonists. Historically, the economy was supported by the steel and iron industries, and later anthracite coal, but the introduction of a chicken-processing plant in the nearby town of No, combined with the lowered demand for coal, led to a similarly monopolized labor force.

The vandalism of the town (and subsequent violence of Bloody Summer) was not the first time this area had found itself associated with tigers, clearly a nonnative predator. The United States has long had a distinctive tiger problem—roadside zoos, illegal breeding, and unscrupulous collectors have led to an unprecedented boom in tiger sales and ownership. It is widely believed that there are more tigers in captivity in the United States than exist in the wild worldwide. Yet the curious nature of Never-Again is that accounts of—and affiliation with—tigers predate all known private breeding programs and the presence of tigers in the Americas altogether.

The earliest known mention of a recognized tiger species on American soil comes from P. T. Barnum, who imported them from Europe and Asia in the 1870s, often selling them to “zoological parks.”[3] At the turn of the last century, there were a few dozen tigers in US circuses and zoos. The Philadelphia Zoological Gardens acquired “Jim, the Tiger” in 1875 from P. T. Barnum, who himself acquired it from the London Society; Jim died of old age in the winter of 1886. An Indianapolis zoo housed a tiger, “Rajah,” that slaughtered a teenager in 1901; a few months later the same big cat ripped the left arm from the zoo’s owner as the man attempted to prepare the creature for shipment to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.[4]

And yet despite this natural and unnatural history, the story of Lackawanna County is rife with stories of tigers—literal tigers—making their presence known. An account from a missionary in 1783 describes a “lurking, stripéd beest [sic]” that prowled outside his lodgings after the missionary’s day of proselytizing to the local indigenous population. When he reported it the next day, the citizens were dismissive, assuring him that no such animal existed. Two nights later, a pig was spirited away in the night by some creature that, according to a witness, “glowed from beneath” as though “alit by flame.” It seized the poor animal and bounded over the high fence, leaving the rest of the “affrighted pigs” in their pen.

In a more direct encounter on a “bright and frosty midnight” in the autumn of 1837, a man and his acquaintance leaving a local tavern by buggy were “startled by the loud cry of an animal.” He later wrote:

The enormous creature sprang into the road behind us, streaked with shadow and stripe, and it is difficult to tell whether the horse or the whitened drivers most appreciated the perilous condition. The moon shone bright down among the opening treetops, and our slender vehicle lurched and trembled over the steep and stony road. As we rode farther, the forest closed behind us, leaving little chance for us to reach the Under-Meadows in safety. Turning the eye backward, the approaching form of the beast could be seen within a stone’s throw, leaping along at a rate of speed corresponding with our own. The silence of the night woods, stretching back in such utter loneliness, was punctured only by the sound of nervous horse hooves, the jarring of the wagon over the stones, the terribly distinct yell of the pursuing animal breaking in upon the surrounding gloom. We shot down hill after hill, around curve after curve, with fearful rapidity, without drawing a breath, fearing every moment . . . the leap of the creature upon us. For three miles, down to the brook and over it, did the yellow-black beast follow our trail, uttering as it came its shrill, unholy cries. Crossing the creek on a crude log bridge, here thrown across the stream, the horse, conscious of the danger, sniffed instinctively and hurried up the ascent with all possible speed, while the animal, slackening its pace perceptibly and ceasing its cries, led us to believe that the chase was abandoned. Not so, however. As we emerged from the woods into the edge of the Under-Meadows, where courage rose to a wonderful if unexpected pitch, we gave one “hollo!” to ascertain [its] whereabouts. Hardly had the echo of our voices returned from the wood-side before the replying scream of the thing reached us, in accents so distinct and appalling as to remove all desire or effort to hold further intercourse with his tigership.[5]

This account is often dismissed as the hysteria of intoxicated men, though not so intoxicated that they couldn’t manage to drive home a horse and cart at top speed with no accident.

In the 1860s, when the town was flooded with men in search of employment, several violent deaths were blamed on an “unholy animal” “hatched with shadow” that moved like “smoke.” Again, locals discounted the story, blaming drink for the witnesses’ confusion. Such denials echoed into the middle of the next century, when sightings of a “monster” were blamed, among other things, on deer, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and local flora.[6] For the next century, rumors of large cats dispatching scabs and bosses haunted coal-miner and steelworker strikes.

The man on whom the blame for Bloody Summer would eventually fall was an unemployed miner named James “Jim” Wheatfield, whose lifelong obsession with tigers could be tracked back to his own childhood. His grandfather, also a miner, claimed to have seen the fabled tiger on multiple occasions, and his father (again, also a miner) had a habit of telling Wheatfield—while admittedly deep in his cups—that he had not been born but delivered by a tiger to his doorstep.

In 1959 an explosion at a local mine killed twelve miners and injured forty more—among them, Wheatfield, only twenty, who lost his left arm and an eye. In the winter of 1964, Wheatfield took the settlement money from the Knox Coal Company and purchased a twelve-acre ranch on the edge of town. The previous owner, a sculptor and craftsman, had left a large quantity of quarried limestone on the property; Wheatfield said the grandiose qualities of the stone blocks spoke to his “vision.” For the next several years, he set about populating the ranch with wild and domesticated animals alike. Wheatfield opened Stone and Thunder Park in the spring of 1968, and while it primarily drew local attention, visitors came from as far away as North Carolina and Tennessee to admire his robust collection.

It is unclear, even today, from where Wheatfield sourced his animals. It is also untrue—despite the dominant narratives that entered the media after Bloody Summer—that Wheatfield wanted only tigers. Among the animals later removed from his property were seven horses, two Red Wattle hogs, twelve peacocks, and one Nubian goat. (It cannot be denied, however, that tigers were an integral part of Wheatfield’s identity and brand. Witnesses later talked about the effect of driving up to the property and seeing half a dozen living tigers lounging upon massive blocks of white stone.)

Locals took pride in the park and appreciated the uptick in tourism. Businesses added stripes to their logos, and a minor league baseball team in nearby Scranton became, briefly, the Tigers. Wheatfield was an active presence in the community; he brought tiger cubs to the elementary school and the mall, and it was not uncommon to find him sitting in front of the municipal building with a cub in his lap.

By the mid-1980s, a series of local tiger sightings suggested that Wheatfield’s casual attitude had resulted in losing control of his animals.[7] Despite several visits from law enforcement, he continued to insist that all his tigers were accounted for, and no one could prove the contrary. The sightings were never officially documented, resulted in no known attacks, and eventually petered out of their own accord.

The relationship between Wheatfield and the community shifted in the 1990s. A general live-and-let-live ethos had meant that, for decades, people had kept their distance but chosen not to involve any authority or governmental figures in this questionably legal venture. That changed in 1992, when a tiger cub posing for photos with local children took a swipe at five-year-old Anna Steier. The injuries to Anna were serious, though not life threatening; she bore dramatic scars on her cheeks for the rest of her young life.

Furious parents, led by Anna’s mother, petitioned the local government to shut down the park. The tension between Wheatfield and the community grew untenable, but law enforcement did not have legal grounds to remove the animals from Wheatfield’s care. Isolated and furious, Wheatfield closed the park and withdrew from the community. All attempts to communicate with him and check in on his and the animals’ welfare failed.

On the morning of July 13, 1999, a police officer turned onto Church Street and made a startling discovery: the dead and brutalized bodies of an unknown number of citizens strewn across the road and sidewalks. By the time backup arrived from a nearby county, the officer was giving CPR to what was believed to be the only living witness to the incident, a high school English teacher with nonfatal injuries. It was her account—that the street had suddenly become filled with tigers who had attacked and slaughtered her neighbors—that led the police to Stone and Thunder Park, where the tigers were missing and Jim Wheatfield was found dead and half-eaten in the grass.

It took several hours for the final detail of Bloody Summer to reveal itself: all the town’s children and adolescents were missing. None had arrived at school, none were in their beds. In total, eighty-seven citizens were dead and over fifty children were missing. The missing children have never been located. The tigers, too, vanished. While sightings have been reported, none have been conclusively captured.

Wheatfield’s only living relative, a cousin, razed the buildings and sold the property to the town for a song. The surviving citizens were loath to speak about the incident after that, though I have heard stories of a local elder in the grip of dementia who was prone to sitting on a bench near the city center and pronouncing to anyone walking by, “For what is a child but a caged tiger, something that should have never been trapped in the first place?”

[1] As Dr. Oren’s work and life predated Bloody Summer, she did not focus on the big-cat imagery specifically, though she did notice it. She was far more interested in the tension between the children and adults of Never-Again, and the way that tension manifested in oral traditions.

[2] Documented sightings include the altar at the town’s Lutheran church, railroad cars, the plates of a local diner, a sewage pipe that had been submerged beneath the earth for decades, and a piece of environmental vandalism that only emerged the following spring when a rash of dandelions the shape of the image grew in the town center’s meticulously maintained lawn.

[3] This is confused somewhat by the liberal and euphemistic use of the word “tiger” in old publications, when native wildcats like jaguars, cougars (sometimes called “Mexican tigers”), and lynxes have almost certainly been the culprit of violent encounters. In 1852 a Texas couple, Mr. and Mrs. Williams, were forced to defend their home from a so-called American tiger that “[committed] its depredations” by killing a neighbor’s horse, attacking their dog, pulling the skin from the face of Mrs. Williams, and entering their bedroom, after which Mrs. Williams, “[seeing] their mutual foe thus attempting to take possession of their house,” was “determined to finish the battle” and dispatched the cat from this earth with a shotgun.

[4] It seems obvious to say, and yet worth saying, that most of these moments of violence are due to the colonialist’s instinct to transport, cage, and own what is fundamentally unownable: a wild animal, or even nature itself.

[5] History of the Lackawanna Valley, Horace Hollister (1869).

[6] This theory hinges on the abundance of an otherwise rare, orangish-red variety of lupine that, when partially shadowed, resembles a lurking tiger.

[7] “Hunt for Tiger, or Something, Stirs Pennsylvania,” William K. Stevens, New York Times, July 30, 1986.

The Hand-Games

What follows is a list of hand-games from the history of the region that may shed some light on Never-Again and its fate.

“ELEANOR’S A LOSSY”

Eleanor’s a lossy,

Sloppy, twisty, flossy,

She’s held up in her windpipe,

She’s under spells in half-light,

She’s down and out but all right,

She’s fire high and too tight,

She’s lost, she’s sad, she will bite,

She’s past the place where we write,

She’s dark, she’s red, she’s too bright,

She’s the kind of girl that you’d like,

She’s won a tiger-girl fight,

She’s swallowed half a tailpipe,

She’s underpaid and uptight,

She’s got fur and claws and black stripes,

She’s got no time for your gripes,

She’s laughing, laughing all night,

Milk creams,

Car beams,

She’s gone for good.

—Recorded by Lucinda Oren, PhD, at Wistful Elementary, Never-Again, PA (1982)

Of all the hand-games of Never-Again, “Eleanor’s a Lossy” is probably one of the oldest; fragments of its lyrics have been reported as far back as 1892, a mere ten years after the town’s official incorporation. In this game, children perform a shared clapping routine, not entirely unlike a hand jive, while one child recites the lines.[8] The game is “won” by continuing the string of rhyme and slant rhyme in accentual verse without losing one’s place or the rhythm. After a while, the participants arrive at the end of the conventional lines, and the reciter must continue to improvise. At least one child, Ella O’Donnell,[9] was said to have performed over four hundred lines from memory. Traditional riffs include discussions of light and dark, colors,[10] contradictions, and nonsense. Tigers are often referenced, for obvious reasons.[11] As is also the nature with children’s hand-games, there are verses that are dark, bawdy, and downright lewd. Eleanor’s sexual history, body, and desires are frequently referenced.

The word “lossy” in the title and opening line—“Eleanor’s a lossy,” sometimes spoken as “Eleanor is lossy”—is believed by most to be a bastardization of “lassie,” hearkening back to the Scottish roots of some of the earliest settlers in the area. Some have argued, for good reason, that the original word was “floozie,” which became “flossy” and later “lossy.” Regardless, the song ends with three lines. The final two are, unchangingly, “car beams, she’s gone for good.” The line preceding “car beams” must rhyme—various accounts have mentioned “milk creams,” “star dreams,” “lip seams,” “death screams,” and so on.

The historical origin of “Eleanor’s a Lossy” is a much-debated topic among folklorists, anthropologists, and ethnographers, given the rhyme’s inevitable entry into the public bloodstream after the events of July 13, 1999. Perhaps the most common story is that the rhyme originates from a young woman, Eleanor, who was discovered more than once wandering the streets of the town in a state of dishevelment and confusion, to which a walk-of-shame interpretation was attached. As Dr. Lucinda Oren points out in Gone for Good, the overtones of rape were obvious but unspoken; something had clearly happened to her, was happening to her, over and over again. “It is notable,” Dr. Oren wrote, “that citizens used language of sexual exploration but implied sexual violence; whether Eleanor was real or fictional is somewhat beside the point. All my research suggests that the relationship between the town’s youth and adults has been strained for many decades now, the result of (among other things) a chronic belief that miseries of the past are an inheritance of the future, rather than something to be avoided.” Dr. Oren attempted to identify the real-life Eleanor but failed, though she did point out that there have been eight citizens named Eleanor since the town’s founding, none of whom lived into adulthood; all died by their own hand.

“BURNING SEASON”

Only a handful of accounts exist of this hand-game being played, and its specific rhyme and physicality have been lost to time. Multiple interviewees had spoken of this game in hushed tones to Dr. Oren, but had been unable to articulate exactly what the game was, why it was played so seldomly, or why it was so memorable. Normally, it would be impossible to link this game to the others in terms of theme, but one interviewee told Dr. Oren that whenever she imagined the game and closed her eyes, she could see something shifting inside the shadows of her lids—a creature of muscle and fire and bone.

Dr. Oren wrote in the introduction to Gone for Good that she had dreamed often of this lost game, her subconscious floating versions of “Burning Season” to her, which she wrote down upon waking. “Like all dreams, they made sense when I was submerged and turned to nonsensical mush when I came to the surface. But I was always hunting for the logic in them—the idea that I was close, or closer, to some understanding of Never-Again that eluded me.”

“THIS TIGER, THAT TIGER”

While most of the hand-games in this account are clapping games, “This Tiger, That Tiger” eschews clapping and rhyming for the four words of its title. Similar to “Bloody Knuckles,” one child swings at the closed fist of another while reciting their half of the refrain. The loser is the first to flinch or, if the game is played to completion, bleed. While always a game of bravado, “This Tiger, That Tiger” became much more subversive in the early aughts than it had been previously—proof not just of one’s willingness to be injured or injure another, but of one’s risk of being caught by the distraught victims of Bloody Summer.

“TIGER, TIGER”

Tiger, tiger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night.

In the night the children sleep,

Wake to rhythms from the deep.

From what science, and what art,

Speeds the timbre of the heart?

And when the heart begins to beat,

Hands or claws? Paws or feet?

Beds are empty, bodies near,

Children missing, tigers here.

—Recorded by Lucinda Oren, PhD, at Sullen Park, Never-Again, PA (1978)

“Tiger, Tiger” (also sometimes called “Tigers Here”) contains probably the most direct allusions to Bloody Summer of any local hand-game. (And while we’re on the subject of allusions, echoes of William Blake’s “The Tyger” are obvious here.) This game is traditionally played in a circle and recited in a round, permitting each speaker to be rhyming with at least one neighbor at any given time. The song then escalates several times in terms of volume, often resulting in cacophonous screaming. The “game” is won as a group; the key is to end simultaneously, no matter where the speaker is in the cycle. If a child forgets themselves and continues after the song is over, the game is lost for all.

Dr. Oren was particularly fascinated by the communal aspect of the game—the way it is lost for all or none. “The children of this town, more than any I have ever seen, share their joys, their successes, and their failures as a unit. The sense of comradery among them feels like they are veterans of a shared war; their mutual success is far more important than any individual grievance or difference.”

[8] Some interviewees have mentioned that the reciter “must be” female, though there are accounts of children of all sexes performing the rhyme.

[9] And potentially also Eleanor St. John, the girl famously raped and murdered while traveling to Buffalo, New York, in 1902.

[10] Most commonly the black, white, and red common to fairy tales (see Kate Bernheimer’s “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” in The Writer’s Notebook [Tin House Books, 2010]) and, occasionally, orange.

[11] The above recording mentions a “tiger-girl fight,” but in other accounts Eleanor also bites, sees, kisses, swallows, becomes, and is a tiger. For more on Eleanor and the intracommunity tensions of Never-Again, I highly recommend Lucinda Oren’s book Gone for Good (Duke University Press, 1984). It should be noted that many tiger references here and elsewhere predate 1999, though they are obviously of much interest to myself and others.

Conclusion

I have spent much of my academic career poking and prodding at the tiger-themed hand-games of this region but, like so many other scholars, have been frustrated by a lack of coherence in the narrative—the fact that there are too many questions and no sufficient answers. Dr. Oren died before she could make sense of any of it; she did not even live long enough for Bloody Summer to cast the town’s many ghosts into a new light.

A few months after the publication of a brief story about my research in the Journal of Regional Folklore, I received a letter from a reader, a retired plant manager who had been born and raised in Never-Again. He asked me if I wanted to know the real story of Bloody Summer from a child who had survived it. Of course, there are no known child survivors; my curiosity was piqued, and I agreed to meet him. “Joshua,” who insisted on anonymity, is a seventy-seven-year-old white male, never married and with no known children. I confirmed through various records—birth certificates, school records, property deeds—that he was, in fact, born and raised in Never-Again, the child of a father killed in a car accident and a mother who worked from home doing bill collections for a regional health network. All his other claims—while fascinating—I have been unable to confirm.

We met at his home in the early autumn of 2064, just before the Sour Rains would inundate the region and alter its landscape permanently. The house was a small, nondescript building on a residential street; Joshua claimed that the pale-pink walls and ceilings “helped him think.” We sat in his bedroom—me on a narrow twin bed against the wall, him in a rocking chair that faced the window. After some amount of fussing—glasses of water being obtained, making sure my equipment was recording—we began.

He was familiar, passingly, with many of the hand-games I was interested in, though he claimed that “the girls played most of ’em.” (He enjoyed “the one where you punched the other boy’s hands.”[12]) Asked about the presence of tigers in Lackawanna County prior to the incidents of Bloody Summer, he gave this account:

JOSHUA: They just felt like a part of the air, something you knew was real but couldn’t quite imagine seeing, like an angel. Kids drew them and talked about them; adults discouraged the talk the way they discourage girls from sitting with their legs open. I always imagined they were coming for us, to help us.

INTERVIEWER: Help you?

JOSHUA: To take us away.

INTERVIEWER: Take you away? From what?

For a moment Joshua refused to continue; he hedged a bit, flipping through my files before landing on a photograph of Anna Steier. He became quite animated, and it took no prompting for him to begin to discuss her:

JOSHUA: Everyone knew her. She was one of those girls who was just . . . beautiful. Terrifying. But after that day in the mall she grew . . . wild. The scars on her face were as white as porcelain. Girls would draw on their own scars with eyeliner and powder. They followed her around. I remember one girl saying that Anna’s eyes practically glowed in the dark. The way she moved—it’s hard to describe. The boys all loved her, but they were also very scared of her.

INTERVIEWER: Did you love her? Were you scared of her?

JOSHUA: Yes, and yes.

On the subject of the graffiti, Joshua told me that the police were brought to the school in an attempt to discover the culprits. The officers called this sort of vandalism the first step in the “criminal disease,” but no child confessed.

INTERVIEWER: How did everyone coordinate their graffiti?

JOSHUA: No one did. We all just found ourselves . . . painting. I did too. Never done anything like that before in my life. Never done anything like it since. It didn’t even occur to me to write my name or anything; I just started doing it, the way you start falling asleep.

INTERVIEWER: It?

JOSHUA: The tiger, with the flames. It was the only thing I could draw. I didn’t realize anyone else was doing it until the next day. The town was covered in them. The adults were furious. They tried to blame Jim, but of course later they found out he’d been dead a few days by then.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know what killed him?

JOSHUA: He was dying of lung cancer when one of his tigers attacked him. Peeled him like a banana. People said he did it on purpose, that he wanted to die from the tigers instead of the cancer.

In an attempt to catch Joshua off guard, I returned to the subject he’d avoided earlier—what, precisely, the tigers of the stories were supposed to be a deliverance from. He looked up from the rocking chair and gestured to me with his hand. I did not understand and said so. He gestured again, and I realized he was motioning to the bed I was sitting on. “Before my father died, he came in almost every night,” he said. “I loved my mother, but she said she didn’t believe me. None of the parents ever did. That was the rule. Until we were adults, we were all fair game. But of course, you know what I’m talking about.”

I leaped up from the bed, my body thrumming with shock and horror. I tried to get him to explain further, but he declined, simply saying that it was a long time ago. I asked him what he meant when he said I knew what he was talking about, but he only smiled sadly and looked out the window. We continued our interview. What he said to me next was so unbelievable—so disquieting and utterly inexplicable—that I cut our interview short and drove to my motel in a nearby town. I was shaking. I could not stop shaking.

When I returned to the subject’s house the next day to complete our discussion, the front door was unlocked and the place was abandoned. On the bed was a small carving of a wooden tiger and an empty vial with the label peeled off, both of which—against all ethical guidelines that I’m aware of—I took home with me.

In the interest of strict accuracy, I will end this paper with the transcript of this piece of our conversation. I can explain no more than what is here. I am a child, and it is a forest; I know nothing beyond its trees.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, now I’d like to talk about the events of July 13, 1999. Are you okay talking about that?

JOSHUA: Yeah. I mean . . . yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Where were you that morning?

JOSHUA: In bed, like everyone else. I woke up at exactly 3:47 in the morning; I remember looking at my clock. I was always afraid to wake up. Because . . . well, you know. But I woke up, and I felt something clear and bright, something like peace. I heard something outside, and when I went to my window, I saw a tiger.

INTERVIEWER: One of Wheatfield’s?

JOSHUA: I don’t know. It was a tiger. Underneath my windowsill, rippling through the darkness. And I should have been scared but I wasn’t, and I went to the front door, and all my classmates were gathered there in the street, being led by Anna. I joined them, and we walked for a while until we got to the woods. We all just went in.

INTERVIEWER: Did you talk to anybody else?

JOSHUA: Not really. Everyone was sort of murmuring and humming and buzzing, but it didn’t sound like speech, exactly, more like cicadas. And I didn’t feel the need to speak. Whatever was happening felt natural.

INTERVIEWER: And where did you end up?

JOSHUA: Jim’s place. Stone and Thunder.

INTERVIEWER: And Wheatfield?

JOSHUA: He was already dead. Just lying flat in the middle of the main pen, eyes full of nothing. Anyway, Anna just went up to the cages and started opening them, one by one. The tigers all came out and lay down at her feet like house cats. Eventually she summoned a child over and drew her fingernail across their arm until it broke skin.

INTERVIEWER: Did they resist?

JOSHUA: The little ones squirmed, and some of them hissed when it hurt the most, but they didn’t seem afraid or upset. But then when she’d done a bunch of them—maybe a dozen or so—the first children scratched fell to their knees. As she continued, they began to writhe in the dirt, and then . . . transform.

INTERVIEWER: Transform?

JOSHUA: Yes.

INTERVIEWER: I don’t know what you mean. They were having seizures, or . . . ?

JOSHUA: No. They were changing.

INTERVIEWER: I see.

JOSHUA: Changing into tigers. People say it was Jim’s tigers that killed all those people, but I’m telling you it wasn’t just them. They got mixed in with the children-tigers, yeah, but most of them that did the killing had gone to sleep the night before in a human bed. Anyway. As they writhed and turned, she started to whisper. She said, “You have never been less free; now you will never be more free.”

INTERVIEWER: But what about you? If all the children were transformed into tigers that night and you saw them, how am I speaking to you? [PAUSE] Are you all right?

JOSHUA: I’m fine. I just . . . I’ve never told anybody about this.

INTERVIEWER: I understand. Would you like a break?

JOSHUA: No. I’d just like to say what happened.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. When you’re ready.

JOSHUA: Like I said, they began to transform. And I could tell what was happening, and I was at the edge of the pack—the group. And when I turned, I saw my friend Evie Miller standing there with her arm extended and so much light in her face. Like she’d swallowed the moon. And I became afraid.

INTERVIEWER: What were you afraid of?

JOSHUA: I didn’t know what she wanted, or what any of them wanted. I wondered if it would hurt. I couldn’t imagine being something else. I was afraid to be free. I didn’t know what it meant. I couldn’t bring myself to change.

INTERVIEWER: What did you do?

JOSHUA: I turned and I ran into the darkness. I kept waiting for someone to come after me, for a hand to wrap around my arm or a jungle cat to flatten me to the ground in a single pounce. But no one came. I ran back to my house and back to my bed, and when I woke up the next morning, half the town had been mauled to death in the streets. The air smelled like copper and then like death. Took ’em over a month to process the bodies and clean everything up. For a while it was not unusual to find splinters of bones in the earth, like arrowheads.

INTERVIEWER: I read that they brought in all these experts to try to figure out what had happened.

JOSHUA: They didn’t ask the right questions. And they were worried about catching the tigers, but I knew that they’d never catch ’em.

INTERVIEWER: What about your mother?

JOSHUA: She hadn’t been out that morning, so she made it. Claims she saw a tiger when she went to the grocery store a few days later, but it was all over by then. I think she just wanted to feel special.

INTERVIEWER: What was the town’s reaction to the disappearance of your classmates?

JOSHUA: People said they were the ones who released the tigers in the first place, and maybe they’d run off in shame. Or they suggested that they’d been kidnapped, by outsiders. They had to close the school for a while. No students, you know? I just dropped out. We moved to the edge of the county. When I was seventeen, I started working at the plant. Was there for sixty years before I retired. They threw me a party and everything. And uh, yeah. That’s been my life since then.

INTERVIEWER: I really appreciate—

JOSHUA: Wait. Can I say one more thing?

INTERVIEWER: Of course.

JOSHUA: That night. When the children became the tigers. I didn’t run straight home. I mean, I did, but when I realized no one was chasing me, I turned to look. I do not know how to describe to you what I saw—an ocean of fur, glowing like amber under the moonlight, creatures purring and striding the earth, the power of their bodies unleashed. It was so beautiful, and even though I was afraid, I regretted my fear. I imagined running back down, taking my place among them. But they were changed and I was not, and I didn’t know if they’d change me or tear me up into little pieces. It could have been too late. I didn’t know. Then they started to growl and snarl, and it was like nothing I’d ever heard—like someone was ripping out the seams of the sky. There were so many of them, and they were free; they were finally free. And I know they killed all those people and I know they didn’t regret it, because they were animals doing animal things for human reasons. They never asked to be uprooted and replanted; they never asked to see a person. I know that wherever they went, they never had a hand laid on them again. Never saw a cage door close. And I wish I had made a different choice. I’ve lived a good life, and I don’t regret any of it except that night. If I could go back, I’d walk right up to the front of the line. Even if it meant tearing out my dear sweet mother’s throat, God rest her soul. Even if it meant being wild on soil never meant to bear me.

[12] When I mentioned the widely attributed title of this game (“This Tiger, That Tiger”), he responded, “We’d just say, ‘You want to draw claws?’ and two minutes later someone’s bleeding.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © Art Streiber

Carmen Maria Machado is the bestselling author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and Lambda Literary Awards for Lesbian Fiction and for LGBTQ Nonfiction.