The Wounded Tigress
I lift the skin over the cub’s mouth with my fingers to reveal the sharp baby teeth, the clenched jaw. I wonder when the strong secondaries will push them out, much the way his mother pushed him out of herself. A shudder passes through my body as I imagine the biting force that’s hiding, gurgling inside those gums, waiting to be let loose.
The days leading up to this were pockmarked with loss and a confusion about the future. They all had asked, “Where is this going?” — the boss, the ex-boyfriend, the mother.
The cub mews — again, I imagine the roar that’s lurking behind time. I have to silence him. Shushing doesn’t really help with a cub that tiny, he lacks the ability to understand my human noises.
The tribe around me is busy gathering weapons, faces painted with streaks of black — also the colour of the sash tied across their foreheads, keeping their brains intact. Waka takes a stride towards me, panting, her face wearing an expression between absolute terror and brave camaraderie.
“She’s close. She knows he’s here.”
“How close?”
“She’s just outside the school building.”
I inch towards the window opening to the scene: The tigress, manic with fury. Raging like a typhoon with the dust rising about her. Blood-drenched canines. I shift back towards the cub — a swift, startling movement and out of helplessness, glance down at my hands that look deformed, and drive the ulnar side of my right hand hard into his mouth, holding it wide open with my left. I need to shut him up.
Spears clink about me, sweaty foreheads scrunch with the sound of determination, to fight a war that we do not know how we ended up in. Outside, the wounded mother makes a sharp turn to enter the premises, her growls piercing the old, brown wood of the building we’re desperately trying to hide her cub in.
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