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| Scribbles Challenge #46 |
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The Tiger's Shadow
The tiger’s shadow is huge. It circles the house, moaning low. Wind tears through the trees. You have heard about it ever since you were small and it carried your mother away. It is Christmas, and in essence, a family reunion. Night has fallen over the large old house in eastern Pennsylvania. It stands in a wide, flat valley. Mountains wall off every horizon. The air inside is still and almost stifling with the breath of so many people. Light shines from the tree and from every light in the house. The shadow engulfs entire lives. It passes through walls without a sound and stares at you from the photographs of your family. You realize you never really knew them.
“Who is that?” you ask, pointing to a black-and-white photograph. It is a group picture; you recognize your grandmother as a girl, forehead wrinkled and mouth puckered. “Because I had to sit between two boys,” she explains.
“Yes, but who is that?” you persist, pointing to one of the boys in question.
The children sit on the floor in a row. Three sets of parents are up on the sofa. They are the sort of people whose eyes are small and black and sudden in their white faces. Perhaps it is just a trick of the camera. One of the parents clutches a baby. Despite this the baby squirmed at the wrong time and her face is a pale blur.
“She died the next year and now that is the only image of her. Life is like that. You have to hold still, hang on tight.”
Tight-lipped grandparents sit up perpendicular, back still further in chairs pulled up for the occasion. Your mother’s people. She has little to do with the ones that are still alive and about as much to do with those who are dead. You can see the suggestions of family not yet born in the cheekbones and hands and eyes of the ones in the photograph. Yes, they still have those dark, hungry eyes. Big, slope-shouldered people. There has been speculation about just exactly where your gyroscope metabolism belongs in the family tree.
You have come to this Christmas reunion out of some altruistic motive, to offer comfort to your grandmother, whose memory is failing. For the umpteenth time your grandmother tells you about Uncle Herman, who had once been the boy seated on her right. He is still more boy than man in that picture, though he appears saddened. There are already grooves on the sides of his mouth.
You point again to the boy on the left. He is sitting cross-legged, looking at the camera with what can only be described as a s*-eating grin.
“That’s Frank-who-ran-away,” says your Grand-Aunt Mattie, hovering briefly over the back of the couch. “I guess he would have been your uncle.” Her hand comes down on your bony shoulder.
“I beg your pardon…?” Bile touches your throat. Frank’s eyebrows are tilted over his wide, wild eyes as he grins up from the picture. You want to ask Great-Aunt Mattie if this is a joke, but your mother’s family are not the joking type.
“He was sixteen in that picture. It was taken a few months before he took off.”
Your grandmother shoots Grand-Aunt Mattie a vicious look, but she goes on-- not with the intent of enlightening you, but of spiting her sister. Nobody had spoken of Frank-who-ran-away in decades. They stood together in silence, hoping to keep the tiger’s shadow from slipping in and filling up the hole he’d left. They did not look for him lest the shadow take them too. No use tempting fate. If he wanted to cross the mountains that was his own business. They held the house down here, held on tight, held still.
The children sit closest to the Christmas tree. They bounce and tear the paper off of packages. Their young parents sit close by, the older ones further out, the grandparents on the outer edge of the circle of colored lights. Even now the darkness creeps closer.
You get up so fast the room spins and head for the door. The icy wind snatches your breath away as you stumble off the porch and away from the yellow lights. Suddenly you see the place with a bird’s eye view. From up here the three-storey house looks small, the grass low and withered. The place is surrounded by relatives' cars. Disused farmyard junk has been cleared away to the edges of the yard. The flat land spreads away and away until it meets the dark bulk of the mountains.
When you turn the corner the tiger’s shadow is there. Wind ruffles its black fur striped with brilliant white-orange. Its tail dusts the frost from the grass. Your heart slams against the cage of your ribs. It snickers, whiskers twitching, showing you a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. It fills the sky. The valley is its paw-print, created from some cataclysmic event ages ago. You breathe deep and spread your arms wide. Icy air fills your lungs. The tiger sinks down low, tilts its head.
You climb astride its back as the first flakes of snow whip across the valley.
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Posted by dreadnaught on 2009-10-21 04:32:53 | Rating: | Views: 80
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