I met a nice man, kind to the core, and took comfort in the strong arms that held me and held me back from myself.
Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Nonfiction
Hungry Animals
There is a tiger inside me who lives to eat and lick itself clean. For years, it lived hungry, pelvic bones threatening to pierce its fur, the ribs along its sides all wishbones, ready to snap and answer a question of fate—will I let the tiger out or will I let it starve?
I first heard its screech-roar when I was huddled on the sidelines of the soccer field with my team, everyone else’s hair blowing in the wind, mine tomboy short. The sunlight caught the legs of the midfielder with the deep-brown ponytail and the close together eyes, goosebumps flecking her kneecap like stars. That scoop of flesh and bone glimmered like the buttery surface of a clam shell just under the water and it was so pretty, bare below the hem of her Umbro shorts, that I couldn’t help but stare. She saw me look. She bent down to brush something off, as if my eyes were telling her there was something ugly there, a speck of dirt or the stain of grass, instead of what I saw: a beauty even then I knew I shouldn’t name.
As I grew, the tiger grew, growling after high school graduation when my friend and I got high in the woods behind our school, and she took my hand and placed it on her heart to feel how fast it ran. That’s nothing, I felt like saying, my own heart a bass drum sounding the alarm.
In college, I got drunk and said, I’m done with waiting, with attraction, with virginity. So, I downed jungle juice like it was water and reaped this precious thing I’d held onto like a bumper crop, laying on a dirty mattress with a frat boy whose name I knew but have long since forgotten. I felt nothing, not the pain I’d been promised, not the thrill I’d been told, not anything at all, like I was in a different state, of geography, of mind. I was floating, my body on that bed but my actual self somewhere else—the rainforest, the grassland, the mangrove swamp, the snowy forest, anywhere David Attenborough might narrate the mating rituals of over-educated homo sapiens. Coitus is mechanical, half-hearted, the male ejaculating quickly before the female can reconsider her choices. Inside my body, the tiger whimpered, but I was too far away to hear.
Sometimes, I lost my grip on the animal, and it ran wild. I left college after a year and found a brief home on the east coast of Australia where the beaches and I were both bleach blonde. I became friends with a horde of 20-something Americans, and together we ate sushi and danced with tan men and drank endless shots with X-rated names—Red Headed Sluts, Pink Panty Droppers, Adios Motherfuckers. One night I met a woman and turned feral. She was a redhead, her panties cotton yellow with pink carnations, and after she kissed me goodbye, I hid in my room for days watching the tiger pace in endless circles.
As it prowled, it showed me its claws, its teeth. The stark light of the daytime cast such a shadow on what I had done, on what lived inside me, that I cast judgement on this living, breathing thing for its unpardonable crime: being what it was. I shooed it away into a dark corner, tucked somewhere between other sources of shame—when I’d stolen money from my mother’s wallet, when I told secrets that weren’t mine, when I touched myself and pictured my knuckles turning white, wrapped in strands of long hair.
The tiger grew thin and threadbare. I starved myself to starve it. I drank whisky to deliver sweet poison. I met a nice man, kind to the core, and took comfort in the strong arms that held me and held me back from myself.
I wanted the tiger to die. I shoved it deeper into a hidden cage and crawled in after it, locking us both inside. I started to die along with it, life and light draining from my eyes as I stood on two high-heeled feet. My heart pumped iron-bare blood. My lungs breathed flavorless air. I nailed pictures to the walls of my cell and called it pretty, called it home.
I lived for two decades this way until one humid morning when moisture hung in the air like rain suspended, I looked in the mirror and touched my reflection to check if it was a trick of the light. I was almost see-through, so small and plain and ordinary, no trace of animal left in the woman who stared back.
Inside of me, in a place too dark to see or even name, the cage rattled against my bones.
“Let me out,” said the tiger in a quiet voice.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s been so long.”
“Yes,” it said, “But there is still so long to go.” It flashed its fangs and swished its strong tail and stretched deeply, shaking off the years of slumber as though they were a short nap.
I was 42 then, and together the tiger and I crawled out of the cage, careful at first, with short steps and eyes darting this way and that in search of like-minded creatures and meals to eat. We found them, ferocious on dating apps, uninhibited in dark coffee shops and sticky bars, or locked up in their self-made coops, suspicious of their own savage beauty.
The first kiss was a banquet. The first graze of teeth against soft skin was as natural as sipping water from a cold spring. The first quickened pulse and gasp of breath roared through me, out of me, scaring me with its resonance as it screamed this, this, this is what you were made for.
The tiger and I are one now, wild things curled up in the warm glow of knowing like fat house cats in a pool of afternoon sun, licking our paws, full and free, fat and happy, and for once, unafraid.
Ashley Berry is a queer writer making a life in Providence. She fangirls over the Oxford comma, mother nature, and space, and suspects the answer to the world’s problems is probably: cheese. She’s been shortlisted for the Lascaux Prize, earned two honorable mentions in the Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition, and received a New England Emmy nomination. At her best, she believes in the raw and deep beauty of the human experience. At her worst, she still believes that, but likely needs more coffee.