The Apocalypse, Almost

Of course, the end of the world loomed close more than once an era. Commoners really had no idea how close they’d come to the end and how many times they had. The kings always felt a little bad for letting it slip this close without appealing to the gods for some sort of saving, but they found that despite the economic consequences, there was always a rise in the approval of the people when the king stepped up to offer food, housing, blankets, alcohol- anything to help them get through the apocalypse. Ajax didn’t care much for approval, and the apocalypse had really only gotten so close to happening because he’d skipped his trip to the temple to watch Twin Peaks from the living room couch. This was a pitiful thing to do with his night, he thought. What was even more pitiful was the fact that no one could seem to come up with a better alternative. There were things and people to do, but he’d done them all. Not the people, but enough to tire. He always had more options, but here he was. Twin Peaks. He was on the second episode.

He knew, in the way that he only gave half of his attention to, that the apocalypse was coming. He didn’t want to offer to help. He wanted to be called upon. But this was the downside to commonor ignorance. Having never looks the end of the world in the face, they did not know exactly how desperate they should let circumstances get before they called upon him for help. They might wait to see the state of the next dawn before they asked him, and the next dawn might not even come. He couldn’t quite tell if it would. He’d only just seen Laura’s father burst into tears.

Kaylin was not in the mood to hear it when she phoned. She was also impervious to his apologies, even when there was a speckle of sincerity on them. Kaylin, he also thought, was not her name. He thought this every time she came to see him. But no ruler ever went by their first names in public. Partially because it was only members of the royal family and the gods that could speak them, and partially because they did not necessarily want to say them. They tended to accumulate (depending on where you were from) unnecessary vowels, or unflattering consonants. Ajax was not his real name either, but his name was made for someone with three tongues and a lot of time on their hands to say. It had left his mother sweating to say it in its entirety. One day, some royal relative’s name would anger the gods and bring about an entirely separate apocalypse. No amount of prayer made by any royal family would help. Kaylin, or whatever her name was, told Ajax that he’d been putting off saving the world again because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to live in it.

“I beg to differ,” Ajax replied. He was in a silk robe. He’d gotten it from an eastern country, imported, and it had cost him as much as it would have to feed one of the villages in his kingdom for a month. But it was a beautiful shade of seafoam green that a common girl had once told him made his green eyes look luminescent. This was the sort of thing to him that seemed celestial, godly. Kings liked godliness and despised it. There was only one step between kings and gods, but as kings did not have supernatural powers, it was not a step that could be overcome. The flattery and his luminescent eyes were as close to magic as Ajax was going to get.

Kaylin made a gloriously resentful noise on the other end of the line. “You don’t beg for anything. What did your last slave die of anyway?”

This was because Ajax had suggested Kaylin end the apocalypse instead of hm. Sovereigns did not like to pray in the place of others, and it wouldn’t make him look very good in front of the gods. He cared more about how he looked in front of Kaylin than the gods. Ajax wold have apologized, but his father had taught him that kings did not apologize. They did not make mistakes, or commit misdeeds worth apologizing for. Beside, Ajax didn’t really wish for the earth the fold under a rain of asteroids or boil under a sheet of molten rock from a sulfurous explosion. It was just that he didn’t want to put in the effort to stop it.

“Don’t answer that,” Kaylin said. “For goodness’ sake. What is it, anyway? Flu, I heard. I’ll go ask them to stop it.”

He told her how nasty the flu was. What the gods wanted for it. Kaylin snorted.

“This is something you could have fixed a week ago,” she told him. “If it had taken out any of my kingdom you can bet I would be asking the gods to contain it just to your country. I’ll take care of it, I don’t mind. No, really. And you’re welcome. Which temple?”

He told her.

Kaylin snorted again. “I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

Ajax didn’t care much for correspondance, but: “Come over. Let’s do something. One of those unity between nations, things. We’ve done nothing but praying for ages.”

Kaylin hung up on him. She didn’t call him back, but the flu receded. In between episodes of Twin Peaks, Ajax checked the news. The number of cases coming into the hospital had slowed to a trickled, then ceased all together. The flu could not be caught from contaminated bodies. Patients were already making a remarkable recovery. The flu was fleeing from the respiratory system as the news caster spoke. Ajax had little to do but watch Twin Peaks again. The gods might be upset with him, but they’d been negotiated with. He was both bored and wary of truly forcing himself into action. How many people had the gods been planning to take out with that flu?

A few day later, Kaylin’s entourage was knocking at the door and holding it open for her when she stepped inside. She stepped all the way inside, to the private reception chambers. Ajax shooed everyone outside. He didn’t like anyone except himself getting ogled in the private reception chambers. But Kaylin was lovely, with dusky, dark skin and lips the colour of squid ink. She had eyes as yellow as a wild cat’s. She looked furious and deadly.

“Were you wearing that when I called?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at his seafoam robe. “How bored are you?”

Ajax pulled his robe tightly around himself. He felt that this moment was a misrepresentation of his natural glory. The chamber itself was a bit of a mess with papers and several cups of coffee from different nations. He thought he liked something from Asia, or a blend from Africa. It was interesting to put different flavours of dirt in your mouth. He offered her a cup of flavoured, hot dirt and reminded her that if she wanted to drink from a clean mug she had to call for one herself, and then fix the coffee maker herself. He had someone who usually did it for him, but he’d sent them out. Kaylin took one of his pre-existing mugs and topped it up. She sat on a daybed and eyes the seafoam robe. Ajax opened his eyes wide, so she could see how luminescent they were.

“You can’t wear that,” Kaylin said.

Ajax looked down at himself. “I certainly can. I have evidence right now that I can.”

“You can’t wear that out.”

“Out? Outside? Where to?”

Kaylin said, “You said you wanted to do something unifying.”

Ajax did want to do something unifying, just without the rest of the court. The rest of the court wasn’t present, though. While Kaylin sipped her transcontinental coffee, he went in search of proper outdoor robes. As a king, he had a plethora of robes to choose from. As Ajax, nothing was what he wanted to wear. Kaylin turned her head while he changed in and out of one and another. The country ran itself outside and Ajax finally settled on something embroidered with winged snakes and man-eating flowers. It was resplendent, even if it wasn’t seafoam. It was the fourth most expensive robe in his closet, but this was a special occasion.

Kaylin looked back at him three hours later. She’d dumped the contents of each coffee cup down the sink and found his liquor. She was drinking either red wine or watered down blood when she assessed his outfit. “Somewhere no one knows us, then.”

“Is it too much?” Ajax said. “I can tone it down.”

“I really don’t think you can,” Kaylin said. “It’s fine. Let’s just go.”

Outside, in Ajax’s kingdom, he took stock. He sometimes forgot that this was the kingdom he’d chosen to create, from his father’s. All choked with people, cars, stray cats and dogs. Every alley branched off into a warren of alleys, thin as corridors. Everywhere, people of different colour, race, religion, gender, tunneled and dispersed. Ajax had been enchanted by the multiculturalism of it once, but that was the state of the world, now. And people were really no different. Not to kings. They shred this with gods. The commoners looked like a frantic population that did not share a common goal with Ajax. He could not exactly tell any of them apart.

It was a girl that caught his eye. Kaylin’s too. Not because the girl was beautiful or he particularly desired her. Though she was beautiful. But she was young, with a china-doll face and huge black eyes, and a skein of silky golden curls down her back. She was tossing her ball quite close to a fountain. The fountain was deep and the ball heavily weighted. Kaylin and Ajax both knew a story when they saw one. The gods loved stories like this, and kings liked to make them happen, with a little help from the gods. It was easier when a god was the direct subject of a story, but surely one of them was willing to give a hand here. Ajax prayed and, when the girl tossed her ball into the fountain and broke into tears, watching it sink, a frog leapt onto the fountain’s edge to offer its services. It had a voice and a personality. Making it human would be a little trickier, but the kings and the gods had time. Really, if it was speaking full sentences to the girl, it was halfway to human already. The girl had to take the frog home, first, and who knew where that was anyway?

Ajax fetched a samosa and a couple vadas and trotted happily back to Kaylin. It was a little obvious that he was pleased with himself. A king’s happiness was almost never out in full force, but his was right now. He turned it accidentally on a poor passerby, who tripped and spilled her trundle buggy of produce. A god melted in the sky, reminded of why they were so fond of humans, and why they cared for them at all in the first place. Kaylin, beside him, was reminded too, in a way that bothered her. Particularly because she knew this story too. The gods loved romances that spanned countries or conflicts. So several were made happy when she leaned forward to kiss Ajax.

Ajax had not been kissed by her before. He’d kissed many of his own subjects, brought to him by his face or the gods’ will, not by a phone call. He felt warmed by several degrees, like a polar ice cap melting. He was sure something had gone wrong with him. Everything had gone sharp at the edges for a moment. The streets and the faces, like it had been when he’d only been his father’s son, before he’d inherited the kingdom. There were hundreds of stories to tell in this square. He need only insert himself in one to know the rest of it.

“That felt more like the apocalypse than anything,” Ajax said.

“Well, keep an eye out,” Kaylin said.

Art by Maja Wronska

Text by Lucie MacAulay

All Of Her Choices

The best people for spreading lies are the pretty ones. The majestic and regal ones. The ones who charm the birds from the trees, sing the storm to sleep. They are the best at turning the tables, tilting the lights. If you look upon me and see only darkness, it is their doing. If I am the thing that creeps in the shadows, it is because she made me this way. I had done nothing to the king’s daughter. Nothing she did not ask.

I knew her before she explained who she was. Everyone within the sea knew the king’s strange daughter. The one with a propensity for throwing herself at the shore, for dragging herself onto the beach, for crusting her scales with sand, for the sake of watching the people on the rocks. She was grossly anxious when she swam into my home. Her hair amassed around her, uncut. The king’s daughters never cut their hair until marriage. Through it, I could see her lovely face, beautiful like the patterns of sunlight on water.

Her spine was rigid. A new tension crept into her shoulders when she entered my home. She was the kind of creature bred to fear the space outside of her territory. The shadow of a passing, overlarge fish might look to her as threatening as a bilious cloud of blood. It is always hard for the sheltered to discern true threat, since they have never been threatened.

I gestured her in. She did not see me the first time, until the gentle movement of my fingers became an aggressive movement of hands and elbows. She flinched and approached slowly. I am not comely or gilded like the folk of the court. I was raised among algae and pebble and coral. My hair and skin and eyes are the colour of the dirt from which I come. It never bothered me, until she appeared. And even then, it only bothered me very little.

I was not a vain thing.

“Are you a witch?” the king’s daughter asked. I could not recall her name. Her forehead was smooth and unlined, except when she raised her brows. She had never had a worry in her life before now, and her skin was unused to the effects of it. She clasped her hands in front of me in an artificial sort of gesture.

“A magician,” I said. We share with humans a certain dislike for the word witch. In those times, being a witch and living at the same time was not likely.

“What is your name? I would like to trust you if, if I only knew your name.”

I shrugged this aside. Names were not necessary. I said, “I’m help. That is all.”

She smiled. It was a hopeful smile. This was the first terrible thing love had done to her. I knew it as soon as I saw it upon her face. The thing about love was that it was not only poison, but a poison that one thought could be remedied by further doses of it. If she were smart, she would have asked me for an antidote. She would have asked me to make it impossible for her to love him. “I don’t know if you can help. If you can bring us together. I did not mean to love someone from the shore, but I do. My father would never allow us to live together. I just want a choice.”

This, I liked. I believed in choices. I said, “I cannot make him one of us. But I can make you a human.”

Suspicion and joy warred upon the king’s daughter’s face. Her face had clearly been used poorly. It was unprepared for so much confusion. I ignored the look she gave me, as though she could see all the way around me, and inside of me, and was still suspicious. “In exchange for what?”

At least the king’s daughter was not entirely stupid. Just a victim. I had sympathy for her; no one had ever told her she would need those skills her royal father had never taught her. Here was the world, and no one had told her she would have to face it. “Your voice. I can give you legs, but I need something of yours in return. It could be your eyes, but I assume you want to see the one you love.”

She was apprehensive, as people are when they’re about to amputate a part of themselves. “But how will I speak? How will I communicate with him? He does love to hear me sing.”

“He will have to love some other part of you,” I said. “I am sure there is much to love. But not if you waste away down here for the rest of your life, pining. There are other ways to communicate.”

Wasting away didn’t sound appealing to her. She gestured, to indicate that she did not know how to give me her voice. I told her I would be gentle, but when I approached her she had to hold herself still, as though I were a barracuda or a hungry tigerhead.

I coaxed it from her throat. The voice lived in many parts of the body, but the place it could mostly be found was the throat. My finger brushed her throat when I took it, and she nearly flinched. Her voice was a soft, fluttering thing between my palms, but I could see that it was beautiful. Of course he would have loved to hear her sing.

I pointed at her tail. Not a tail much longer. She would have to find her way to the surface.

Surprise and delight lit her lovely features.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. Her tail was beginning to split. I helped her reach the surface first.

It was less than two months when I next saw the king’s daughter. In that time, the kingdom had fallen into disrepair while the king searched the chasms and sandbars for his daughter. I was silent and unintrusive. I had not seen the king’s daughter. Perhaps she could be described to me? But they had no time for it. The king’s daughter coaxed me to the ocean’s surface. Even voiceless, she could force the sea to listen to her. I came when called and found her on the beach, unaccompanied, scandalous by the people’s standards.

She had been weeping, that was evident. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she had to discretely wipe her nose upon the lace cuff of her sleeve before she spoke. The sun had almost sunk below the waves. There was light cast across one of her ankles, peeking out from under her dress. She did not continue to weep when I appeared. She did start, still unnerved by my appearance. Love had taken its toll. Her face was bored by despair. Her forehead settled into familiar lines when she furrowed her brows. She clasped her hands to her chest and wrote in the sand, “Witch. Magician. I did not know if you would come. I did not have your name to call for you. I need your help, as I needed it before. Only your pity can help me.” Her movements were less lovely outside of the water.

This, I doubted. But I swam a little closer to her, until I could prop my elbows upon a rock. She recoiled a little, though not as much as the first time. “And what are you doing here, in tears?” I asked. “I thought you were with your true love. What could mar this for you?”

The king’s daughter looked both pitying and indignant. She wrote, “I gave up my voice for him. And he loves me, but he does not love me as much as another. She can speak. She is from a kingdom on land. How can I make him love me?”

I shrugged. I was not in the business of telling people who to love, orally or magically. Magic worked only so well. If I were to enchant this man, there would be a part of him, deep down, that was aware of the enchantment. That kind of festering poison was almost as bad as love.

The king’s daughter was taking the poison to heart. It had struck an artery. “You must help me,” she wrote. “I will give you anything.”

I knew of only one course of action that would help her, because the poison had dug deep, and there was nothing to do now but abstain from it until the rest drained. “You must give him up. I can give you back your voice now, and you will speak and sing again, but you must return to the water. Your legs will be gone.”

She reeled back and bit her lip. If she had had a voice then, I am sure she would have turned it on me. “No,” she wrote. She wrote it several times, then smoothed out the sand with her hand again. Her fingers fumbled as she wrote. “That is not what I asked for. I must make him love me, but I cannot without my voice. Ask for something else, and give me my voice back.”

There was nothing else to give me but her eyes, and when I told her this, she shook her head and pointed at what she had written already. She did not understand exchange, and I was beginning to curse her father again for her ignorance. And herself. Instead I thought of something new. It was magic of the kind I did not do, but I pitied her.

“If this man kisses you,” I said, “before the setting of the sun, three days from now, you will remain a human forever, and he will love you, with all of his heart.” This was a little bit of a lie- I am not proud of that. “If you do not, then come back to me, and I will return you to the sea, with your voice. That is all I can offer you.” And it was. This was the truth.

The king’s daughter clapped her hands together, delighted again. She looked almost as though she did not mind my terrible appearance, or my presence. Her gaze strayed to the road, to the end of the shore, away, away. “I can ask from him one kiss,” she wrote. “He will have to give it to me. I love him so dearly.”

“I am sure you will fair well,” I said. There was no point in saying anything further. She had made her choice.

I swam a little farther out and watched her walk away along the shore. Her legs must have been aching, but she could not tell. She did not even see it as an option- not loving him. The wind brushed away her words in the sand.

I knew what the problem was before she came to tell me. The sun had long gone, and so she brought a candle to the shore, and warned me back so she had space to write in the sand in front of me. The shadows made sharp all the anxious angles of her face. The lines that would not fade beside her eyes and on her forehead. She was lovely and older, in only a few months. “He did not kiss me,” she wrote. I was not surprised. She was sorrowful, and raging. “You must make me human longer.”

“I cannot,” I told her. She had ceased crying a time ago. She dug her fingers into the sand beside the candle. Wax fell on to the back of her hand. “I warned you that if you could not kiss him, then I could only offer you your place in the sea.”

She recoiled, and this time it was not because of my appearance, but because of my certainty. I had done all I could do for her. Her only option was the return to the sea. The poison had set in too deep. It might not even be allowed to drain. And if it did not, it might fester instead, and transform. “Take this,” I said. I held up my palm. There was a perfect blade on it, something I’d scavenged from a human wreck. Something I had made my own. “Put it deep into his heart, and you will be able to return to the sea with your voice. Otherwise, you will die.” I had done all I could for her.

Her eyes flashed. She snatched the dagger from me. It glanced across my palm; blood welled there. “You tricked me,” she wrote.

I said nothing. I knew what she would choose, in the end. She was more kind than I gave her credit for, because in the end it was not his life that she gave up.

And she did return to the sea. It was the best of the options. Anyway, she had used up all of her choices.

Art by Erin

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Tiger In My Car

I knew she would take it the wrong way when she got here. She wasn’t a fan of most animals, but she’d always had a problem with cats. In theory, the bigger the cat, the bigger the problem. Mia would be apoplectic when she saw the tiger in my car.

I had to walk around all of my evo to see just how much tiger was wedged into it. It was much more tiger than should have been possible, and more tiger than I thought was actually attached to a tiger. As far as wild cats went, it was the largest I’d ever seen, and there was something primal to the build of it. This cat hadn’t weathered hunting seasons and greedy humans and global warming; this cat had weathered terraformation, ice flows, the birth of islands, wars and natural disasters. There was a chip in the tiger’s left ear. The ear flicked when I opened the driver’s side door and dropped into the seat. “Look, if you don’t get out now, my friend is going to be pissed when she gets back.”

The tiger didn’t have much space for adjusting positions. My car is small, but there’s only so much space that can be robbed by a tiny budget. And efficient tiger or large person would have been able to fit themselves in here. As it was, the tiger was draped over the reclining passenger seat and part of the tiny backseat. It growled and the car shook. Its eyes were not quite feline. They reminded me of the mosaic, earthen eyes of a crocodile. When it spoke, it sounded like the force of buffeting wind. “It was not my choice to get in, and it is not my choice about whether or not I will be getting out.”

“What?” I didn’t know how this answered my question. In what language would that answer my question? “You’re in my car by accident? Can’t you just-” I made a shoving motion with my hands, as blatant as I dared. I was very aware that it was a large jungle cat and I was a young woman with recent acquisition of her license.

The tiger tried to tilt its head. This was as much of an answer as I was getting, I supposed. I raked my hair away from my face. The city was too hot in the summer; sunshine bounced off every available surface. Tarmac, glass, steel; even in a residential area everything conspired to bake the residents. There was not much to do but wait. I turned on the air con. It sputtered to life a couple minutes before Mia got back.

Mia took it the wrong way immediately. She was good at that.

“Seriously?” she said. She was in the blouse she’d worn to some meeting that day in which she’d sat on the sidelines and waited for her employer to say something worth noting. She was essentially a net for all of the remarks that her employer missed and forgot. From the state of her notepad after these meetings, he looked pretty clumsy with remarks in general. I’d asked if he had a problem with memory or work ethic. This is why you should be grateful to work for Jonathan, she’d said. Mia glared at the tiger. “I told you to commit yourself to your job, Tara. Not to getting out of it. And the office party? I went to incredible lengths to get you an invite. If you didn’t want to go, you could just say so. Fine, maybe you’ll decide I’m worth your time when I get back.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I didn’t do this on purpose. I didn’t ask it to get in. Beside, why are we taking my car? You’ve got one. Just-”

Mia had perfected this to an art; turning away so quicly she looked less rude, and more as though she’d been pushed. There was something performance art about it, as though from a different angle, someone might interpret that I were the one pushing her away. She went to seize her own car, a prettier, German car that had seen more of the world than either of us.

I rounded on the tiger. “Fantastic.” This was not the tone to take with a tiger, but the tiger was not in the position to round on me. “We were going to get dinner too, before the party. You know what’s in the house now? Pasta. Leftover pasta. From the last three nights. Fuck this, we’re going to the store.”

The tiger didn’t protest. It would have been simple to leave the tiger there if not for the fact that there truly was nothing left among the apartment but dried out pasta. There is a tolerance threshold for all things, including pasta, no matter what shape I decided to buy. It was pretty suitable for a university student, but I was supposed to have surpassed that now. Mia’s cupboards were empty by virtue of not having eaten in the apartment for several days. She did have generous coworkers.

“Your tail,” I said. The tiger’s tail was wrapped around the gear shift, and was partly on my lap. It was heavier than a tail really had right to be. I’d read once that tigers use their tails to communicate with other tigers, and to balance when they made quick turns while running after prey. I would be more enthused about a giant, muscled tail on my lap if I thought the tiger was going to catch us dinner with it.

The tiger drew in its tail. I reversed out of the parking spot. About seventy percent of the reflections in my rear and side view mirrors was orange and black. I tried not to run over any lives while I backed out of the parking spot. Everything was still living when I left.

“Who was that?” the tiger asked in its windy, impact voice. It was the sort of androgenous voice that I thought thoughts in in my head. Asking the tiger what gender it considered itself sounded like a great way to get hurt.

“My roommate. Friend. Best friend. Except for right now, maybe,” I said. I pulled onto a main street and aimed for the highway. The car, I noticed, tipped a little toward the tiger’s side.

“Is that my fault?”

“Huh?” I switched lanes quickly and cut off a driver. I felt bad right up until he gave me the finger. It was like seeing a kitten try to menace you with their claws. I laughed and sped up. “She’ll get over it. She likes the idea of working with her best friend in the same office. She couldn’t do that anymore if we weren’t best friends.”

“Are we speeding?” the tiger wondered. It was strange that a tiger might have a concept of speeding. How quickly could a tiger run? This one might easily overtake the car at the speed we were going now. I pressed on the gas a little more, until I could feel the engine’s mini-seizures through the floor.

“Not… now,” I replied, pulling the car quickly off the interstate. There was a grocery store/supermarket here. It was the sort of place you came to buy fertilizer for your plants, diapers for your baby, fancy but disgusting cake for your racist mother-in-law. A teenager was probably smoking in the back somewhere. “You good?” I climbed out of the car and double-checked with the tiger. It had been locked in my car before I found it, but that hadn’t had anything to do with me. When the tiger nodded, I locked my car- for the safety of the tiger more than the safety of others; there were some crazy people in Maryland- and went to the door of the supermarket.

I imagined that some day I would be able to wring in a proper supper on a debit card instead of rifling for change for two small yogurts and a bakery bagel at the cash. There was a woman a little younger than me behind the counter, looking unimpressed with the entire exchange. I hoped the tiger didn’t expect something. I hadn’t seen any bloody carcasses in the store, and I really didn’t have the money for once anyway.

“If I had my credit card, I could have done some real shopping,” I said to the tiger. I put the bag with yogurt and bagel in the console between us. “Like, noodles or something. Pay day is in a week, though. Yeah, this is it for now. When did you last eat?”

The tiger thought for a moment. “Not too long ago. A day, two, perhaps. I am not hungry yet.”

“Hungry for what? Rabbits? Birds? Buskers?” I asked.

“Your roommate looked good,” the tiger said.

There was no expression to the tiger’s face; it was impossible to tell from its voice or face whether or not it was joking. Because there was no way I was letting it get at Mia, I decided the tiger was joking. “You’re welcome to her,” I said. “If you get hungry for someone’s terrible boss, let me know.”

On the way home, we pulled up next to a cop car at the red light of an intersection. The immediate result was that I had to pull over. The tiger was sitting right in front of the license and registration, which were in the folded up mirror in the passenger seat.

“It’s there.” I pointed.

The police officer followed my finger, then shifted a couple inches to the right, to the tiger’s muzzle. It was clean, but when you considered that the muzzle was easily as big as my palm, there were sudden, new, difficult dimensions involved.

“Can you get it out for me?” the cop said. I shrugged and leaned back. There was a perfect path through my window, to the opposite mirror. “It is your duty to get it out for me. Don’t make me ask again. The tiger can’t properly wear a seatbelt, can it?”

“Maybe.” But there was no way for the tiger to actually sit up in the seat with the seatbelt on in the position it was in now without cracking something spinal. The cop ticketed me for speeding, for the funny sound the engine made- the engine was always betraying me this way, and though I dearly loved the Evo, I was beginning to suspect it didn’t love me back- and for the tiger’s seat belt. I would add the ticket to pile of bills I could not pay. When we got back on the road, I worked my way up to a couple miles above the speed limit and very carefully did not go over. If I had been younger, I would have let the needle on the tach climb and climb. I would have kept going until cars with strobe lights stopped me. I wrestled the car straight as the tiger’s weight pulled it right and right again.

“IS this your job?” the tiger asked.

“My job?” I couldn’t be offended. What did the tiger know of the business world? “No. I actually do have a job. I’m an intern for a shareholder and business executive.” It sounded a lot better with long words tacked onto it.

“What does that entail?” the tiger asked. Then the tiger seemed to rethink the question, or to lose interest in my answer before I gave it. “What does that mean, actually? Interns do the same regardless of who they work for, to an extent, don’t they? Or are you shareholding and doing business? You could be an intern if your prime function is not being paid-”

“I was so unaware,” I said. “I did not realize I wasn’t getting paid. I didn’t know I was at the bottom of the food chain. Well, shit, there it all goes. How silly to invest in this. Just because it worked for Mia doesn’t mean it’s a viable path for me, oh no. Whatever you’re saying, it’s all right. Eventually I’ll actually be paid to do- basically what Mia’s doing.”

“And that’s what you want to do?”

“Isn’t that what everyone wants to do? Get paid to do something they love? Well, I like business.” I stopped rather abruptly because I realized I’d actually passed the turnoff for my neighbourhood. I was heading into an area that was alternately an imitation of the old Georgian homes of D.C. and an imitation of a post-apocalyptic ghetto. “And you like my car. Or you don’t. But you’re in it. Speaking of, when are you getting out? I doubt you’re really enjoying our talk that much.”

“I’m getting out when you let me out,” the tiger said “It’s not so bad.”

“What? Let you out?” I had to brake quickly again. The car behind me made a very showy screeching halt as the driver honked their horn. Everyone thought stop signs only needed to apply to the rest of the world. “I’m not keeping you in.”

“But the door is locked,” the tiger said.

I could see from here the tiger was lying. “It is not.”

The tiger nudged the roof with its head. “It is. I can’t get out.”

“Are. You. Serious?”

The tiger looked mournfully so.

I took the next exit to try to turn around. I’d come out in the kind of area that did not know that cars could look like my car looked. That is to say, that they looked like less than five figure cars. This area was probably pretty if you’ve grown up around cream baseboards and decorative paperweights. “That would require dismantling my one true love. I can’t do that to my Evo.”

“What about business?”

“What about it?” I snapped. I had no desire to be lost here. Already one of the natives had lowered their monocle to look at me. Possibly just their reading glasses. But you wouldn’t have seen reading glasses like those in my corner of Maryland.

“Do you not love business?”

“That is not the point at all. And yes. Would I be eating a plain bagel for dinner if I didn’t love business?”

The tiger flexed its paws. I’m sure there were claws somewhere in there, but as they weren’t in my line of vision and I was pissed, I couldn’t care at the moment. “Your friend made it sound lie you have a problem committing. Do you really? You seem committed.”

“Thank you!” But I wasn’t sure the tiger was saying it to agree with me. Taxpayers’ money hemmed us in on either side with groomed greenery and sculpted landscape. “You could tell Mia that. You know, if you were sticking around at all.” I slowed near a sign. I slowed some more to try to read it around the tiger. I slowed until I was almost sure I was going backward. The sign directed me toward squalor. I headed in that direction. “Anyway, did I ask you?”

“You didn’t have to. We were already having this conversation. This is what happens when you have a tiger in your car. It wouldn’t happen to me.”

“What? The tiger in my car is you!”

“Don’t yell at me,” the tiger said. Its whiskers twitched this time. I decided that maybe it did actually have an expression.

We doubled around near the interstate. There were a few miles of road to burn before I would reach a ramp. On the way there, the houses regressed. The degree of shittiness rose. The population of gas stations and corner stores increased. The number of completed houses declined. Several were under construction. One was still piled with tools outside of it, and a construction crane. “I’m not yelling. You are a tiger. In my car. Telling me- what, to get a life? Well, this is life. You do the things you don’t want to do to do the things you do want to do.”

“And business is what you want to do?” the tiger said. It didn’t have eyebrows, just long whisker-like hair over its eyes that rose when it asked the question.

“Who knows?” I said.

I pulled the car over sharply in front of the work-in-progress house. I drove over a wrench or a rock or a dug-up artifact. There was an auto garage across the street eyeing the tiger, and me, and the situation in general. “The thing is, tiger, I have this one plan. If I don’t have it, I’d have to make a whole new plan. You know how hard it is to start from scratch?”

The tiger blinked. One of its eyes was glowing phosphorescence under the street lamp. “Choices.”

I pointed at the windshield of the Evo. I said a silent prayer. “Do you think you’d be able to climb out through that?”

The tiger considered. Then it nodded.

I trudged through the yard, which looked more like a bombsight than the partially built house. I hefted a sledgehammer over my shoulder.

I queued up beside my windshield.

Inside the Evo, the tiger shut its eyes, preparing for impact. “Be gentle,” it advised.

“No point,” I said. I swung.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay