Tiger Girl

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Authors: May-lee Chai
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their pods, mushrooms and fungus and berries, raw things the beasts of the jungle might eat themselves. At first the girls are unwilling to eat such things, but then one day they fall upon the spirit’s food, eating ravenously. Day after day they eat like wild creatures until it is too late. Their lips grow hard and pointed, more like beaks than mouths. Little feathers sprout on their chests, their arms turn into wings, the pinion feathers long and graceful. Their bodies shrink, and the last tatters of their human clothes fall to the jungle floor. The girls stare at each other in amazement, but when they open their mouths, no words come out. The wind swirls about them, scattering their meal of seeds and berries and flesh, and the girls run into the spirit wind and fly away, high high high above the trees
.
    â€œWhat could they see?” I wanted to know. “Could they see their mother? Their house?”
    â€œNo.” Ma was growing tired. Her breath had slowed. I could feel her body growing heavier, like a stone beside me. I could feel her leaving me, drifting to another realm.
    I pinched her arm. I scratched her calf with the sharp broken nail of my big toe. “Did they fly to their mother’s house?”
    â€œMmm. No.”
    â€œWhy not?” Frantically, I pulled on my mother’s shirt, I breathed on her face, blew across her nose, hoping my hot breath would wake her. “Why didn’t they fly to see their mother?”
    Ma stirred. “They didn’t want to see her.”
    â€œNot even to see what she was doing?”
    â€œThey didn’t remember her. They were birds now.”
    â€œOh.”
    The people of the village are watching the mother behaving like a gangster herself. They shake their heads. They know what she’s done to her daughters. What kind of mother is she? Not a good woman. Not someone they wanted in their village
.
    So the villagers band together and drive the mother and the gangster out of the village. They then tear down her house and burn the wood. They take all the woman’s animals; they steal all the woman’s pots and pans and bowls and cups. They take her sarong and her
krama
scarf and the comb she used in her hair. They pretend the woman never lived there at all
.
    (I nod. This is exactly what villagers would do.)
    After many years, the girls’ father returns to the village
.
    â€œHe wasn’t really dead?” I gripped Ma’s arm tightly in my excitement.
    â€œSshh. Quiet.”
    â€œBut I thought the mother was a widow?”
    â€œNo. She just thought her husband was dead.” Ma was growing sleepy. Her voice was heavy, slow, the way we used to move under the sun, turning the earth slowly with our borrowed hoes.
    I nudged her gently, then not so gently. “So the father returns?” I prompted.
    Ma blinked, licked her lips, and reached into the dark for my hand. Finding it in hers, she squeezed it tight and continued.
    So the father returns and discovers the scorched spot where his house once stood. He asks the villagers, “Where is my wife? Where are my children?” But they pretend they don’t know. Alarmed, he walks to the city. He asks in the market if anyone has seen his wife, a woman this high, with three girls trailing behind? People shake their heads and turn away. Stall after stall, no one will speak. Finally an old woman takes pity and tells him the story of his dissolute wife marrying the gangster and the way she’d taken the children to the forest to die
.
    The father marches into the forest himself, carrying a pack upon his back, a long knife in one hand to fight the beasts, and a long stick in the other to help him walk through the pathless jungle, over the tall grasses and the thick vines and the dark low-lying branches
.
    The bird sisters see their father walking through the forest. They call out to him, but they can no longer remember how to speak. Their beaks open and shut, open and

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