Fiction: The Tiger in the Tree by Harry Steven Lazerus

Photo Source: Raw Pixels

To Lenore

The woodland paths are dry. Soon the harsh Chicago winter will be here. I will be gone long before then.

It’s been five years since I walked this way. I used to come in the mornings. The sound of birds, the sight of rabbits, deer, and the occasional fox, coyote, or even skunk, would greet me in this nature preserve, but they are absent this late afternoon, the last time, I tell myself, that I will come here.

I moved away five years ago, to the warmer south, easier on the bones and body of a man once young now growing old. I’m a quarter of a mile away from her tree, Laura’s tree, where the one time she was able to take that difficult hike with me she danced in front of it and made it hers. The tree was dead, covered in rough dark bark, broken in half, the top part of its thick body bent backwards like a giant staggering under a prodigious blow. There was a gaping hole near the top of the upright part of the trunk, and a small platform fronting that hole.

As Laura danced, she spun magical stories about that tree, about the faeries who lived in it; were I not of a cold, rational nature I would have sworn she was communicating with them.

Laura and I were together on and off for two or three years. I no longer remember the exact dates, so much happened during and since. We did not get along. We loved each other. The physical passion I experienced with her was unlike any I had before or since. But we did not get along. Misunderstandings or fights could not easily be resolved; we lived more than 300 miles away from each other.

During one of those breaks in our relationship, when we only sent messages to each other, I told her that when I passed her tree, which I did several times a week during my peregrinations through the nature preserve, I thought of her and wished she was with me.

“Leave an offering for the faeries,” she wrote back, “Something bright and shiny!”

So on my next walk, I made my way through the few feet of tangled underbrush—it was early summer—to reach that tree’s small platform of light brown that contrasted with the rest of the tree. I laid a bright, shiny penny.

It was not something that could be seen from the path, and I waited until autumn to make my way to the tree to see if it was still there or if the faeries had taken it.

The gift had not been accepted. But a year later, in the summer, it was gone.

A bird, a person? No, the faeries had taken it. I wanted to believe.

The following autumn I was supposed to drive down to Missouri to visit her for her birthday. She had been sick, in and out of the hospital, so I planned to stay at a motel as to not put an extra burden on her. I had not seen her in more than a year.

“You dodged a bullet,” she told me at one point.

But she had health problems even before I met her. It did not drive me away. “You’re squeezing my pacemaker,” she cried once, while we were making love.

I planned more than a motel stay. I also looked into places near her where I could move.

And then, the day before I was about to leave, she texted me that it would be better if I did not come.

A chill went through me, followed by a deep sadness. I never cry; I did then.

We never spoke again. We never texted. It was over, and I knew it with certainty.

A month before that I had visited a daughter on the east coast. She and my son-in-law took my toddler grandson to the zoo. There I bought a small figurine, a souvenir for Laura. It was a tiger, orange with black stripes, its nose red, its body poised for attack. I was planning to give it to Laura on her birthday.

The next day, the day of her birthday, I hiked to her tree and made an offering of the tiger to the faeries.

I never went that way again. In fact, before winter arrived, I left Chicago and moved south, south enough so that winter never bothered me again.

Five years have passed. I know nothing of what has happened to Laura. Though there have been others since, she has never left my mind.

Neither has that tiger. Two days ago I drove north and took a motel room near the nature preserve. I drive back home tomorrow, but before that, I must find out. It is why I made this last trip.

Is the tiger still there?

Of course, I know the tiger is not, not after five years. It is gone, as has so much of my life, most of all Laura. But I have to see for myself.

My heart is pounding as I approach the tree.

I am level with the tree now. My stomach churns. I do not know what I want to find. If she has gone, have the faeries taken her, or some random passerby? And if she is still there…

I make my way the short distance through the tangled underbrush.

The hair on my arm stands up.

A broken brown leaf rests on it back. The red nose is smudged with dirt.

The tiger lives!

Harry Steven Lazerus’ short stories have appeared in AlienSkin Magazine, Anotherealm, Every Day Fiction, The Mythic Circle, Change Magazine, Broken Pencil, Frontier Tales, Terror House Magazine, and Twenty-two Twenty-eight.  His story “Becky” won Anotherealm’s Higney Award for 2009.  His op-ed column, “The Contrarian”, appeared in Houston’s Change Magazine from 2011 to 2015. His collection of short stories, Thirteen Tales from the Hippocampus, was published by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing in New York in 2017. His historical novel, The Sikarikin, was published by Copan Books in 2024.