He knows this body he finds himself in is wrong in some way, but the world has changed more than he. It is painted over in scent. Drenched in stinks bright and thick as egg yolks. The speck of blood in a yolk from an egg cracked between his fingers. He has no fingers. The first night he travels over thirty miles, through the neighborhoods and sports fields and along the shorelines of Lovesend, the county of Wake. But a tiger has no sense of miles. He investigates with his tongue the place between the pads of his paws where broken glass has cut the tender skin. The taste of his own blood is delicious. He kills and eats a raccoon and then a small, elderly dog escaped from its yard, incontinent, scrofulous, and full of bravado. Some of the next day he spends sleeping in a drainage pipe. Once near the Cliffs he encounters another tiger, a female, but she snarls and lashes her tail, warning him off. He does not even recognize her. He does not know himself. He is dreaming of a man in a kitchen cracking eggs in a pan, his long new body draped along a tree branch, when a jogger passes under him and looks up. The jogger takes several pictures with his phone and then backs away. The police show up, but now the tiger is miles off, stalking chickens in a neighborhood where several families keep coops. He kills six plump Buff Orpingtons and eats one. He eats three eggs, still warm. Blood in the yolk.
It’s not quite midnight when a woman driving a secondhand Celica does not brake quite in time on the section of the Cliff Road where almost everyone forgets to pay attention to the speed limit. She is driving at fifty miles per hour and the tiger is running across the road. She hits its hindquarters, breaking its spine, and her back wheel crushes its heavy head like an egg. Oh, tiger! Two miles from the Cliff Hangar. But tigers know nothing of miles.
The woman thinks at first that she has hit a deer or a dog. When she pulls over on the side of the road, she sees the tiger’s body and is overcome with shame and horror. She’s been a vegan for twenty-seven years and donates five hundred dollars to the World Wildlife Fund every year at Christmas. If Kyle Mylynowski the man could know any of this, he would roll his eyes in disgust. Twenty years in the restaurant business and he always hated vegans.