The tiger outfit she liked to wear and wore it till it was threadbare. It went from her neck to her ankles, one piece, long-sleeved, fastened with a couple of hooks near the neck in back, black and faded orange stripes, some material like muslin, bought for a buck at Goodwill. She never knew what to put on her feet with it—“Tiger in sneakers? Sandals, socks? Better I go barefoot,” but she only did around the yard or house. When she wore it to the local supermarket or in town people would occasionally stare and a few times she quickly mussed up her hair till it was like a mane and raised her hands into tiger’s paws and growled at them and once snapped. “Listen,” he said, “people just haven’t seen an outfit like this, so what are you doing that to them for? It’s embarrassing, unpleasant; not like you,” and she said “It’s the skin that’s making me do it. Anyway, nobody really minds. A pretty girl, you once said, can get away with almost anything like that, and a pretty tiger, but a small domesticated one, well maybe even more so,” and he said “I find the scene ugly. Just don’t ever bitch at me when I get stupid and rude,” and she said “Oh brother, you sure have a nice way of putting it,” and slid her nails across his cheek. She usually wore nothing underneath it, at the most a bikini brief, and she liked saying to him when they got home, if Brons was at someone else’s house or sleeping in the car seat, something about how tiger and man should mate, and she continued pretending to be the tiger in bed, moving around on all fours, bounding over him, landing with her hands on his chest, scratching, hissing, snarling, rolling over playfully, ending up on her back with her arms and legs in the air and saying something like “Now’s the optimum time, tiger’s in extreme heat, take it any vaginal way you like, it won’t bite off your head, whatever interdictions it had to the other customary positions are temporarily suspended.”
