‘Tiger’s Stripes Strike in Strip Mall Maul.’

On The Size of The Beast.

The tiger was huge. Perhaps the result of some kind of scientific experiment where they crossed all the huge things with things that were already big but also quite deadly enough at their current size. No one’s looked into that.
The tiger was so big that the old line of “you wouldn’t want to meet him down a dark alley!”, didn’t even apply; that would have been preferable: ignorance is bliss.

It was a big tiger — it is a big tiger — bigger even, now. But then it was just plain huge. And imposing. It stared at you and you lost a certain amount of control. That’s the normal human reaction and no one that ever had seen the tiger standing there, in the flesh, looking so ginormous and hungry and look at them as the answer to being ginormous and hungry could argue any different. It happens to the best of us. It happens to the worst of us. Shit happens.

As it was daylight though, and not an alley, most people that saw what happened secreted a small amount of something.

On The Coverage of The Beast.

It’s not like it was doing anything especially, you can anthropomorphise it all you want, but mostly it was just a huge tiger standing there on its three powerful legs, which were or were not designed to the end of ripping asunder the flesh of its prey (they were very good at it anyway).

When it was described in the papers the next day they used a range of adjectives. These included:

Angry.
Curious.
Cute.
Fluffy.
Friendly.
Huge.
Hulking.
Hungry.
Massive.
Monstrous.
Orange.
Powerful.
Rabid (the yellow press liked this one).
Stoic.
Thoughtful.
Tigerous.
Tripod.

None of these would reflect the true nature of the beast as it roamed the town, nor could they aptly suit what it actually looked like as it stood there face to face with this small woman and her dog.

She was twenty-five and her name was Matilda Shortcrust according to the papers that had said so much about the tiger. She was twenty-five and stood in front of the tiger for what some papers reported as ’twenty minutes’ and was still in possession of all her limbs.

A bit of history.

The tigrous tripod of a tiger only had three legs because it had lost one of them when it was a small cute orange ball of friendly fluff. One morning it was running around the zoo chasing its siblings and exploring things and jumping on logs with all the nimble dexterity of a tiger with the correct amount of legs, the next it was lying on a surgical table with a statistically unlikely number of legs.

In the wild perhaps the tiger would have gone hungry without its leg; it would be at a disadvantage when it came to chasing, catching and dismembering its prey with the powerful legs that nature or man or god or alien or prankster did or did not design.

But this was not the case for two reasons.

A) Our tiger — whom from hence forth we shall refer to by his given name, ‘Brian’ — did not realise he didn’t have a leg where a leg should have been and because he lived in a zoo and got fed everyday this didn’t actually impact him in the slightest.

B) Our Brian was a vegetarian and was quite serious about it.
Brian wasn’t a vegetarian for the normal sort of reasons people are vegetarians — Brian is not people, remember; despite his people shaped name — he didn’t give a damn about animal cruelty, despite being a member of the sort of demographic that you would have thought cared a great deal about this. He was apathetic about animal rights. He didn’t even know what rights were, let alone the relevant ones to his Phyla.

Brian found meat to be unpalatable, and had never, even as a tiny orange ball of fluff, or as an older less tiny less ball-like thing, got into that whole ‘scene’.
The human that fed him milk when he was a ball picked up on this quite early, and so started testing different foods with him. Potatoes covered in Nutella were an early hit, though he grew out of that rather quickly and eventually settled on a mix of potatoes, carrots, broccoli and some Muscle Power Mix to keep him developing nicely.

You can argue about the merits of feeding an animal that was naturally meat-eater all these vegetables and synthetics, but what you cannot argue with is the results: Brian would never have been the hulking great three legged monstrous creature he was if he hadn’t eaten this way. Brian was the poster boy for regular exercise, eating right and taking a whole heap of muscle generating supplements.

This explains why he was so massive, as you might have read; how he could be as tall as Matilda Shortcrust, who was not a short person — of above average stature — despite being of a breed of tiger which in the wild might only have come up to her waist when standing on all fours.

Mistakes were made…

Brian lost his leg due to a clerical error of the kind that happened to people in hospitals all the time. You would have thought this was less likely to happen to a tiger, but sadly the whole tiger healthcare system is modelled upon the human healthcare system (indeed, Brian was better cared for than a lot of citizens of a lot of countries; he was lucky that way… if you didn’t take the leg thing into consideration anyway) and was run by the same sort of people: fallible people.

No one even realised there had been a mistake. The zookeeper that allowed Brian’s improbable escape this morning still thinks he was going to lose his leg to a debilitating and progressive form of muscle cancer. And there is a tiger inexplicably sick somewhere else. Fallible people.

Excuse me.

So this erroneously restricted animal, of overwhelmingly large portions was staring down a woman and to everyone’s great surprise this woman was staring right back at him.

She wasn’t afraid, Matilda Shortcrust. People would call brave, lucky and stupid amongst other things.

What few people will say though, is that she was blind.

She didn’t even realise there was a tiger there. So when she said ‘Excuse me’ and asked it to get out of the way and it didn’t because it’s a tiger and it doesn’t understand manners, she got annoyed.

This confused Brian.

It confused the onlookers too.

‘IS SHE CRAZY!?’ someone would scream. According to the papers.
She wasn’t. She was just blind and, as far as Brain thought, incredibly fearless and horrendously fast too.

Brian, being a tiger which is a creature that is ornery by its nature, didn’t take kindly to being asked to move despite the fact it didn’t know what it had been asked. Being asked was enough. So he took a swipe at her with a big paw the size of a fat man’s head, ‘that’ll teach her’, he might have thought .

She didn’t even flinch.
Brian couldn’t believe it.
Onlookers screamed.
Matilda didn’t even notice.

Matilda didn’t feel anything, not because she was dead and beyond feeling or because she had some weird disease that no-one had diagnosed like Brian’s opposite. She didn’t feel anything because there wasn’t anything to feel.

When Brian swiped at her with the paw that was removed some years ago on the operating table under influence of bad filing, there was no much tangible consequence outside of his own brain. And as much as he believed he still had his arm and his paw the size of a fat man’s head, he didn’t.

Matilda just stood there being annoyed and not staring down this confused animal with three legs. Brian didn’t understand what was going on at all anymore. He was out of his cage inexplicably and now faced with this creature who was clearly much stronger than he.

And because she was still alive and oblivious and because the team that had been sent out to catch the ludicrous animal were taking their sweet time… Matilda said again, in a sterner tone, “Excuse ME!”, she even cough first.

At which point Brian seemed to realise who was in charge here and how it was not actually him, so took a small step backwards.

To further shame whoever was there Matilda pulled out her blind person stick and gently tapped the tigers foot, coughing again. Again, Brian stepped back, completely befuddled by this strange woman, and then moved out of her way.

The Truth Behind

And that is the true story how an escaped tiger was caught and a blind woman went shopping. Which has nothing to do with the headline. Much like reality and the news.