SmokeLong Quarterly

We saw a man getting mauled by a tiger. The man was our father. My brother Johnny and I didn’t recognize him at first, not because of the profusion of blood, but because the man, our father, had grown a beard the way fathers do when they no longer want to be recognized. It almost worked. But the way he wrestled with the tiger, how he thrashed first one arm and then the other, made his disguise fall away. It wasn’t much of a disguise if I’m honest. Our father claimed it was no disguise at all. He seemed offended we’d suggested as much.

We asked if this was one of the circus tigers. He said no, this here’s a city tiger. You can tell by her teeth, he said, by their yellowed tinge of smog and nicotine. For a moment, I remembered how our father used to know everything.

By this point, Johnny was crying, now that it was irrefutable this was our father and not some stranger getting mauled. The tiger didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t even growl. Our father said it was because she was cosmopolitan and had seen it all. She wasn’t one to make a fuss, he said, and gave a stern look toward Johhny. I told him to leave Johnny out of it, that Johnny couldn’t help it if he didn’t like the sight of blood.

But Johnny said that wasn’t it at all. He pointed to our father, to our father’s beard, and I saw what he meant, that the beard was slashed through with gray, and our father’s once proud mane was hardly there at all, which you’d think I’d have noticed earlier, the absence of hair being almost as shocking as the sudden addition of a beard. And our father’s once ruddy face now swollen and so pale, like the bellies of ticks we used to pull from our old dog—from our father’s dog, Johnny reminded me, though he later claimed not to remember her. Said what did it matter, she was gone.

We’d reached the circus by then. It was smaller than I remembered, only a single tent with faded stripes. A bear sat in front of it. It’d been shaved and dressed in a green vest and diaper. Around its left ankle was a sharp iron manacle. The manacle was attached to a chain and the chain attached to nothing. Why doesn’t it leave, we asked its handler, a man in a matching green suit.

I wish he would, the handler said. You know how much it costs to keep him? Say, you boys wouldn’t happen to have any cigarettes would you?

Its leg is bleeding, Johnny said.

He don’t mind, the handler said. I could take off his iron and he’d just sit there, begging for smokes. That’s all he’s good for. Just you watch, he said, and he pried open the manacle and shook it at the bear, shook it right under the bear’s shaved face. The bear blinked, then slowly gathered itself and stood on its hind legs so it towered over the handler. The handler didn’t seem too bothered. He kept shaking the manacle and its chain, grinning and making a racket. When the bear took off, the handler stopped shaking the manacle and stared at it as if puzzling over how it could possibly work. Well I’ll be, he kept saying. Well I’ll be. Then he sat on the bear’s old patch of dirt and told us we best go after him, it being our fault he ran off and all.

In the end, the bear hadn’t run that far. He was stopped beside the tiger, sitting on his haunches while she tried to teach him how to smoke. Each time she gave him a cigarette, he wrapped his tongue about it and swallowed it, then held out a paw for another. The tiger sighed and sieved out another cigarette for the bear. They were Parliaments like our father used to smoke. We looked for other signs of him, a trail of blood leading this way or that, but as usual, he’d only left behind a faint scent of tobacco.

Do you think she ate him, Johnny later asked on our way back home. I thought maybe he was asking the bear who trotted beside us, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He’d eaten almost the whole pack before finally getting it right. I thought about answering for the bear, that of course the tiger didn’t eat our father—she was civilized, after all. But then I thought I’d let Johnny reach his own conclusions. He was sharp, my brother. He understood the way of the world.

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“On Our Way to the Circus” is the winner of the flash fiction competition of A SmokeLong Summer 25.