On April Fool’s Day, 2018, my collection of stories, Double Bird, was published. The first story in the book is called, “Tiger Blood.” In the story, a man and a woman go on a first date—and more. It’s a very brief story, which I wrote with the goal in mind of having something to read out loud at bars in NYC. I wrote quite a lot of stories this length, and for that purpose, and having this kind of demented/abstracted feel. During the years 2013 through 2017, I would try and write a story ‘like this’ once a week. I was writing a lot of poetry then too. The thing I liked about stories this length, was that it’s possible to memorize the story, and recite it without looking at the paper, or your phone—it could all be a performance. The book/paper/phone in your hands winds up just being a prop. Freed up, you could talk to the audience about things related to the story, during the story, improvise, have fun, perhaps confound? In those four years, I wrote over a hundred stories in this mode. In 2019 I had started to feel a little bit trapped in this brief style (but not this type of performance), and began to work on longer short stories. I wondered what was possible in a short story that stretched out and explored, over the course of 4000, 5000, 6000+ words. I found that was satisfying in a different way. But still, sometimes I think of “Tiger Blood” as my best story. But what kind of lunatic keeps track of inconsequential things like that?
Tiger Blood
I meet a girl on OK Cupid and the first date goes well enough. We sit in a red booth with folds like a heart sliced open and stare at each other, sipping icy beverages, smiling the way you should at these things.
She says, “I’ve got tiger blood.”
“Oh? Like what do you mean? In a jar or something?”
“No, in my body.”
“I’m crazy too,” I say. “I once swallowed a handful of gravel. Helps me digest.”
“Like a pelican,” she says, nodding, understanding.
Jackie. Her name is Jackie. Jackie with her hair gelled back.
I grin and have spinach in between most teeth (I see it in a mirror later) but she doesn’t say anything. Now, she’s chill. I stir my iced tea. I wish we were plastered. I wish we were plastered and having sex, no condom, in the back of my pickup truck parked in the shade behind the plaza.
We’re in recovery. That happened by accident, you know. It almost always does.
“What kind of gravel was it?” she asks. “Sharp red rocks? Blue like jetty stone? River pebbles?”
“Ah come on, I was just screwing around. I didn’t swallow any gravel.”
She sits up straight.
“Well why would you say something that wasn’t true?”
“You started it.”
“I really do have tiger blood, though.”
“Really do, uh huh.”
“I’ll show you.”
We’re sober and I have car insurance right now and a current registration and even have a driver’s license and this is America and I really like this girl and want to impress her so we leave the restaurant without paying and break into the science lab at the community college.
We are working in the dark so as not to alert the watchman. Working by the miraculous LCD light of cellphone. She plugs the microscope into the wall.
It glows.
“I don’t usually do things like this on the first date.”
“It’s cool,” I say.
“Slice me open, but be gentle.”
I want her to like me, so I don’t hesitate, I drag a scalpel across her forearm and she catches a droplet of red on a perfect little glass slide and pushes it underneath the microscope, into the only shine in the room.
“Okay, take a look.”
I lean down and look.
Well look at that. She doesn’t have happy little red inner tube ringlets or plasma lifesavers or even globs of shivering crimson.
She really does have tigers.
Bengal tigers I think and they are running around on the slide in slow motion. The tigers chase each other. And play. And some lay down and sleep. And others are already sleeping. Countless tigers. In her blood. A sea of them, bounding and rolling and attacking and screwing and fighting and jumping over each other and licking their own tails and paws.
It was incredible. She was incredible. At least in this one way.
But as it goes, we didn’t last very long.
Just another date after that.
I took her roller skating.
I must not have impressed her very much with my roller skating.
And I could not pull magic out of the unknown.
And I could not cause any dark room to glow the way that room did with the night watchman lost roaming other halls.
And I could not vomit gravel like a bird does before sailing away over an endless canyon.
Double Bird has 39 other stories like ‘Tiger Blood.’
Pick up a copy here
oh i love this one. of this length, the one where the guy eats american flags, too, i love. going to reread now haha
When I think of you, it’s often of you reading this story. Your reading of this story is electric. Thanks for sharing your thoughts around it