When You Trap a Tiger: Chapters 27–46

Every evening, the halmoni would try to tell the girl the story of their family. But the girl was afraid. The stories felt like darkness, the kind that hid under her bed and lurked beneath the stairs.

As the tea steeped, the girl longed for the stars and fiddled with her pendant, an heirloom left behind by a mother she never knew.

And though the girl's skin looked as it always did, it felt coarse, like matted fur.

Her tiger heart turned angry. A wild thing, she rolled her terrible eyes and gnashed her terrible teeth.

The change of atmosphere is disorienting.

She looks at Sam for two heartbeats and says, "You any good with tech? We're setting up an email newsletter for the library and scaring Joe with all this newfangled technology."

"Well, the noisy kid is waving rather frantically."

"If you think it's weird, don't eat it. The consistency looks off. It could be poop."

Halmoni is eccentric and strange, and not everybody understands her individuality.

And I know Halmoni's episodes are scary, but she loves you, too. Those momentary lapses are the illness, not her.

The phrase Take your friend to the den has a bit of a murder vibe to it, but when Ricky shows up, he looks sheepish.

"I apologize for judging your culture and for being intolerant of other beliefs. I created a hostile environment, and..."

Suddenly, his self- sabotage over the language arts test and the tutoring makes sense.

"Well, I guess you could try making the trap somewhere else. Because, no offense, but it's pretty unlikely that a tiger would just...wander into your basement. Like, my great-grandfather used to go on these big hunting expeditions in the wilderness of Siberia, because that's where tigers like to be."

Frustrated, I leave the basement, and I'm just tiptoeing past the bathroom when I hear a familiar noise.

She looks down at her empty hands, so delicate and fragile. She's lost so much weight.

I scoot closer to her, desperation roiling inside me.

Halmoni winces, like our conversation physically pains her. "There is too much fighting already. No more of that."

Back in fifth grade, during our astronomy unit, we learned about stars and galaxies and black holes. But my favorite thing was the supernova—a star exploding, bigger than we could ever imagine. An infinite, powerful force, like the sun swallowing itself whole.

She looks pale, as withered as dried mugwort, and she shakes, unsteady on her feet.

I stand under the canopy outside the hospital entrance.

Now you can tell your own star stories, the sky tiger told them, her voice skritching like coarse fabric against their ears.

Sam reaches up to unclasp the pendant. She takes it in her palm, presses it into mine, and intertwines our fingers.

Water laps at the steps. The boxes that Ricky and I worked so hard to stack slowly disintegrate into mush.

They all wave to me, and Ricky abandons them for a moment, walking up to me with a wicker basket in his arms.