Animals: “Apples for Tigers” by Niyah Morris

Apples for Tigers

by Niyah Morris

I sat crouched behind a massive pine, binoculars pressing deep rings into the skin around my eyes. I had been out there for an hour at that point, maybe longer. My thighs hurt. I was starting to lose some of the feeling in my fingers, the air surprisingly chilly for this early in September. I kept thinking, I should get up. I should go back inside, but I didn’t move. By then, it had become a kind of game—how long could I get away with seeing something I wasn’t supposed to see?

The rhinoceros lowered its head to the water to drink. Then it stood and stared out across the river, its horns pointed toward Kaesong to the north, tail swinging like a braid. The whole time I had been out there, that was all I had seen it do. I could hear my editor’s voice in my head going: Where was the story in that?

She would urge me to open with the plain truth, which was this: There was a rhinoceros or something like it in the mountain woods of Korea, where the nearest ancestors of the genus had been extinct since prehistoric times. Yet here was one, impossibly alive.

A rush of bitter wind shook the trees. Resigned at last, I lowered my binoculars. I couldn’t just stand there, in awe and disbelief. If I walked fast, I could get to the house, grab my camera, and be back in twenty, twenty-five minutes. I started walking. By the time the house came into view, I was nearly sprinting. I ran up the stairs, slung my camera around my neck by its strap and ran back out and through the trees, fast enough to startle the magpies and starlings from their roosts. But when I came back to that spot overlooking the river, the rhinoceros—that miracle—was gone.

*

The listing had said the house was available to rent for the month. It was nestled in the mountains near the border, on the outskirts of Paju. I thought the location would be good for writing. I had been working on the long-overdue next installment of my column for the better part of a year already and wanted nothing more than to be done with it. My editor back in New York wanted the same.

The work had been slow-going as of late. My column documented global efforts to reintroduce regionally extinct species into the wild. The first couple months of research and reportage had taken me across Southeast Asia to write about the conservation of pangolins, tapirs, flying squirrels. Readers loved the column—each installment ranked among the most-read and shared content on the magazine’s website for months after going online. I was planning to head to Australia for the next few pieces when I got word from my uncle in Korea that my mother had died. Of a brain tumor that had shown up on her scans not even a month before. I hadn’t known about the cancer, but I wasn’t surprised. My mother kept so many secrets. Sometimes I got the feeling she didn’t even realize she was doing it, hiding herself away as though every facet of her life were a morsel other people might steal. I wrote to my editor and told her what had happened, that I would be heading to Korea instead. She sent her condolences from her iPhone and asked whether I could get a draft to her by the end of the month.

A month turned into two turned into five, and I knew I couldn’t keep on using my grief to bargain for patience. It wasn’t as though I had been doing nothing all that time. Since my mother’s funeral, I had been staying with my uncle in Yongin and making the trek into Seoul three or four times a week to browse library archives and visit animal sanctuaries and zoos. I knew there were a good number of species on the peninsula that were bordering on extinction or else already believed to have gone the way of ghosts. But for the first time since I had started my column, I began to wonder why so many of us refused to let the dead stay dead. I vehemently shoved the thought aside the first time it came to mind. But there was a morning I sat across from my uncle at the little table where we’d eat juk on his living room floor, and I felt my grief choke my heart so tight that I wondered if it was better not to know how many living things were gone from this world for good. If we knew the details, we might never stop feeling them, these brutal waves of loss.

I returned the library books on native birds. I stopped returning phone calls and emails to the wildlife sanctuaries. I played baduk with my uncle and lay in my mother’s old bed for hours a day, wondering what happens when a brain tumor kills you, which memories it crowds out first. In her last moments, did my mother remember my face? Did she know how much she had outlived, and how little would survive her?

In August, my editor gave me an ultimatum. Turn in the next installment of the column or I would never pen a word for the magazine or its subsidiaries again. In a panic, I emailed a former instructor from grad school. Told him I was stuck on this project, like a fly that kept returning to the spot it had been shooed from seconds earlier. He told me I needed space. To get away. Get to a quiet room, he said. Then get to work. I found the listing that same night and booked the place before I could talk myself out of it.

The first Sunday in September, I drove up to Paju and arrived as the sun was sinking into the dense woods behind the villa. I followed the check-in instructions I remembered from the listing. The key in the wooden mailbox on the face of the house. Shoes off and stored neatly in the entryway. Brown house slippers, a little small on me, to be worn inside so as not to track in dirt.

Stepping inside, I stood my suitcase against the wall and surveyed the interior. Cream-yellow walls, brown hardwood floors. An open living and dining area ahead of me, a kitchen area to my right, and a staircase tucked into the corner to my left, leading up to the bedroom and bathroom.

I went to wash my hands, dusty from travel, when I noticed a fruit basket on the countertop beside the kitchen sink. Mandarins, melons, pears. I reached in and picked up a mandarin, testing its weight in my hand to see if it was real. It was, and so were the other fruits.

I didn’t like having fruit in the house, especially what I called countertop fruit. You bring one into your home—a snack for a future, hungrier version of yourself—and you forget it. By the following morning, it’s begun to freckle, and by the morning after that, the freckles have begun to crawl. Fruit flies. You think the peels are browning a little, the apples going soft in spots, until your countertop is crawling with little gnats, your home already infested.

I wanted to put the fruit from the basket in the refrigerator, at least, but I found its shelves fully stocked with bread, vegetables, and deli meat. Cartons of milk and bottles of water stood in the baskets on the inside of the refrigerator door. There was no room for the fruit, so I left it out. I would have to make a fruit salad or something later, something I could freeze and keep. I felt the beginnings of overwhelm climbing up my throat. I had so much to do. A month felt like nothing. At the same time, a month felt impossibly long. The sum of all those days pressed down on my chest.

I tried calling my uncle to tell him I had gotten there in one piece, but my phone wasn’t getting any service. I wandered around the house in search of cellular bars and found none. I decided to unpack while I still had some energy. By the time I hauled my suitcase up the stairs and put away all my clothes, I had sweated the fabric of my white blouse soft and pulpy. I needed a shower. A good night’s sleep.

I woke up at dawn the first morning and put a kettle on the stove for tea. I brought the mug of oolong up to the bedroom and sat down at the writing desk to work.

What I knew, and what my old instructor had intuited, was that I needed a change of environment to make progress. You cannot move forward in the writing if you remain still in the world, my professor had written in his email. I opened my laptop and found the document for my column, which hadn’t been modified in the last month. I clicked on the space after the final word I had typed: gone. The cursor blinked slowly. Patiently. I took a sip of tea.

Lately, I had been thinking about the crested ibis. How the bird had once flown through Korea on its way west to China and Russia and on its way back east to Japan. How it vanished from the cities where it had been known to nest, one colony falling after another. The last individual spotted on the peninsula had been seen flying near the demilitarized zone in 1979, and only in the 2000s were efforts made to reintroduce ibises raised in captivity into the wild. A bird that had been thought dead, flying the routes its ancestors had flown. A miracle. There was a story somewhere in these facts, but so far I hadn’t found it.

Even now, the words eluded me. I looked up from the document. The soft blue light that had filled the window at dawn was easing into the citrus hue of late morning. I remembered the fruit basket then. I should make that fruit salad. I would come back to the writing. I had time.

I was in the kitchen peeling one of the mandarins when I heard three light knocks on the door. I set the mandarin on the counter and went to answer it. Standing on the stone steps in front of the house, in a red baseball cap and overalls beaten up by dust, was an older man, his face tan and wrinkled like onionskin.

The old man lifted his cap to get a better look at me. He was the owner’s grandfather, I guessed. When I booked the place, the owner had messaged me with additional notes and instructions. That was how I learned she was in marketing, that she spent several months a year in China on business. She apologized that she wouldn’t be there to welcome me, but mentioned that her grandfather lived on a small farm in a nearby eup and would be around as a landlord of sorts, should I need one. She must have told him about me, too, seeing as he didn’t look too surprised to see me there. He smiled and made his way past me, into the house. His sneakers tracked in red dirt and yellow blades of grass. The old man roamed around the kitchen, running his fingers over the face of the fridge and the countertops, knocking on the wood of the table and the backs of the chairs, looking over everything with a wistful gleam in his eyes.

This is a beautiful house, he said. He looked at me, expectant.

I nodded, told him yes, the house was gorgeous. He kept smiling, as though encouraging me to go on, but I didn’t know what more there was to say.

The owner had told me if there were any problems bigger than a question about where to find something like spare rolls of toilet paper or an extra bottle of body wash, I should call her grandfather up. I told her my Korean wasn’t the best, as I hadn’t lived here since I’d finished elementary school. She said it should be fine. While her grandfather didn’t speak much English, he would understand enough to know the usual ailments of the house—clogged sink, clogged toilet, and as the weather grew colder, frozen pipes. Sure enough, as the old man eased himself into one of the kitchen chairs, I noticed the toolbelt around his waist. It seemed like an afterthought, though, like a hat you only remember to put on because it happens to be on the coat rack on your way out.

I sat down across from him. He eased back in the chair and looked around. It was as if he were seeing a stranger’s home for the first time. His eyes were still gleaming. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

My granddaughter said you could speak Korean, he said.

I try, I told him. I didn’t mention my mother, wasn’t ready to speak about her in the past tense.

The old man asked what had brought me to Paju, and I told him I was writing.

A book?

An article.

He asked what it was about, and I said, weakly: animals. There were plenty of animals around here, he said. Musk deer, boars, foxes. Ratsnakes, if you took a wrong step in the woods. He chuckled, said my article should be done in no time.

While we talked, I remembered I hadn’t been able to call my uncle and asked the old man if there was a working landline in the house. He said the phone lines were always down for a few days every month—mountain hares and weasels gnawing through the wires. See! Animals! Lots of ’em! There was nothing the old man could do about it, but someone from the regional office would have to come out at some point once enough townsfolk complained. I tried to mask the worry lines I knew were creasing my face, but the old man didn’t seem to notice.

Sufficiently entertained for the day, he stood up and stretched. He promised to stop by again and wished me luck with the writing. His eyes then roamed around the kitchen until they landed on the fruit basket near the sink and the mandarins on the counter. He got up and grabbed one of the mandarins I hadn’t peeled yet, set it in my hand and closed my fingers around it. Then, with a laugh that felt like wind moving through a forest of trees, he left.

I didn’t write for the rest of the day, but that night I dreamt of red foxes, flashes of color in the dark of the woods. 

*

I tried writing early in the mornings when I woke up. I tried writing in the afternoons, after I had made a simple lunch from the broths and side dishes the owner left for me in the fridge. I tried writing during the golden hours, with the promise that I could stop after the sun had set. Each of these days, I wrote some of the best sentences I had written in years. But before I could get too far beyond them, I felt all this noise cutting into my writing, my thoughts. At first, I couldn’t place the sources of the sounds—they would change depending on the time of day. Sometimes, a faint scratching overhead or a low hum underfoot. Other times, a moan that seemed to last for hours.

The sixth or seventh day that I was there, I started going out for walks before I wrote. I took some of the fruits from the basket with me each time, to eat or feed them to something that would. No matter how much of the food I consumed, there was always so much left. I was sure it was all going to rot soon and reasoned that if I tossed the molding melons and blue-spotted slices of bread into the woods for the birds to pick at and the moss to grow over, it wasn’t a waste. I began to think some animals were drawn specifically to the stuff that was starting to putrefy. I would leave pears that had gone soft and black in spots near certain trees and return to them the following day to find the fruit eaten down to the cores.

The old man came by most evenings, bringing me even more food from his farm—juicy tomatoes, blueberry jam—and asking how the article was coming along. I had nothing to report to him the first few days. I was beginning to think I would never finish the article, would never be able to add another word to it, until the morning I saw the rhinoceros in the woods about a week and a half into my stay.

I was on one of my walks, tossing sweet potatoes that had started to go bad into the underbrush. Birds chittered as they dove through the leaves and flew off with the spoils. Voles wrestled over the skins. The walk had been mostly uphill—my skin was sticky with tick repellant and sweat. I spotted a clearing through the trees ahead and a river beyond that. Figuring it would be a good spot for bird-watching, I went closer.

So far, I had seen mostly kites and crows in the woods around the house—no crested ibises or other near-deads, though keeping an eye out for them was more wishful thinking on my part. Still, I usually brought along a camera and always kept my binoculars on me, if nothing else. That day, though, I’d only meant to venture out briefly to get rid of some of the browning countertop fruit, so I left the camera behind.

I stopped when I saw the creature in the clearing. My hands shook as I gripped the binoculars where they rested over my heart and brought them up to my eyes.

I stood there, looking through the lenses in shock. Slowly, a single coherent thought formed in my head: There’s a rhinoceros in the woods. I repeated the words, mentally and then out loud, gasping them as I sprinted to the house, then back out to the clearing. I whispered that sentence over and over as I trudged back home with the empty camera in tow.

My whole body was humming for the rest of the afternoon. I almost burned myself frying eggs, I was so on edge. Finally, I managed to cook two without burning them and sat down at the kitchen table to eat, but I had no appetite, so I just poked holes in the hard-fried whites with a fork and tried to think of a good lede.

Around sundown, the old man came by. He wasn’t wearing his toolbelt this time, just a woven pouch that sat on his hip like a fanny pack. He reached inside the pouch and pulled out a handful of sunflower seeds. I started to say I wasn’t hungry, but he was already pouring a shower of seeds into my palm.

As we snacked, the old man asked me how the article was coming, whether I had seen any animals. Told me the damned musk deer spent the nights braying like they were being murdered and eating through his barley crop. I told him I’d heard their barking at night and moans that might have been owls, but until that morning, I hadn’t encountered many animals aside from common birds and shrews.

I knew what I’d seen that day but didn’t trust myself to say it out loud. So I described it and let the old man make his guesses. 멧돼지? he tried, but I said no, boars had tusks, not horns like this thing had. 코끼리 was his next guess, but what I’d seen was shorter than an elephant. Then, like we were playing a game, his face brightened with the answer—아, 아! 코뿔소! He mimed the horns coming out from the space between a rhino’s eyes. I clapped and nodded—right, right. I thought I had seen one earlier, I said and waited for him to laugh, but he didn’t. Just kept smiling, eyes shining with delight.

But that couldn’t have been what I saw, right?

I asked the question to my now-empty hands. Later, I would look up the location of the nearest zoo, scan the local news for word on whether any animals had recently escaped. But even then, I knew the search would yield nothing. A rhino sighting, plain as day in Paju. No creature even remotely like it had existed in this region for more than ten thousand years, so how—

Something must have called its spirit back.

The old man spoke slowly. The word he used for spirit, I remembered hearing so many times all those months ago. May her spirit find peace. Her spirit lives on. Absurd as it seemed, it comforted me to imagine the spirit as a kind of star, frenetic and bright, so alive that it continued to burn without its body. Somehow, it hurt less to think the ashes we had kept were not my mother, that the part of her I missed was something I could summon if I tried. I would never have imagined I could be so sentimental.

You know jesa?

The old man laid out his hands, palms down, pantomiming a table spread. I did know about jesa. Offerings made to the departed, the remnants of which the living consumed. I’d seen the ancestral rites performed a handful of times in my life, all before the age of ten. I had memories of lying on my back on the floor of my grandparents’ house in my pink Moomin pajamas, belly bloated with food while the grown-ups laughed drunkenly in the other room. Back then, all my ancestors had been people I had never met, too long gone to miss. I didn’t know how it would feel to hold a feast for ghosts I actually knew.

The old man told me I should come by his farm sometime—he would prepare the ancestral rites. I had thought jesa was offered only during certain holidays, but the old man said he made small offerings on his own whenever the spirits craved them. I asked how he could tell. He said there were ways—the spirits grew restless. You could hear them, running wild through the nearby woods, groaning and hissing in the walls and circuits of the house. They were always hungry, to varying degrees. Always searching for a way back to whatever had survived them.

Scientists had a name for the last known member of a species, the one whose death would mark the extinction of the whole group. The last of the line was called an endling. Most extinct species did not have a known endling. It was much more common for them to die off unnoticed. I remembered how surprised I’d been to learn that someone had given that final trace a name at all. I asked the old man what we’d call an animal in Korean when the last of its kind passed on. He thought about it for a while before telling me you would simply say they were gone.

*

I brought my camera with me on all my walks for the rest of the week, but I only managed to spot common birds, red squirrels, and deer. I found a set of tracks on Friday morning after a night of rain and spent the rest of the day studying the photographs. I was almost certain they belonged to a big cat of some kind—I was imagining a lynx, unlikely but not impossible that close to the border—but the tracks came to an abrupt end as if the beast that made them had suddenly taken flight. I went back to that same spot on Saturday but found no bent branches, large droppings, or any other traces of a big cat having recently passed through. Even the mud where I was sure the tracks had been seemed to have been rubbed smooth.

Come Sunday, I woke up feeling heavy and couldn’t place why until I opened my computer to try writing and saw the date. It had been exactly half a year since my mother died.

Perhaps it was merely good timing that the old man was preparing jesa for that night.

He stopped in late in the morning to invite me over for dinner. He told me I didn’t need to prepare anything, since most of the food was from his own harvest, and what he didn’t grow or raise on the farm, he bought or traded for. One of his good friends was a fishmonger in Incheon, another a butcher in Gimpo. We would have dried mackerel. We would have good-quality beef.

The old man came by again to pick me up as the sun began to set. We rode in his truck to the farm about fifteen, twenty minutes out. On the way, we passed walls of forest on either side of the barely-paved road. I saw movement in the trees and thought again of the tracks I had come across on my walk the other day, though now I knew it was likely nothing wilder than the wind.

I told the old man about a report I had found while doing research some months ago about the tigers that had once been abundant in the mountains of Korea, so abundant that they appeared in almost every fable I could remember from my childhood. A few surviving accounts claimed the tigers had been deliberately hunted to extinction during Japan’s colonization of Korea. It was commonly believed that the last known tiger on the peninsula had been captured and killed by Japanese hunters in the 1920s. In the decades since, rumors spread that a few surviving tigers still stalked the woods to the north, or else that some later migrants had found their way to the peninsula from Russia, but there had been no definitive sightings on the southern side of the demilitarized zone thereafter. In less than half a century, Japan had managed to completely erase all traces of them from the land. I asked the old man if he could believe it. He grunted but didn’t say.

The sun had fully set by the time we arrived at the farm. His truck rolled over rough dirt and wild grass turning into the patch of tire-worn earth that stood in for a driveway. We got out, and the old man led me through a narrow path between tufts of tall grass and sunflowers. Ahead of me, he remarked without once looking back, The dogs love ’em.

His house was a simple, surprisingly modern one-story, a smooth stone face and big square windows. It was more spacious inside than I would have guessed. The floors—made from natural wood—were scuffed dull, but I could imagine a time they had gleamed like new.

The old man directed me to a long, low table in the dining room. Have a seat, he insisted, so I did. One by one, he brought in dishes for the spread. The table crowded with saucers, bowls, trays. From what I remembered, there were rituals to be performed before the feast could begin, incense to burn and kowtowing to do, a certain order to things, but the old man seemed uninterested in ceremony. He simply asked me which ancestors I wanted to invite to our meal.

I thought of my mother. Her parents. My father’s father, and all the unnamed ghosts on his side of the family. The last known tiger to roam the land where I was living now, an ancestor to no one.

The old man asked if I knew the Hanja for their names, which I did not. To him, it made no difference. He drew strokes on the floor between us with his finger, the characters for mother, grandmother, grandfather. The one for tiger, fittingly, was an assemblage of stripes. He wrote names I did not know, but told me the meanings of each character—his ancestors had names full of gold, beauty, light. Once their names had been drawn, we waited for our ghosts. Recalling scattered bits of the ritual, I asked if we should leave the room so the ancestors could eat first, but he waved off the idea and said the spirits had probably been lonely enough all this time. May as well stay and eat with them. So we did.

After the meal, I helped the old man rinse some of the dishes and tidy up. It was late, a little past 11. I told him I should be getting home and thanked him for the food.

Outside, animals surrounded the house. Pairs of wild, glowing eyes winked like fireflies all throughout the fields of grass and flowers. All that ghostly light illuminated their half-hidden faces—martens, foxes, wolves. The old man’s dogs were barking into the night, straining at their leashes which were tied to a post off to the side of the house. The old man handed me a pouch of nuts and seeds. He tossed some out to the grass as he made his way down the path again. I followed. The grass rustled as creatures darted after the scatterings of food. Lots of animals, the old man murmured. Lots and lots of animals.

As we approached his truck, the ground beneath us began to tremble like a big truck was passing down the main road or a plane was soaring low overhead. But when I looked back at the main road we had come up, I saw no cars, only the woods beyond the main road also trembling despite the absence of a breeze. As I turned to the old man again, I saw him gesturing for me to hurry over to the truck. He hobbled around to the driver’s side while I climbed into the passenger’s seat. Earthquake? I asked, but the old man shook his head. The truck was rattling so hard, I was afraid to say another word for fear that I might bite off my own tongue.

I looked up at the rearview mirror and gasped when I saw what was there: a surge of huge, dark beasts stampeding out of the woods. The source of the tremors, the pounding of hundreds of hooves on earth. Their eyes glowed a ghostly green, too, revealing horns, tusks, and wings, small beasts sprinting at the front of the pack, huge beasts pulling up the rear. Wild cattle, megafauna, enormous birds—there were animals coming toward us now that had not lived in these mountains in centuries. I was going to scream—every muscle in my body strained with the effort—but if any sound came out of me, it was drowned out by the thundering roar that seemed to be everywhere now, around me and inside me, pounding against my ribs from within like the horde was my own heart. The truck swung from side to side. Eyes squeezed shut, I waited to be crushed, stamped down to nothing. But at the height of the noise, at the moment I was sure the end was coming, all the roaring around and inside us hushed. Like we had plunged into the ocean. It was quiet now. The burst of pain I’d been waiting for never came. I opened my eyes.

The horde was gone. There was nothing in the rearview mirror, nothing I could see through the windshield but the night. I looked around, peering out the windows, and saw the old man’s yard sitting dark and still, empty of eerie, glowing eyes.

I looked over at the old man where he sat in the driver’s seat, rough hands gripping the steering wheel tight. He didn’t seem to be too shocked, his expression more thoughtful than afraid. I studied him for a while, but his face gave nothing away. His eyes remained glassy and distant, as if he were seeing something out there in all the trees that was just beyond my sight.

*

That night, after the old man dropped me back off at the rental house, I couldn’t sleep. I kept imagining ibises and cranes. Aurochs, mammoths, sabertooths. Mothers with tumors growing like horns inside their heads.

I got out of bed and went downstairs, turned on all the lights. I opened all the cupboard and cabinet doors, pulled out all the shelves in the refrigerator and the drawers under the sink. I brought out all the plates and trays, the chopsticks and knives, the tongs and scissors. I didn’t know what to prepare, so I began to pull out all the food in the house—packages of meat from the freezer, the remaining fruits in the basket on the countertop and in the drawers in the fridge, flour and rice from the cupboards, garlic cloves and spinach leaves. I set a pot of water on the stove, lined a pan with sesame oil, placed a melon on the cutting board, took a pair of scissors to scallions. Moving around the kitchen, I worked from instinct, pulling from an even deeper place than memory. While the rice cooked in the machine, I laid out plates on the table. As a fistful of cellophane noodles cooked down to translucent strings, I spooned doenjang and gochujang onto small saucers and placed them on the table’s ends. All the while, I thought of Umma, the care with which she’d spoon jeon batter into a pan of oil, the easy grace with which she pried the bones from fish. It had been years since I had last seen her that way, head bowed over smoke and steam, telling me, her wailing, wild-haired daughter: soon, soon, soon. As a child, I had been ravenous. My mother had seemed so unhurried then—her hands couldn’t prepare the food fast enough to sate my hunger. Now, with my own hands, bigger and clumsier than hers, I peeled mandarins for moon bears. Halved apples for tigers.

I took a few spare towels from a closet in the bedroom and brought them out to the yard behind the house. I laid them out on the grass and dirt, then started bringing out the dishes, a few plates and bowls at a time. I tried to recreate my mother’s old jesa spreads from memory. My heart ached for all the dead, so hard I knew their spirits had to feel it. 

The spread laid out, I went back inside and wrote until the sky began to lighten again. I closed the laptop, more than ready to sleep. I stood, casting one last glance out the window at the woods. Trees swaying in the wind. A figure moving in the dark.

I thought again that I must have been mistaken. But the energy emanating from the animal was undeniable, sparks of light shooting off its pelt like the cloud of gnats spinning in the glow from the porchlights. 

A tiger. Like something out of a dream. Massive, stalking toward the foods I had prepared. It circled the blanket I had spread out in the yard, hunched its back and nosed one of the apples off the plate. Then the creature turned its huge head toward the anchovies pickling in a little dish at one end of the spread. The fruit rolled down to the main road, forgotten. In one flick of the tiger’s tongue, the dish that held the anchovies was licked clean and white. In another flick, the tiger downed a fritter, still gleaming with oil. It made its way around the feast, nipping at the acorn jelly, rubbing its snout in glass noodles. Then it turned away and dove into the sea of grass, a flash of fire, gone.

About Niyah Morris

Niyah Morris is a writer and translator from Jersey City, New Jersey. She holds BAs in Ethnic Studies and Literary Arts from Brown University and an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Rutgers University-Newark. Her story "Lowcountry" was selected for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other fiction of hers has appeared in The Rumpus, Strange Horizons, Thin Noon, Necessary Fiction, and more.