My White Tiger is Too Weak to Eat Me

by Janelle Bassett

My white tiger and I share Q-tips but we have our own toothbrushes. If I could get my hands on a toothbrush with bristles at each end, we’d share that too because I consider myself to be a firm minimalist, for the most part. It doesn’t look good for a minimalist to own an exotic pet. Wild animals are extraneous to apartment living—my tiger cub cannot grind my coffee or lengthen my lashes or tell me, for the millionth time, to unclench my jaw. So please know that I am very much against the owning of white tiger cubs ethically and also spatially, like she takes up a lot of space that could be empty space. But once a tiger baby joins your family, you have certain responsibilities. You can’t shirk your interspecies step-sister just because she’s furry.

My dad’s wife Candace runs a roadside snake attraction—all snakes, only snakes, snakes on snakes. Candance has to dedicate at least two hours a week to untangling those spaghetti-looking fuckers. (She actually has a tattoo on her inner wrist that says LIVING FOR LIVING KNOTS and when Dad begs her to consider switching careers she points at the tattoo as a counterargument.) Then Candace’s snake dealer offered her a low-cost cub she couldn’t refuse, told her the cub would pay for itself in a matter of weeks as long as she kept it away from the mouth-end of the pythons. The dealer called the cub Mingle but he had an accent that made it sound like Mangle and the name Mangle stuck, as a way of taunting fate.

Candace and Mangle didn’t get along because she truly only likes animals that come in one long shape. She said that Mangle’s limbs turned her stomach, they way they held her up off the ground. Candace tried to return the cub for a refund, but her snake dealer said he was shedding his former business model and moving into scrap metal recycling so to please stop calling unless she had a hot load of copper. Dad wanted to give her to a zoo, but Candace couldn’t bear to “further the zoo’s sinister agenda.” I don’t know what this means, but it’s one of the more coherent things I’ve heard from Candace.

So now it’s me and Mangle and our daily attempts at healing. Mangle, like all white tigers in captivity, is the result of generations and generations of inbreeding. In order to force the rare trait of white fur into consistently showing up, breeders pair up parents and offspring, brothers and sisters, and other close relatives like bad uncle stuff. The resulting health problems are debilitating and awful and also so sad since someone chose this for them in order to make money, in order to buy things they probably didn’t even need like one of those jackets with the fringe on the sleeves. I took in Mangle to save her from further genetic curlicues and to apologize, through daily loving care, for my fellow humans who fucked up her nature and her nurture.

I give my tiger cranio sacral massages and ask her to imagine that her parents were in fact very very different, like natural peanut butter and delicious peanut butter. The life expectancy for white tigers in captivity is short enough that she might not get to wear the orange tiger costume I got her for Halloween, so I let Mangle eat Sweet Tarts and sleep on my kneecaps.

I refuse to Google “tiger care,” “tiger diet,” “tiger training,” or “tips for getting your extremely inbred tiger to stop looking so defeated.” I want to be more intuitive than that, more responsive to the vibes Mangle is giving. I want her to help me help her help me feel like a minimalist who loves freely without needing step-by-step instructions.

At night I put on calm piano music, rub Mangle’s belly and whisper empathetic commiserations.

“I know how you feel. My parents were next door neighbors.”

Or, “My mother and my uncle once shimmied into a single coat so their mother could take a silly picture.”

Or, “My grandma consistently referred to her father as ‘the most breathtaking man I’ve ever seen.’”

Or, “Sometimes I think of my own arms as my parents. They zip up my coat, wipe crumbs off my face and they are always right here when I need them.”

Janelle Bassett’s writing appears in The Rumpus, American Literary Review, The Offing, New Delta Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and Slice Magazine. She lives in St. Louis and is a Fiction Editor at Split Lip Magazine.