Work Text:
Every day, just between the moment of waking up and getting out of the bed, Soft Whisper closes his eyes, and imagines himself being devoured by a great and terrible tiger.
"Man-eating tiger. Evil tiger." He'd mutter to himself, putting the emphasis on the word "Evil", wielding the implicit understanding and context given only when imagination runs wild for too long.
He never mentions the color of its pelt. He never elaborates further.
It isn't a secret of his. He acts no different when waking in the presence of others. If someone were to ever ask him outright, had he pondered being eaten by some animal? He'd probably say yes. People are not insane enough to ask this to the respected Soft Whisper, and neither is he, to speak unprompted of slaughter and consumption, but he holds little shame over his rumination. Compared to the thoughts of vile debauchery other tailed let slip when drunk on spirits, his is a mere curiosity.
A lack of desire for conversation or companionship leaves him alone in his study at odd hours, chewing tobacco and turning the thought over in his mind. In tender moments, he even reflects on the beauty of it, the mystery of the image. Variations abound, but the core truth never changes. He has tried, many times, to put it into writing. Sheets of paper have been torn, ink spilled, approaches discarded. The setup stifles, the aftermath atrophies. The tiger refuses.
The urge to write about it fights bitterly with his understanding that a stream-of-consciousness story about a man being eaten by a tiger would never make it. Not on its own, nor as part of a grander narrative or collective anthology. It wouldn’t resonate with other works, other readers. And trying to alter it, to shape it into something more palatable, would lose something he could not put words to, the reason why it persisted in his mind.
"It'd be nice to get something out of it." He thinks.
But maybe his skills aren’t enough. Maybe writing simply isn’t the medium. Or maybe the compromise between what he wants to express and what might be accepted and bring him recognition is just impossible. He doesn’t say this. He doesn’t even think it, not directly. But when he crumples another page and returns to more convenient work, it’s clear enough what his heart is trying to say.
If it isn't that, it's not worth it.
He’s long been dead, having lived a happy and serene life. If he ever harbored bitter regrets, none were directed at the thought of the tiger or at never writing it down. No one knows what he left undone. No one knows how meaningful it was meant to be, or the weight of meaninglessness those morning thoughts held.
No one will ever wonder what it was about.
No one but us.