Part One:

Nightmares haunts Diane

No one knew how the world would change, or how the framework for one’s reality was flawed. People whose identities go unregistered by the wider society were prone to seeing the cracks. Revolutions sponsored or naturally occurring worked against the political structures but come too late because the bodies are already piled high. All those important questions about humanity are left to the dry conversations between academics and politicians. The revolutionary and the status quo fail to acknowledge the pragmatic solution  or the radical solution, and so all the solutions come too late. People fell behind the problems, so they don’t see how quickly the problems mutated. That is the word for this “new problem” it mutated. Society mutated one day and people were already behind the curve. Animals needed time to adapt to this “new problem” the humans. Humans needed time for their “new problem.” Maybe everyone was fucked from the start.

After people figured out the problem, if it was even a problem in the first place. One of the children that wasn’t lucky enough to grow up with a better chance to weather the change. She’s stuck, Diane is where she has always been when the world changed. She stayed in the same room and forced her needs upon her younger brother. Like an emotional support animal, they laid there as he barely had enough space to breath.  Diane got to sleep as her brother was uncomfortably passive with her arms around his chest. She got to dream about her childhood before her brother. He hated it, he would hate it, and still he laid there while Diane dreamed.

She dreamed about her childhood. She remembered the feeling of a giant overshadowing her. She was a little girl in the land of giants, and when she sat on their shoulders, she could see what they saw. At least, for a time, she did. She was too young to remember what the world was like before people grew stripes. She was a smart little girl who watched T.V. and read books about all of her favorite animals. How the tigers moved in the tall grass, ambush predators with their violent power. How wolves moved in pacts with their animal intelligence to know to make each hunt worth it.

In her dream, the memories were spotty at best. Her parents limited her T.V.time one day when she watched a new broadcast she believed was a documentary. Diane thought it was about big cats. Half memory and half dance in the surreal mess of her mind. She had a liger stuffed animal in her arms that tried to squirm free, but she’d just squeeze tighter. The liger cried as she watched the doctor from some place called W.H.O. Some of it was too much for that little girl.  “Mutations.” “Hybrid.” One word lingered in her head, one word she understood, “Carnivore.”

“We are seeing a shift to the ecosystem to such a drastic degree with the introduction of this new carnivore,” and that announcement for a little girl that wanted to go on safari adventures it lit something in her mind. In the present, she had her arms around this “new carnivore” to get its smell on her. While she moved from moment to another, she skipped across her memories as the Liger roared and squirmed. Her brother wasn’t sleeping, he was sweating. Each time she felt him move, the more she squeezed. He thought to himself to lay there and deal with it for now. He wondered where she was right now in her fragmented childhood memory.  In this cliché, she asked her dad about these new carnivores. 

“Well, I don’t know much, but they’re like…” he struggled with the words.

“They are like us, but…they aren’t like chimps, and-” David, her dad, tried to inform him, but it was stilted. How did chimps describe their distant kin?

“Yeah, I know how some people can be called chimps,” Diane’s mother said with a chuckle. She looked unhappy, and the Liger whispered under his breath. “B***h.”

“Liger!” Diane shouted.

“Diane, let's have a new rule, ok baby? All those doctors and scientists don’t know more than the person on the ground dealing with it,” her mother didn’t acknowledge Liger.

“So…” Diane’s mother looked at David with a forced smile as he looked stiff, a cold sweat down from his brow.

“Just watch it when we’re around so we can explain it to you,” she said with a toothy smile. Even if she didn’t understand, she knew something was off. It was maybe how her dad’s voice changed, softer…meeker.

“Oh my god,” her mom’s voice. It was possibly the first time she heard fear in her voice. This fragmented memory is noisy. Her mom or her dad picked her up and stuck her in their car. A four-seater with a car seat in the back. The click sound it made when she was in.

“Momma?” Diane called out, she felt Liger out of her arms.

The parts she remembered, the most unaltered, were stores and ATMs. Diane was dragged from one place to another. People whispered or screamed about monsters and wild dogs. 

“I saw it on the news! That man just ripped a chunk out of another man’s neck. They’re all f*****g animals.”

“Yes, I want the f*****g 12 gauge! Only thing that’d work on these creatures.”

“F*****g Animals.”

“Creatures.”

“Beasts.”

A half-asleep little girl heard how the world howled at the unknown. She opened her eyes to a car so packed with everything.

“Heather? Is that enough? Do we have to go to every atm?” David asked, as exhausted as Diane.

“David…shut the f**k up,” Diane’s mom said, her voice cold as ice. 

Diane closed her eyes and tried to escape the noise. People outside screamed at another man for having a cart filled with meat. His body covered head to toe in winter clothes. Diane opened her eyes, a brief moment, she saw the world moved too fast for her. A violent flash and that man was on the ground. Fear, humans have that instinct for a reason too bad now they forgot how to use it properly. Diane cried as the people, like dogs, howled and screamed at this abrupt distinctly human form of violence. “He was an animal! A f*****g animal, you have to f*****g believe me!” 

“We can’t go outside for a long time. No, we can’t have your friends over. No, we can't watch t.v. all day. Just see it like this, we'll have family time all day,” Heather explained, more like dictated to her little girl. The Liger returned, sat at the foot of her bed, it murmured to itself. Diane pulled him in, and he panicked momentarily before he relented and sighed.

“Diane…Diane…” a deep voice came out of the dark. The memory is burning up again and she tenses up.

“Diane…” that voice called to her again

“Oh…sorry,” Diane said as she pulled away. She looked at him with contempt and guilt.

“Yeah,” he moved from her, she’d have frequent nightmares. She’d demand he’d at first sleep in the room together, then to hold her, and finally to lay in the same bed. Each request paired with guilt trips, tears, and accusations that he didn’t care.

“You’re crying,” he said as he sat up and walked to her closet.

“Yeah,  I just had a dream about how things were…” She looked at her brother as he looked over his bags in her closet.

“Roger?” she called out to him, she sounded annoyed by how he didn’t look at her.

“What?” Roger questioned.

“You’re ignoring me,” she accused.

“No I’m not, you have the same dream,” Roger heard how she talked in her sleep and how she woke up. She used to scream, but now she’d just look for Roger. That’s what she needed, at least that's what she said to Roger.

“No, this time was different,” she sounded tired, tears rolled down her face as she looked at how her brother wasn't facing her.

“Yeah? Different how?” Roger said with a dismissive tone.

“You don’t have to be like that,” Diane laid down and turned her back to him. She cried again, and Roger almost didn’t care.

“How was your dream different this time?” Roger asked. He hated how she cried, she did it every time he didn’t bend over backwards for him.

“It’s not fair, Roger, ok?” Diane cried. She sat up and saw how big Roger is, he’s a tower. Diane tensed up for a moment and continued to talk as tears rolled down her face. 

“It’s not fair how you treat me, I’m small, I’m smaller than you, and you don’t realize how you lord over me…” She lied. It made Roger take a step back before he relented. It was best to let her believe she was the victim, then to fight her.

“I’m sorry,” Roger let out a sigh and Diane kept crying before he held her as he looked up at the ceiling.

“I’m allowed to have complicated feelings, you’re supposed to be here and protect me,” Diane said as her face was buried into his chest. The room is covered in all her things, as he had his bag pressed to the back of the closet. Her desk in the corner making the room cramped and his things in a box and bag at the bottom of her closet.

“Roger, can you just hold me a little longer, ok?” Diane asks him, her tears staining his red shirt. Roger agrees and takes a deep breath. His body is a furnace, people joke that he was meant for the mountains hunting goats.

Laying down with Diane’s arms around him, he felt his chest get tight again. If he moved she shivered and if he spoke she looked at him with fear before she cried. She had their father’s eyes, Roger listened to Diane as she gave her usual speech about how things were before him. Diane forced a smile right when she started talking about his mom, and how he came along. She acted as if she had to placate him, like she’s trapped in the room with him.

“I used to play as a tiger or a lion, I’d hunt snacks in our apartment like it was a safari adventure.”

“I was the queen of the jungle.”

“I was the apex.”

“Then I learned I was prey…”

Diane fell asleep as she mourned her innocence, or maybe her ignorance. Roger pulled away bit by bit. He heard it, how slow her heartbeat became as she slept. He slipped out of her suffocating grasp. He looked at the room that has barely changed since she was thirteen. He looked down at her, he felt uncomfortable being this close.

“Goodnight Diane.” 

Now the night was for him, the night was for the Liger.

Author's Note

I would love to have general thoughts as well as any comments saying what works and what doesn't work.