The Tigress
Stephen Mosher
Picture the scene: a comfortable one-story house in a suburban neighborhood in Texas. It is occupied by a happy family, simply going about their day, and life is pleasant. There is a wife, a husband, and a grown son with special needs, and there are frequent visits from the other children, one who lives locally, and two who live in other states. There is never nothing going on in the house.
On this particular day, the house is full; it is nearing twilight. The husband’s television in the front room is playing a sports show, the son’s television in his bedroom is on a sporting event, the wife’s television in the Living Room is showing an NCIS episode… but nobody is watching television. Everyone is gathered in the living room and the kitchen - the father, the son, the out-of-town son, the local son, and the local son’s daughter. All of the men are gathered throughout the Living Room, the Kitchen, and the Dining Room, talking about the things that fathers and sons and brothers talk about. The air abounds with energy as the male voices fill the rooms and three television sets blast noise. The mother is not engaged in conversation with the men of her family, indeed, the mother is not engaged in conversation with anybody, for she is sound asleep on the Living Room floor, four feet from the console television set playing out its ninth episode of NCIS for the day. The mother often sleeps right here, on the cool, hardwood floor. The mother can sleep anywhere - the sofa, the floor, an armchair - anywhere but her bed, where she seems to toss and turn and try to fall and stay asleep. At this moment in time, it is the cool dark brown slats of the shiny wood floor that cradles her in her rest as the voices chatter and the sound of little feet can be heard throughout the house.
The Living Room is adjacent to the Dining Room and they are connected by doorways and runways that are seeming parts of the Kitchen and the Foyer, and even though the Kitchen floor is linoleum and the Foyer’s, ceramic tile, even though the two larger rooms are paved with different kinds of wood, the sound of the feet is the same in each room. This is the daughter of the son who lives mere minutes away with the family he calls his own. The four year old girl is playful and rambunctious and replete with energy but she needs no companion to spend that energy, for she has herself, and what herself is doing right now is running. She runs in a circle from the Living Room through the Kitchen through the Dining Room through the Foyer through the Living Room through the Kitchen through the Dining Room through the Foyer… around and around she goes, through thresholds and archways and doorways. Slap, slap, slap go her little white feet and bubblegum toes, as her red hair flies behind her, in the wind that she, herself, is making. Slap, slap, slap. Slap, slap, slap. Wood, tile, linoleum, wood, tile, linoleum. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap. The giggling girl dodges in and out of the legs of her father, her uncles, her grandfather, she darts in between her grandmother and the crime drama covered TV screen. Slap, slap, slap. Slap, slap, slap. The child shows no sign of stopping, only of running, and giggling, and slapping the floor with her fleshy feet. Slap, Slap…
Suddenly, there is silence. The slapping has stopped. There is no noise, for a split second, as the sound of little palms hitting wood floor thuds, and an instantaneous cry is released:
“Whaa…”
In an equally split second, the woman on the floor is awake and moving. No more of the cry than “Whaa…” has been heard, but eyes have snapped open, awake from a deep sleep, and a sixty-five year old body is speedily vaulted into the air, as legs carry the woman to the sound of the crying babe. From the moment that the little palms hit the floor to the time that the woman’s arms scooped up the fallen child, no more than five seconds has passed.
This is the instinct of a Mother. This is the speed of a Grandmother.
This is the Nature of The Tigress.