Hi. I’m Sam. I like to prowl around in a tiger suit, but I don’t get to run very much because I’m only eight years old. Mum makes me hold her hand a fair bit, especially in the city, but I don’t really mind cause if I’m a good boy she buys me ice cream, like the rainbow paddle pop, which is really caramel. But I’ve known that since before I was born, about the rainbow paddle pop, and about mothers, not that I tell her, she wouldn’t believe me. I’ve actually lived since the dawn of time. You’re right, my body hasn’t, but my spirit has, or my soul I guess. I’m not sure what it’s called. I’m very wise, and quite smart, but I only have the vocabulary of an eight year old. Sometimes I surprise myself with words that I don’t know. They just come up like comets. Comets come from Oort clouds. So do souls like mine if you’re lucky enough. I carry around a little dictionary in the back of my tiger suit where grown people put their wallets. I don’t have a wallet because I don’t need one; my mum’s a bank. She says I have a lively imagination. I looked up the word lively and it means: full of life and energy; active and out going, and also, intellectually stimulating or perceptive, and also, having a quick, bouncy tempo. If only she knew how full of life I was! But I must not scare her, or anyone else for that matter, and live lively as only one sensibly can, by having a bounce and quickness to their step, which is, of course, inherent to the tiger. I also looked up the word inherent. It’s a good one. I’m remembering things all the time. Sometimes they happen to me in dreams, and other times I get a stirring in my head that whirls and whirls and I remember things that cannot have happened to me, because I am speaking another language, or I am a different sex, or everything is lit by candles because electricity hasn’t been invented yet. I should be scared when this happens but I am not scared. Not even for a second. I call these memory jigs. I looked that phrase up too and it wasn’t listed so I’m claiming it as my own. When I enter a memory jig I enter another person’s life. Even so, I know everything about them. So memory can be carried in the soul - maybe this is why some people are more depressed or sad or happy or crazy than other people: old souls collecting the thoughts of their hosts like stamps, stamps that are stuck all over the body, until they can’t breathe because they’re covered and smothered and cranky. The happy ones probably like the stamps because they keep them warm, like a second skin. It’s all very perceptive, I think.
I got up real early this morning. I was dreaming and then I shot up like a spring. All my tinkerbuds I think. Tinkerbuds live in your stomach mainly, but when they get riled up they swim breakneck through your veins and heart and lungs and you can’t breathe unless you move really fast, or squeal, or do a sprint. I put on my tiger suit and went downstairs. I stopped suddenly on the bottom step because there was a fish tank on my table and it had not been there the night before. I moved closer, holding my tail so that it would not drag on the ground, not because it might get dirty but because I was afraid to upset the fish. They are very sensitive to vibrations. I peered through the glass. There was a small purple one who hid amongst some reeds, and then a bigger yellow guy who looked like he was sleeping in the castle. A fish in a castle; I shook my head and laughed a little, not out loud, but just in my mind. Then the floor began to blink purple and black and a little tornado came in through my ear. They always come in through the ear. It’s hard to explain, the memory jigs, because when it happens it’s all pretty sudden. It’s mainly just a lot of flashing in front of your eyes, not always the same colours, then a spinning, like your on a vortex, or a merry-go-round, first with your eyes open, but then with them closed, because someone has pushed the merry-go-round faster, and the grass and the sky and the girl on the rocking horse all blend into one.
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I am outside a shack, just off the sand, a small dirt trail. I’m about nine years old. My mother is inside. She sweeps at the spiders on the ceiling and in the cracks of the walls. They fall to the ground. There are red-backs and baby red-backs that scurry with their eight legs because they are exposed. My mother kills them. Whacks them with her broom on the wooden floorboards. The shack has a rectangular table that sits in the middle of the singular room. It holds candles that someone has forced into old wine bottles. There are no light switches. There is no power. Outside iguanas slink their long tails across the tin roof and scamper into trees, sometimes chased by other iguanas because they are probably mating.
