When the Tiger’s Came To The City is a long fable about a long lost indigenous woman separated from her tribe many years ago due to complications with her father’s alcoholism and her jealous, mean spirited sister, her sister’s rage, his fighting brother’s and sister’s who were all known to aim their arrows at one another from time to time and lived in shame and disharmony. Luckily, the young Native girl was separated from them at birth and grew up with her mother in New York City, where the two of them could often be seen walking hand in hand from Times Square to their home in Sugar Hill, Harlem that now has a Wholefoods on the Corner in place of Mr. and Mrs. C’s Bodega where the girl grew up helping the elderly couple on weekends and after school. The girl’s mother worked three jobs, full time as she was a single mother so it wasn’t unusual at all to find the girl having supper with Mr. and Mrs. C where they would feed her warm, steaming Empanada’s or Tamale’s. On Sunday’s Mr. C would make his speciality of collard greens and pot liquor which was as rich and soft as velvet. Thick bitter greens, warm with tender pieces of ham hocks, cooked for what smelled like days that filled up the store, the hallways, the wallpaper too. The girl always noticed that it looked like someone’s old shoes, or at least the leather tops of them, but with the snow coming down like frosted dandy lions, and February ‘s bitter cold, so much so that her eyes began to tear the second she opened the door, running up to her apartment from the Bodega to get her cat who she called Mr. Cat even though he was a she. It tasted perfect to her, and all was well as her cat followed her back inside and down they all sat, in the way back of the store on an old formica table with a pink paper cloth table topper next to some crayons Mrs. C always laid out for her. When the girl wasn’t busy, especially in moments like these when all was perfect, if even for only a second, maybe two. The girl would think of her fat tabby cat as a magical lion taking her back home to a magical place where everyone looked like her. This is how the story begins. Keep scrolling way down to see the origin and the middle and maybe the end.