This short story from the collection Wild Child was originally published in Harper's.
Mae is in her southern California garden early one morning when a tiger shows up at the edge of her yard. Meanwhile Mae's sister, Anita, is in Wisconsin grieving her dead husband, dealing with a pack of feral cats under her trailer, and trying to start a relationship with Todd, a man who's lobbying for a ballot measure that will allow people to kill strays. Mae and Anita have been vegetarians since high school, but they're still learning what it means to care about animals, both wild and human.
T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.