In your last life, you were a tiger princess. You lived by the water and you adorned yourself in gold circlets; you chimed when you walked, like birdsong, like blessing, lotus flowers threaded in your long, raven-down hair. A snarl-handed oma who loved you better than she did your sister taught you to paint your face and to strike first. You were cruel, beautiful—when you tipped your face up to the sun, it shone brighter, just for you.

In this life you are a man named Peril, and the age of tiger princesses has been squeezed along by history’s fat intestine for a very long time now. You might have felt, at some point, a flash of familiarity—your finger skimming the pages of your eighth-grade history book, your eyes wandering towards a costume in the girl’s section of a toy store—but it never lingered, flickering then gone. These days you don’t think about princesses, or soft skin, or your white-knuckled hand clutching a weapon. These days you are busy. You have to keep moving; there is too much to do.

Put simply, your life is small, easily folded and stacked up, one piece on top of the other. Like this: you work in an office building and staple every one of your reports perfectly, right there, at the upper left corner of the stack—you live alone and you only fuck in other people’s apartments. Every morning you shave your face, but the scraggly hairs around your mouth persevere anyway. You have a single tattoo of a peacock feather on your ankle.

There isn’t anything particularly special about you. But you do all right for yourself.

Today, as you slot the end-of-quarter numbers into your spreadsheet, your mind is restlessly occupied, your leg jogging under your desk. It is bad enough that you unplug your laptop and try out the treadmill desk by the window only to return to your chair a little breathless. You need to pick up your anxiety medication, buy groceries, pack your bag for the weekend you’re spending at your mother’s house. And you have a date at seven tonight, a real one at a restaurant with a girl you met on an app. Anticipation flutter-kicks in your stomach.

Movement beside you, a hand in front of your face. You blink, tearing your gaze from your screen.

“Per,” Haim says, like it isn’t the first time he’s called your name. The rest of your coworkers’ desks, you realize, are empty. Your skin crawls. “Lunch?”

“Oh,” you say. Your voice comes out scratchy with disuse. “Yeah. Sure.”

Anja has eyes the color of a sliding grass serpent and dark hair that falls to her shoulders, gold-shine highlights winking at you from across your candlelit table. She is wearing a backless black dress, and gloss sheens across her lips. Layered red-brown kiss marks stain the rim of her wineglass. You wonder, in your slacks and collared shirt, if she thinks you are underdressed. Anja takes a bite of her fish, knife squealing against her plate. You swallow a forkful of risotto.

“I like your name, by the way,” she says. “It’s nice. Poetic.”

She’d said something similar over your messages. Dreamish, she’d mused, bittersweet. At first you weren’t sure if she meant it as a compliment. Anja’s texts are dry, without inflection. In person, though, she is too bright to look at head-on. Her smile hangs on her twisted left canine, which tingles down your spine. You tell her, an easy admission, that she is beautiful.

It isn’t until later, her bare thigh pressed sticky-warm against yours, that you notice it. A knob of skin behind her ear, hard and cold. You feel it as you brush an idle hand through her hair. Anja shivers, turning to face you with something hesitant in the set of her mouth. As though she is weighing the cost of breaking the quiet between you.

“You can’t laugh,” she says after a long moment.

“Okay,” you say. “I won’t laugh.”

She grazes the spot gently. “Memory implant,” she says. Her shoulders hunch, the heat from her body slowly pulling away and leeching into the bedsheets. “I don’t know, my mom set up the appointment. Birthday present. She’s into all that—” a hand wave— “woo-woo stuff.” Anja swallows, searches your gaze. “But I mean,” she adds, “it’s kind of cool. Having it. Sometimes I’ll be stuck on something and I’ll remember what I did in my last life, and it’s like relearning how to ride a bike.”

You’ve seen a few headlines here and there. Hidden Brain Benefits of Memory Implants, 15 Actors With Famous Past Lives. A few years ago it was this breakthrough science, but these days it’s just something people get done to make themselves feel special, to impress the New Age spiritualists at the yoga studio. You remember thinking that it would be a little funny if you went through the effort of getting an implant just for it to be your first time living anyway. You want to ask Anja if the implant makes her one person or ten, if it hurts to have it inside of her.

“That’s neat,” you say.

Anja bites her lip. “You think it’s weird.”

“No, really,” you insist, and you surprise yourself by meaning it. “It’s cool. I’d want to know who I was before.”

At this she tilts her head. “You could always get one if you wanted to,” she says, soft. For some reason it makes your chest seize hearing her say it aloud. Anja backtracks almost instantly. You wonder, and worry, if something showed on your face. “Or not, you know, some people don’t bother, right?”

You don’t have a good answer for that, so you stroke her hair again, drag the pad of your thumb down her collarbone. Her face goes soft. You like her; you like that you can see the reflection of her thinking on her face before she says anything. You wonder if another version of her has ever crossed paths with another version of you.

“We should do this again,” you murmur.

Anja lays her head on your chest. Your heart hammers against your ribs. When you leave, you think, you will kiss her goodbye, and then you will block her, and she will get over it.

You catch yourself thinking about it without meaning to. The rubber band of your focus pulls back, springs between tasks, then returns to the same baseline. As you click at your keyboard, your wrists twinging, you wonder if you spent your last life clocking in and clocking out until you died. You can’t decide if it would be better or worse if you did. Best, probably, not to know at all.

It isn’t even that you hate your job. You’re good at it. It pays fine. There is little for you to complain about. But you suppose that possibility has made you curious. You want to know if you were ever something more, or if this is as good as things will get.

The clock ticks five. You gather your things, loosen your tie. Outside, the sky is already bruised purple-red with sunset.

Your mother’s house gets smaller every time you visit her. She has a habit of holding onto things, and now that your father is gone she spends her time excavating old memories and forgetting to return them to the attic. You step around photo albums, pearl-trimmed jewelry boxes, the crate where your father kept his vinyl—a framed photo of him blinks at you from the wall by the stairs. You are greeted by the strange, blended aromas of incense and chole, sandalwood and garam masala.

“You’re too skinny now,” your mother says. Age has made her smaller, squatter. She spoons extra food onto your plate, and she refills your glass of water. With a pinch at your bicep: “Look at you. No meat on your bones.”

Your chest pulls taut, your answering smile helpless. “I know, Mom.”

She sits beside you at the table, watching as you chew. “And you know,” she adds, conspiratorial, “girls like a little muscle on a guy.” This punctuated with a knowing Look. You think, with a flash of guilt, about Anja, her skin under your hands.

“I’ll eat better,” you agree, dry-mouthed.

Your mother grins. “There’s my good boy.”

She does not let you do the dishes, but you get away with wiping the table. One of the lightbulbs in the kitchen is dead, four different candles stacked atop each other on the counter by the stove. You don’t remember your mother looking this fragile, like she could fall, like she could break, but there’s a boniness to her that wasn’t there before. Next to her you feel hulking, overlarge, an uncontrolled growth. It makes your stomach hurt.

Your childhood bedroom smells like laundry detergent, and every surface has been dusted; there’s a towel folded on your crisply made tiger-print bed. The sheets pull tight over your body, and you have to bend your legs so they don’t hang off the end of the mattress. A single lifeless star sticker remains on the ceiling. In the dark, the light from your phone’s screen makes your eyes water. Slowly you type questions into your search bar:

how does memory implant work

pain with memory implant

memory implant complications

cost of memroy implant

memory implant insurance coverage

memory clinic near me

It would be so easy, is the thing. There aren’t any bureaucratic hoops for you to jump through, you’re pretty sure, beyond an intake form. You wouldn’t even have to take off work. The clinic downtown has an opening next Wednesday, and the whole thing takes an hour. Minimal pain, zero downtime.

On the other hand, there is an article floating at the top of the search results page about a woman who jumped off of a building a week after getting her implant in. She’d signed her note under the name of a man who died a hundred years ago. So you don’t know.

As you are swiping through client testimonials, a notification buzzes at the top of your screen. Meloe, half hidden in her profile picture, has swiped right on you: Holy shit hi handsome lol

You don’t know why it itches. The man in your photos smiles slightly, lips curled at the corners, this nonchalant sureness posing in front of a mountain, holding an iced coffee. The message Meloe has sent you is meant for him. You get up and flick on the light in the bathroom, blinking blearily at yourself in the mirror. The picture frame downstairs comes to mind; you are the spitting image of your father, sans readers. Strong jaw, hooked nose. Stubble shadows your upper lip.

You reread the message and nausea churns your stomach. You don’t reply, shoving your phone into your pocket as you sink to your knees before the toilet.

The memory clinic has plush green chairs and an expensive coffee machine, more hotel lobby than medical office. Slow jazz piano filters through the decorumed quiet. You scrawl your details into the form the receptionist gives you with an impatience. As you hand back the clipboard, you roll up your sleeves, your underarms moist, and check your phone once, twice. You realize, with a glance towards the clinic’s doors, that you tracked in a few clods of dirt from outside. After you leave, someone will have to clean your mess.

You are called back to bare your neck for the gloved tech’s needle. They flick their syringe with a latexed finger, swipe rubbing alcohol over the injection site. A pinch, and then the implant is in, nestled among your nerves. As the tech adjusts it, poking and squeezing, a long flatline-beep sings directly into your auditory cortex.

You are sent home with an ice pack for any swelling and an instruction sheet with a list of neck exercises. Do not sleep, the tech warns, for the next six hours. Call if you experience any migraines or if you begin to hallucinate.

It’s funny. You don’t feel it, really, until you do.

You were raised with a trident in your hand, and you lined your undereyes with thick white stripes to match the tigers reared alongside you. The world was greener, then, more vast, mountains climbing the sky like wicked fangs from the soft jaw of your valley. It could not be bought, sold, owned. The laws of nature were built on consumption and recycled matter—you struck down silver-bellied fish with your trident and used the trimmings to feed the soil.

Your sister cared for the tigers, but you rode on their backs. The wind bit your cheeks and the world blurred around you and you whooped and held on when that lithe body beneath you broke into a run. After you dismounted, panting, your sister would bring out a large brass bowl of water, and she would scratch between a tiger’s ears as it lapped its fill. You could never differentiate between the creatures, but she could. She had names for all of them. When they licked her, she giggled like a child.

She envied you and you did not care. A lifetime of favoritism spoiled you special. As children, now and then, she would whisper a secret into the shared dark between your beds, inviting you to exchange one of your own, and you would roll over and feign sleep. What was there to say? You had nothing in common. You wore your muscle as proud as your finery, big and loud and wild, and she was—quiet. Strange, pensive. You heard the whispers surrounding her, and you did not want them to chase after you.

You eclipsed your sister’s solemn moon, but it wasn’t like you did it on purpose. It was not your fault that you were stronger than her, better. She simply did not have the makings of a princess.

Time burped forward. Your oma, as sickness wrung the strength from her bones, insisted you take her best gold pieces, now that she could no longer wear them. The finest gold, she said, for the finest warrior yourvalley had seen in centuries. The last treasure your oma bestowed upon you, before she breathed her last, was her own bone-tipped trident.

You held that trident during your proudest moment, your greatest kill. You’d spent a full day tracking the mad buffalo that had wrecked a desolate path through your valley, and when you sunk your trident’s thorns into its neck you swore you felt your oma’s hand guiding yours. You had never killed anything so large before. The victory tasted like godhood.

It did not occur to you, then, that things could change. You did not think to stay on guard; you did not realize how clever your sister was. The way of your world was sunrise and tiger-cry and sunset, your place immutable and evergreen. You had forgotten that, under the ouroboric machinations of nature, you too could be consumed.

You wake wailing, this animal keen leaking out of your throat. You aren’t sure why.

Kalima sends you a mirror selfie, tall and full-bodied in a lace bra the color of wine, her slender fingers curled, beckoning. A long, swirling tattoo dances the length of her torso, and faded mehndi stains her knuckles. Her phone shields the lower half of her face. You should come over, she writes, if you don’t have anything better to do. White dots the inner corners of her dark, daring eyes, which catches your attention, an ache like homesickness blooming beneath your ribcage.

It is not that her eyeliner is why you decide to make the drive to her place, but you think about it even as she moves under you, her hair fanned out on the pillow. You can’t pull your gaze away from her face. Her mouth is hot and wanting and she tastes like vanilla. Your name leaves her lips gasping and unrecognizable: Peril, Peril. You fuck her like your body could seep into hers.

After, when her breathing has evened out and you are lying sleepless beside her, you reach for the white tube on her nightstand, Venus-trap-fast like it will try to roll away from you. A floorboard groans under your weight; you go very, very still, your veins freezing over as Kalima stirs. You do not breathe until she settles back into sleep, a petty thief afraid of being caught.

As a tiger princess, you did this differently. The process was long and elegant. You used a brush, mixed oil into a bowl of powder, tongued the line beneath your eyes in a single wide stroke. Kalima’s eyeliner pen is thin and strange, unfamiliar to either of the people you have been, but your hands remember the motion. From the wrist rather than the fingers. You judge yourself in the mirror atop Kalima’s dresser, your phone flashlight glaring off its surface, and you are almost—pretty. You tilt your head this way and that, your features narrower, somehow, your eyes bigger.

Blood rushes in your ears. You look stupid.

You scrub at your face until the liner flecks off, and you crawl back into bed. Your lip trembles. You don’t know what you were expecting.

Kalima makes a small sound as your body dips the mattress. She doesn’t open her eyes. “Peril?”

“Sorry,” you say. It comes out whining. “Sorry.”

Her brow furrows. She reaches out, brushes the back of her hand against your cheek, her stare half-lucid. “Oh shit, you’re crying,” she says, startled, and your chest gives an anxious, fitful squeeze. For a stuttering moment you wonder if there is any lingering white on your face.

You grind the heels of your palms into your eyes. Static, purple-green spots fuzz over your vision. “I’m not.”

“Okay,” she says, like saying it makes it true. “Fine. You’re not.”

She rolls onto her side, angling herself away from you. You turn and face the wall, your lips pressed tightly together. Wet drips onto your pillow. At some point you fall asleep, your head full of cotton, and you don’t dream.

Neither of you bring it up in the morning. You pull on your clothes, and the two of you exchange stiff, cordial goodbyes, with the unspoken understanding that you will not see each other again hanging between you. You are not sure if it is out of pity on Kalima’s part that she does not ask if you are all right or if she has simply forgotten. Maybe she just doesn’t care. You do not brush her hand or kiss her, keeping yourself carefully clean. She does not need any more of you.

As you reach into your pocket for your car keys, you withdraw her eyeliner, and then you abandon it to your glove compartment.

Your coworker Haim receives a promotion that comes with an office of his own—he empties his desk into the room beside your cubicle, and you watch him pace back and forth and back and forth, his phone pressed to his ear, through the window by his new door. You continue your data entry, open an email from your manager detailing the current company initiatives. The back of your neck is perpetually prickling now, your hair tufting behind your ears. One of these days you will have to cut it, but you are putting that off as long as you can get away with it.

Haim invites you to happy hour after work, a new ring glinting on his index finger. “Help you loosen up a little,” he says, other hand in his pocket. “It’ll be nice. Really. Company covers up to two drinks.”

He has an implant too, you realize. It’s the first time you’ve really noticed it. You wonder if it is new, or if now you have started searching people’s necks out of instinct. For some reason it almost makes you laugh. Haim looks too at home in his skin, you think, to be sharing it. You cannot imagine yourself having anything in common with him, climbing the corporate ladder until you have an office of your own, but at the same time it is the only tangible future within your reach.

You decline, flashing Haim a polite smile. “Next time,” you promise. “Sorry.”

So you go home to your barren apartment, and you lie on your couch for an hour, your foot twitching without direction. Through your blinds, the moon fades into being as the final embers of the horizon sputter, then die.

Your sister did not hate you, but she was afraid of what she would be reduced to, standing behind you. Your valley’s tradition was shifting like sands under the rough onslaught of the ocean—she was not going to land in your shadow, sights set on higher prizes. She wanted, fierce and wretched.

What was hers was supposed to be yours, but you did not know about her craftswoman, wiry and foul-mouthed, who loved your sister to the point of artistry. You chose not to. Every one of the headdresses she fashioned for your sister’s tigers bore the curved characters of her name amid their intricate inlays. She was not of your caste and your sister could not have her.

You are not beholden to her, the craftswoman had whispered once, as they laid twined together beneath the stars, their heads bent close. Why not love me under the light of day?

A week after your oma left you, your sister plucked the dangling earrings you had been gifted from your jewelry box, and she clicked one of your gemstoned hoops into her nose. She’d hoped, quietly, that you would be angry enough to fight her, but you didn’t notice. You were distracted, busy, digging your heels into the sides of one of her tigers as you set after a buffalo. She realized, then, that you would not notice any hand she played against you.

Your sister did not do it herself. She watched, shrouded in the shadows. Your eyes met hers before you disappeared under the water; you died there in the river, thrashing.

You make the drive to the department store next to your office building an hour before closing, scraping forward into the parking spot nearest its double doors as though you might need to make a quick getaway. The front wheel of your shopping cart squeaks against the tile, announcing your presence, which makes your shoulders hunch, but there is no one around you. A pair of plump lips blow you a kiss from a makeup display.

At first, you make a show of rifling through the men’s section. A belt lands in your cart, a pair of socks. And you happen upon the fringes of the women’s clearance aisle. The blouses hanging from the rack are all wrinkled discard, uncared for, but a wink of green the color of a jungle canopy snags your gaze. You inch your cart closer, your heart climbing your throat.

You snatch the skirt from its hanger like it will burn you. The fabric is softer than you’d thought it would be.

As you lay your items before the yawning cashier, you ready your explanation (“for my girlfriend, ha”), but they don’t ask. The relief that melts through you doesn’t stick. You knot a protective fist into your plastic bag and keep it safe between your legs as you put your car in reverse.

In your apartment, you extract the skirt carefully, and you fold it up with the tags still attached, your receipt tucked under it where it sits atop the stack of empty shoeboxes in your closet. One day, maybe, you will try it on, and you will spin until you are sick and dizzy and lightheaded with laughter in a way that you haven’t been since childhood, since the last time you knotted your fingers into the silky fur of a tiger.