Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile
February 2025
The Chase
Tracie Adams
Addiction is a hungry tiger, insatiable, never satisfied, always wanting. You were only fourteen when you reached for the lock, opened the cage, released the beast. Since that first day when you hid in your closet gorging yourself with pie and chips, feeding the fear and trying to forget the shame of childhood abuse, you have been on the run.
The line between hunter and prey is thin and blurred, like the stripes on the tiger’s face, contorted as black lips disappear to reveal polished fangs. You keep running and running, never at rest, your icy breath caught in your chest. You want it all— the drugs, the sex, the exercise, the starvation, the shopping—so many ways to anesthetize. A beast on the run, you can never resist your fate. Too ashamed to leave the cage and too afraid to look back. Smoke one more, take the shot, skip the meal, and run like hell.
‘Keep Running’ - original artwork by Jude Potts
You will be hunted. The smell of your fear and the sweat of your desire will keep the tiger close on your heels. Another pill, another drink, and it will have you in its grasp. You will see four muscular limbs reaching up from below, claws shredding your resolve, tearing your weak flesh piece by pulpy piece. When you taste vomit mixed with blood, the stench of your shameful lust will rise like incense to an altar you built with your own hands.
Recovery is a lamb. When it appears in the haze, eyes shining like the noonday sun, you question your sanity, you question your doubt, you question your life. You flush the pills, watch vodka circle the drain, whisper a prayer. On hallowed ground, you climb inside the empty cage, hands reaching for the bars to shield you from the terror of the lamb’s holy light. But the lamb comes to rest beside your emaciated frame, wagging a red tongue like a battle flag. One last roar echoes through a starlit sky, and the tiger retreats. You sleep in the warmth of lamb’s wool, your sins atoned and your spirit renewed, but you dream of stripes moving like lightning in the dark, the sound of breathless panting pursuing you.
It will not end here. It will start all over in the morning.
About the author
Tracie Adams
Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia. Pushcart nominee 2025. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Does It Have Pockets, Cleaver Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, Cool Beans Lit, and others. Read her work at www.tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams.