Autumn Tiger

By Yuan Changming

Copyright ©2025

Walking back to my hotel from Yasi, where I had my three meals every day, I noticed

several ads for rent, which caused me to reflect on my awkward situation. As her mother

could be dying at home any time after two strokes in a row, Hua had moved to Shangyite

the night before, a better hotel only steps away from her parents’ residence, where her

husband would readily come from Zhuhai to join her for the impending funeral. In other

words, she and I had to separate from each other for an unknown period of time. This

being the case, I didn’t want to spend any more time alone in Guanshenyuan, nor was it a

good idea to return to my mother’s residence in Jingzhou, as the renovation going on

upstairs during the day and the girl wailing three times a night for no reason made it

unbearable for me to stay there even for a single hour. Knowing well how ferocious “the

autumn tiger” [Indian summer] and mosquitos could be in my native place, I decided to

rent a place with an air conditioner, where I could concentrate on revising my novel

Mabakoola: Paradise Regained, a silver romance based on my true love experience with

Hua, which had been accepted for publication by an LA-based press.

After making a few phone calls, I paid the deposit for a studio offering the most

reliable connectivity to the internet. About an hour later, I settled down in my new place.

Shortly after I texted Hua about my move, she audio-chatted with me for a few minutes,

saying that she was sorry about her inability to keep me company, but would come to

visit me as soon as possible.

I was scrolling through my iPad after lunch when Hua sneaked into my rented

room. Seeing the small unit with only an old big bed and a worn out table, Hua felt quite

surprised that I could live in such a place far from cozy and comfortable. While the room

was too small, none of the appliances seemed to be in a working condition.

“It suites me perfectly well, since I don’t do any cocking or wash clothes here,” I

said. “All I care is its geographical proximity to where you are.”

“A lot of mosquitos here? Is it too hot?” Hua asked.

“Everything’s okay, I keep the air conditioner on all day long.”

After a brief talk about her mother’s worsening condition, I drew the curtains

tight, while Hua got ready for a catnap. The moment she lay down on the bed, I began to

unclothe her and make out, telling her to make up for the loss of the past three days. As

there was no security concern about hidden pinhole cameras in this plain rented place as

in a hotel, I insisted that we not use any covers. This time, I wanted to take a good look at

her body, something I had longed to do during our separation by the Pacific. Seeing her in

her birthday suits, I found her skin just as fair, firm, smooth, supple and spotless as

before; her whole body still looked in perfect shape as in the case of a fortyish woman. In

particular, her little garden was so good-looking as to make her a perfect “white fox.” The

only fly in the ointment was her breasts, which were quite empty and droopy, her titties

even too small to suck. Compared with my wife and especially my former fiancée’s,

Hua’s breasts were surely disappointing, but I had never mentioned anything to this

effect. Once I asked if her breasts had been like this since youth. She simply nodded.

From this response, I believed that she herself was never aware of her breasts being

unusual in a negative sense. So, each time I made love with her, I concentrated on her

lower body. As I saw it, this represented a kind of balance: by reducing the attractiveness

of her breasts, Heaven had made her little garden all the more enchanting.

To have another soul-melting intercourse, we had a good and long outer-course,

rolling and swallowing like two playing animals on the bed. During the entire process, we

remained fully circuit-connected: my dick deep in her vagina and her tongue deep in my

mouth. When Hua became aroused enough, I quickly lay on my back and let her take a

squatting position and fuck me instead. To my great delight, she told me that she had a

rare deep orgasm this time.

“Did I act like a tiger?” she asked, referring to the popular saying: “A woman in

her thirties need sex like a starving wolf, in her forties like a starving tiger.”

“A killing tiger you are! …But how come you never bite my bait like a fish?” I

asked, curious about why I failed to sense her orgasmic contractions, which I could feel

each time when my wife had them. I had never raised this question to Hua before, afraid

that the truth might lie in the fact that I was not hard or long enough to feel them, or she

didn’t actually have any as she claimed.

“Oh, that must be due to my ‘abnormal’ inner structure,” Hua explained. “My

doctor said I got a womb positioned more inside than other women.”

I hoped that was the true reason, but no matter what, I felt sorry that I could never

tell whether or when she had orgasm. “After all, no women are exactly the same after the

light is turned off, as people often say,” I told myself.

Too excited to fall asleep, we started to share our sexual experiences with each

other. When Hua reiterated that she felt extremely guilty to have sex with me while her

mother was dying at the ICU in the moment, I tried to make her feel better by recalling a

similar dramatic situation in Junichi Watanabe's A Lost Paradise, an internationally

acclaimed novel supposedly based on the author’s true love experience.

It was a dark stormy night. The 37-year-young female protagonist was keeping

vigil for her late father in the mourning hall when she received a short text message from

her lover, a 50-year-old senior editor working for a publishing house, which contained

nothing but his hotel information. Though he didn’t expect or, rather, request her to join

him for the night, she decided to leave the hall after much hesitation and entered into his

room at the eleventh hour. Partly because she needed to do something out of ordinary to

release her tense feeling about her loss, and partly because she had a really strong urge to

make love with him after a whole week’s separation, she just could not refuse the chance

presented to her, though at an inappropriate time. Since theirs was also an extramarital

relationship, they had to make the best use of every meeting. This time, she demanded

him to penetrate her from behind her bottom as wildly as possible while they both stood

beside the bed like two pigs or wolves.

“We often took this position when my wife and I were in our thirties,” I added. “I

wish to do the same with you.”

“That’d be too uncivilized!” Hua complained.

“Sex is the most natural thing to do,” I said. “Being civilized or not is utterly

irrelevant.

“But didn’t the Japanese woman feel guilty? Isn’t it a perverse thing to do while

mourning for her father?”

As far as I could recall, the protagonist-narrator said nothing about what was

going on in his partner’s mind, but he did suggest that it was precisely her sense of guilt

that must have led her to further violate the social norm by betraying her surgeon-

husband and her later father at the same time.

“Doing something morally wrong in a conscious manner could give people a

unique sense of joy,” I said.

“I don’t quite share that feeling,” Hua responded. “All I’m feeling now is a

deepened sense of guilt. Don’t you think I’m a worse woman, if not really a bad one?”

“No. You’re really a beautiful tiger, if not a better fox!” I said.

About Yuan Changming:

Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 16 chapbooks, 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and 2129 other publications across 51 countries. A poetry judge for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022; his debut novel Detaching, 'silver romance' The Tuner and short story collection Flashbacks are all available at Amazon.