First Tiger: George Harrar - Hardcover

George Harrar won Story magazine's Carson McCullers Prize for the Short Story, and this piece was selected for the 1999 edition of Best American Short Stories. His fiction has also appeared in The New Press Literary Quarterly, Quarter After Eight, Dickinson Review, Side Show Anthology and other literary reviews. He is represented by the Zachary Shuster Agency in Boston.

First paragraph:
"Imagine being decapitated," my father said to me once as we were sharpening the kitchen knives in the basement. Flakes of steel floated into the air each time he pressed the tip of the blade to the grindstone. My job was to hand him the next dull knife when he was ready for it. I was only ten at the time, and I didn't know what "decapitated" meant. Dad always assumed I knew more than I did. "Your head falls to the ground," he said as he ran his finger over the edge of the meat cleaver, "and you expect to be dead. But your brain still has a few seconds' worth of oxygen left. You look up and there's the rest of your body still draped over the chopping block. That, my boy, is the most intense moment of existence I can imagine."