In the near future, an ethnographer and researcher writes a paper detailing the origins of children’s games in a small Pennsylvania town. The town is infamous for a violent massacre that happened there, where citizens were killed by tigers and all the children in the town went missing. Blame for the massacre, referred to as “Bloody Summer,” fell on a local man named Jim Wheatfield, who collected and caged tigers on his farm. One morning, a police officer discovered the dismembered bodies of an unknown number of citizens strewn across a street. A witness described a hoard of tigers which descended upon them, and when authorities go to Jim Wheatfield’s farm, they find him dead and half-eaten. The rest of the townspeople discover that all of the children have disappeared from town, and are never seen again. The town folklore soon grew to involve many references to tigers. A man who claims to be a child survivor of the massacre reaches out to the author, and interviews him. He describes the way that the children in town were fascinated by the tigers, and how the adults disapproved of their obsession. The author asks him where he was on the day of the massacre. He explains that he woke up early that morning with the other children, and they walked into the woods together. When they reached Jim Wheatfield’s farm, they released the tigers from their cages. He watched as the other children began to transform into tigers, but he got scared and ran away before the same could happen to him. However, he regrets losing his chance at this transformation, and longs to go back and attain that freedom that he lost, despite the violence.