The old road she walked on every day was lined with overgrown bushes they called beach plums, though they were really wild roses. The sky was huge and overcast, and the air was full of the drone of insects overlaid with the screaming of gulls in the distance. Christina had asked her where she walked, and when she had said, “down to the salt marsh,” Christina had caught Evan’s eye as if to confirm something, and Evan had said, “Be careful, Mom.” So she decided not to mention the cat.

Near the salt marsh was a hummock covered with rough grass. She could sit there and gaze out at the ocean, far into the distance, where on a day like this, the sky and water blurred. People rarely came here, not even in the summer, so she was surprised to see something move in a clump of sawgrass. She thought it must be a heron – she had seen them there before, but then she saw it, and realized that it was a large cat of some kind. It was the color of a doe, but muscular, with large paws. A mountain lion, she thought, and knew there was another name for it, but it would not come to her. Not native to Rhode Island, but here it was, in the wild.

The cat gazed at her, unblinking, with its amber eyes. It retreated into the brush, and then came out the other side. She hoisted herself up to see where it was going. She followed it, avoiding the places where her sneakers could squelch into the marsh.  

It padded to where there was an abandoned elementary school. The windows and doors were boarded up, with graffiti covering the plywood.  There was a little playground there, and she sat down on the only swing that was still left.

The cat stretched out on the ground, several feet away. She tried unsuccessfully to think of what it was called. She thought about the chapter in Through the Looking Glass where Alice is in the woods where things have no names. Who would she be if she lost her name?

The cat’s fur looked soft, and she felt an urge to stroke it, but when she stood up from the swing, the cat shifted away in one liquid motion.

It occurred to her that she should probably be careful around a large cat. She sat there on the swing, completely still, staring at nothing. After a while, she felt something against her leg, and the cat had come to rub against her, just as a housecat might.

She reached down tentatively to pet the cat on the head. At first it shrank from her, but then it moved within her reach and looked at her.

The next day, and for days after that, she went back to the playground, and she brought pieces of chicken for the cat. She held them out in her hand and felt the cat’s rough tongue lick them into its pink mouth.

They (Catherine? Kevin?), sat in her living room while she searched for something to feed them, foraging through the mostly empty cupboards. They thought she couldn’t hear them, or they didn’t care.

“Well, she has to go somewhere,” Christina said. “They have a highly rated memory unit at Greenwood.”

“I hate those places. They smell like urine and stale cafeteria food and disinfectant.”

“But Evan, you can see her cognitive decline for yourself. She keeps on forgetting words. It’s dangerous. She could forget to turn the stove off and burn the house down!”

“I know, I know. Someone needs to take care of her. Maybe Greenwood isn’t so bad.”

They painted on smiles when she came back to the living room, and gave each other sidelong glances, vindicated, when they saw she had forgotten what she had gone to the kitchen for. They talked at her calmly and rationally, explaining what was to be done. Bees swarmed in her head.

When they left, she found they had left a brochure on the coffee table.  “Welcome Home to Joyful & Vibrant Living at Greenwood!” it said on the front. Inside were pictures of smiling gray-haired people.

She left it on the table. She went out to the hummock overlooking the sea. She sat there for a while, and the cat made its way through the sawgrass. “Puma,” she thought, pleased that the name had come back to her.

“They want to put me in a nursing home,” she told the cat.

The cat sat quietly by her feet, listening.

“It’s very highly rated,” she said, “with private rooms.” The cat considered her with its unfathomable eyes. In the distance, a red-winged blackbird trilled from a reed.

“They think I’m dangerous.”

A thought came to her and she pulled herself unsteadily to her feet, then straightened up, resolute.

“Goodbye, Puma,” she said. The cat stretched and got up. It looked at her one last time and then walked into the stand of sawgrass.

—

This story is an homage to Ursula Le Guin, and is based on a story of hers, The White Donkey.