Mouse-Mouth
- Jul 28, 2023
- 4 min read
by Addison Zeller
I don’t remember how to spell her Norwegian name, but it means Mouse-Mouth, and I picture her as a low raincloud pushing through ferns, electric within. A gray cat, bony, black stripes down her back and tail. Obviously old from the way she moved — as if a leg hadn’t set — and her leaden fur that looked rained on.
She came down the side of the fjord a couple months before I visited Dad in Norway. Perhaps she’d guarded an apple or cherry orchard higher on the slope. Solveig’s mom let her in the basement to catch a mouse, a brown flicker on the steps quick as recognition.
She fed the cat, named her, allowed her to stay. Good old barn cat, she said. She grinned when she stroked her head and shoulders — roughly, I thought, but Mouse-Mouth lifted her haunches to be petted too. I didn’t yet know cats, or what they preferred. Mouse-Mouth preferred me. When I arrived, everyone took second place, even the old woman who fed her. She followed me when I walked. When I sat she bumped my ankles, tail in the air.
Wherever I was, indoors or out, she found me. I wandered all over, just like her, because I didn’t really know anyone, just like her.
My parents had divorced the year before and promptly went broke. Dad moved to Norway with what was left to marry Solveig. They were academics in the same field, they’d known each other for years — I won’t go into it.
Solveig’s family had lived on the same farm on the same fjord longer than records were kept in the region. Their name signifies a promontory on the water, a finger of land their house juts out on. Solveig’s niece, tall, friendly, two years my senior, visited twice-weekly from Norheimsund. She took me to see a series of low mounds by the property line, where her ancestors were, and a gentle meadow that sloped into the water. Here’s where they built the dragon ships, she told me. Rain swept along the fjord and she opened a clear plastic umbrella too small for us both, but we crowded under it anyway, shoulders pressed together or soaked, while she pointed out landmarks in the water and across it: Thief’s Island, the glacier Folgefonna, under fish-gray clouds. When the rain passed, Mouse-Mouth trotted over the grass with a present for me, a lemming, eyes closed and incisors parted.
My visit lasted two months. It was an escape more than a vacation. Solveig paid for my flights. I’d run out of money myself: I was facing eviction, failing college — none of this is relevant to Mouse-Mouth, but it helps explain why the summer drifted as it did, and why I was content to spend so many hours with an old barn cat in my lap, sitting in the grass or in the chair by my bed, where warm light pooled in the afternoons. By then in the year the sun merely swoops in the sky: night’s a kind of sunrise.
The rodents didn’t know when to hide, so Mouse-Mouth brought me a present or two every day. She never seemed to come in without a body dangling under her whiskers. She’s adopted you, said Solveig, you are her kitten. I think she’s in love with you, said Dad.
I didn’t see them much outside of mealtimes. Dad, lonely in a country where he didn’t speak the language, was addicted to Facebook. Sometimes we sat together in the same room for hours without a flicker of awareness. Solveig was often an hour inland, restoring murals in a small medieval church. I went to see it once. By the altar was a window with a deep groove in the sill: worn away, I was told, by the lepers of the region resting their hands there for blessings down the centuries.
It’s impossible to say what draws people to each other. I couldn’t talk to Solveig’s mom without Solveig or her niece to translate. If she saw me in the kitchen, she gestured to whatever food she wanted me to know I was entitled to. Or she smiled at the cat on my lap. Mouse-Mouth, she purred in her language. We were equally comprehensible to Mouse-Mouth. Something about the tone of voice we used, the way it arced upward, as when talking to a child.
I praised her for being a good hunter, for displaying her daily catch. As soon as I did, she set it down and ate it completely. Always a rodent, a mouse or rat, less often a lemming. I’d wince a little when I heard the skull pop. It only took a minute or so for her to put it away, with one piece left over, a single organ she didn’t like, gray and tiny — the spleen, I think — which she spat out and left.
Something that amazes me is how quickly a thing can disappear, a whole living presence, with only one spleen left to show for it, waiting on the rug to be collected in a tissue and tipped into the grass. And very soon, no doubt, the ants will see to that too, and the vanishing act will end.
There must have been a goodbye, but I don’t remember it — or with Solveig’s mom either, who died in the new year. It probably amounted to holding that very light cat on my lap and hoping she understood I had to leave. I was told she spent the next day looking for me, and that she died in the spring: they’d moved to a newly-built house up the slope, a busy road gleamed between them and her hunting ground — that was the end of her. I find it difficult to round out this thought. I always fail to recognize the moments I’ll wish to remember. She had yellow eyes, the pads of her feet were a dull pink.
Addison Zeller’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Epiphany, Ligeia, Hex, Roi Fainéant, Olney, minor literature, and elsewhere. He lives in Wooster, Ohio.
