Word Count: 471
She lived all her life at the outskirts of town, beyond the reach of the routines and bustle of regulated life. She grew her own food in well-tended gardens, ate fresh fruit and vegetables summer into fall, canned and dried the last harvests for winter through spring. Still had a good eye and steady hand for meat, patience for the fish that filled the streams and the lake a good mile from her back door.
Her husband had died a decade ago. Her daughter had married and moved to the western end of the state. She saw her daughter once a year in the summer when she’d come home to visit. She saw her husband every night in her dreams. Talked to him as she sat down to dinner. Scolded him for any dirt she’d tracked into the kitchen.
The milkman came by Monday mornings, left a glass quart of milk and a dozen eggs on her porch. Took the dollar she left rolled in the neck of the washed-out empty bottle, shook his head but never had the heart to tell her it cost four times more.
She made do with whatever she had in abundance in bounty or dearth in hard times of drought. Each Sunday morning she’d take stock of supplies and use up what she had, or do without. It was on a Wednesday, however, that the cat first came by. It left grouse on her doorstep. Two days later, a plump mourning dove. She never saw him nor heard his kills in the night but she left out a saucer of milk by the steps. Every morning, she noticed it licked clean.
It came at a good time, with autumn’s bite still a nibble, and her hip stiff and painful each morning and night. She went less frequently out to the stream and rarely out to the lake, but caught more than she needed each time. Making two meals for herself out of one freshly caught. Leaving one out by the milk for the cat. Salting and drying the rest of the catch for the winter.
The two lived compatibly through the most of the winter, the cat and the old lady, until a bad storm late-March left them scrounging the last of the larder. The last of the ground squirrels and rabbits burrowed deeply in snow. The milkman couldn’t make it up to her door for several weeks and the last of the milk, thinned out with water, was gone.
The old woman felt bad, having nothing to share, but the large cat still came to the edge of the trees and waited for morning. Hidden in the darkness, his belly growling, his mind anticipating the hunt, he stretched his claws, curled them back under, and waited for the woman to come.
