A Story I Loved: "Cougar" by Marie Anderson
- Staff Writer
- Aug 20
- 6 min read
Often, when I’m writing and meditating about these stories I love, it’s often hard for me to come up with anything original to say about why I love them. Of course each story is original in its own way, and they’re always good, of course. Technically, they are very well-done. And other people could give you much more specific run-downs of why they work, why sentences entrance the way they do on a molecular level. But I’m not really here to talk about the mechanics of the work, because I don’t know very much about the mechanics of writing myself. I just write. All of this to say that reading these posts can be like watching somebody trying to self-teach themselves mathematics without having any formal education, any fancy terms. But terms are just words of containment, in writing, seeking to trap down the ideas that we all instinctively sense and know. To write with beautiful clarity is one thing. But in some ways, I prefer it like this- reading a single short story and trying to explain in my own way why some lines slip through me carelessly but others stick, like little hooks, and won't let go. Unlike mathematics, writing is a much more vague, opaque art. There is a delightful murkiness to it. There are no strongholds to catch you if you fall one way or the other- so you are taking tiny steps into the dark, foraging for what is good, trying to pick out what it is that attracts your attention so much. This is a long-winded way of saying, forgive me, then, if I lack eloquence at times. I don’t think any of this is a sure science, not so much as some people like to claim it is. Selfishly, too, I think that over-explaining on my end would ruin some of the magic for myself. The point of a magic trick is the mystery.
Short stories allow for you to be entranced into a small world, which is why I've always loved them. I read many more short stories than I do novels, if only because the bar of commitment is so much lower in a short story. With a novel, I go in expecting things. I’m sure the writer of one does too. But with a short story- who knows what may happen? It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. Watching it streak and fizz and turn into something quite incredulous, something not so easily defined, in front of your very eyes. Often, when I’m reading or writing short stories, I let it get away from me. I put it all down on the page, and then I come back, with fresh eyes, to see exactly what the story has become.
Of course this doesn’t always happen. Some of the greatest short stories I love are ones that have been carefully tended to, and surgically excised- all of the loose words and paragraphs cut away until only the bones and flesh of a story remain, with none of the fat. In some ways, with the short stories I am referring to above, they are more characteristic of mini novels. In novels do you have the luxury of texture, of spiraling tangents that are amusing but end up going nowhere. Short stories are, in some ways, about precision. You must know what it is that you are aiming at.
In the story we read today, ‘Cougar’, I don’t know if I get a sense as the reader of anything being particularly aimed at. This story is kind of all texture. The point is sort of that nothing happens. The protagonist is a boy named Cal, and he’s just freshly graduated high school. He doesn’t have many prospects anywhere. And he has one interesting thing about him: his father has disappeared. He has gone somewhere, for reasons that are never fully explained, though the reader gets the sense that Cal is just as bewildered about this chain of events as they are. He has a neighbor, named Jenny, a man who makes Cal slightly uncomfortable but is also his only source of rugged, strange comfort. He is familiar to Cal. Life settles into a rhythm over the pages of the story, and the mystery is not really of Cal trying to figure out what has happened to his father. He’s more just trying to survive, to understand the mystery of life itself.
I talked about energy, before, in a David Lipsky story. About how energy matters- where the author places it, because it tells you what kind of story this is going to be. Cal’s father exists to take this shadowy, kind of primordial force over his own life. We rarely get any memories of the two of them together. Cal is not actively trying to track his father down except at the very beginning. What we get instead is a kind of standstill- a match-off. He’s waiting- but for what? Enter in the cougar, who becomes a metaphor for this in Cal’s life. Neither of them are actively attacking at either point. Cal has heard rumors of a cougar and thinks he sees one once, but that is the extent of their interactions. It’s only later, when his own dog is injured by the cougar, and he tries to get it back, that finally all of his dead-end living is fuelled into a purpose. But the climax isn’t the end of the story. Other things happen afterwards. He sees the cougar only once at the very end, after he thinks to himself that maybe his dad has died or gone away, and he learns that his neighbor has been feeding the cougar that probably killed his dog. The neighbor asks him to feed the cougar when he dies, as well. The narrator just sits and listens, and thinks that he might see the cougar sometime later.
How can I explain why this story is good to someone? Is it even good? What makes a story good? When simplified, I don’t know if I could explain to a five-year-old why this story is the way it is. I could probably explain Moby Dick, the daunting, behemoth classic- with its themes of redemption and revenge, and a four-year-old might grasp more of it than of this tiny story, clocking in at just twelve pages. I kept re-reading this story. It’s haunting, no doubt about it. The characters are haunted, as well, but they don’t do anything with their hauntings. The neighbor brings up the fact that he feeds the cougar because a cougar isn’t wrong for being hungry- it simply is hungry. This comment brings a primordial layer of morality into the story, something ancient and completely animal. Jenny says Cal can’t hate the cougar. Okay, then what can Cal hate? Can he hate his father for leaving him? His mother, who he never likes to talk about? What will Cal, this listless, thoroughly un-motivated character, lean his life towards?
Survival, and the justification for survival, is a key theme here. Humans are complex creatures, and we deem ourselves the arbiters of the natural world, the ultimate ones with authority to pronounce good and evil over "lesser creatures". But what this story urges us to reflect on is what this means in terms of culpability. Cal justifies his survival in a few basic ways- to pay rent, to look for his father, to speak with Jenny, to be with Koda, and finally, to revenge Koda. To say that the cougar is merely an unthinking creature who wants to eat would be to imply that Koda, as an animal, was just submitting to the natural food chain of things. To say Koda is a thinking, feeling creature, means that the cougar must also understand this on some primordial level and is thus responsible. But what does that make us, then? The human is the hungriest animal. We think, then, in order to justify our hunger.
Cal keeps wanting somebody to justify his hunger. He keeps wanting to find meaning, in his own way, like we all do. But all the things that usually give people meaning- work, love, even tragedy, such as a father disappearing, don't really do the same things to Cal.
What I love about this story is how cyclical it is. It feels realistic- this tone of resignation interspersed throughout. Cal is probably stuck in generational poverty. He comes from a small, sleepy town, where Koreans serve Chinese food because it’s the only Asian-adjacent thing that these people will eat. Nothing really awaits our main character. A friend urges him to take a job with him, but Cal is hesitant. Maybe he has an idea of what taking the job will mean- a kind of responsibility he has been daunted by up until this point. He recognizes he’s not exceptionally smart or hardworking. In this way, he's trying to figure out what separates him from this cougar. The details aren’t purposeless, in this story. They add up carefully, even in the offhand ones. The magic trick here is atmosphere, and helplessness, and helping us to understand why this character is this helpless. Fate is a major player in this story, the idea of something Greek and tragic, or pre-destined, which gives the whole story a beauty, but also a terrible melancholy. I think what the story means to me at the end is that it’s irrelevant whether we are the cougar or we are Cal, looking back at each other. It doesn’t matter what we think of the cougar, because the cougar doesn’t think of us. We can be only ourselves, here, doing what we believe is right. We are animals, but meaning and being an animal aren’t mutually exclusive things. This story proves that.
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