A loud purring rumbles me into consciousness, accompanied by the feeling of a large cat rubbing itself against me, both of which make no real sense. I died, didn’t I? I mean, I felt my heart stop beating and the last breath leave my lungs. That is also excluding the fact that the cat I can feel, and its purring, are several times larger than any that I’ve felt before. Before I open my eyes though, I pause to take stock of what my other senses are telling me.

            My ears tell me more than they should, my skin feels more sensitive, my nose is picking up more than it could, and I’m fairly certain that I couldn’t taste smells before. I can hear not just the cat’s purr, but its breathing and heartbeat, as well as the songs of the birds and insects outside of wherever we are. I can feel the cat’s breath and heartbeat, the ground through whatever I’m wearing and a light breeze blowing through my bear toes and up my warm, unfamiliarly familiar body. I can smell the cat, the dirt and stone below and around me and the scent of a forest blowing in on the breeze. I can taste the cat all around me, the rain from last night and the familiar tang of blood.

            In but a brief moment, without even opening my eyes, I can tell that I am likely in the den of the large cat being friendly with me, and said cat lives in a cave that protects it from the near nightly rain. This cat is also most definitely carnivorous, which in hindsight, is quite obvious without having to taste the smell of blood in the air, it is a cat after all.

            After giving myself a brief moment to process all of the information being thrown at me, I open my eyes. And can’t see anything. Oh great, now I’m blind, that would at least explain some of the other hyper-active senses. Hang on … nope, never mind, not blind just not quite fully in control of my body yet. I didn’t actually open my eyes, they just stayed shut. Maybe I should have tried moving something that requires less subconscious action first. Let’s try toes. Ok, they wiggled, how about fingers? They wriggle as well, great. Now the eye thing again.

            Bam! An explosion of light and colours so bright and vibrant welcomes me as soon as I open my eyes, it renders me speechless. Which makes no sense, I’m not even talking. Whatever, the fact remains that despite the fact that all I can see is a stone ceiling, I can tell my vision is sharper and clearer than before. The greys are greyer, the shadows more discernible and the sparkles in the rock more contrasting. In short, wow, now cave ceilings look amazing.

            I turn my head to look at the cat curled up against my side, and the intense detail and colour makes me theoretically speechless again, and thoroughly confused about what in the name of heck is going on. The cat next to me is quite large, although length is hard to tell from my viewpoint and the fact that it is curled up, it looks to be around the size of a small two-person couch, which is to say, big. It is mainly a sort of dark bark brown, with lighter brown and some white spread throughout. The paw that I can see is about as big as a regular size novel, and its face is the cutest cat triangle I have seen, with large ears on top with fluffy looking tufts of very light brown on top.

            Somehow I can tell that the cat is female, which is perhaps the strangest thing so far about any of this whole experience, and the female cat has also somehow determined that I am awake. Her piercing yellow eyes fix themselves on me, and we just look into each other’s eyes, and it is likely the most comfortable I’ve been with any sort of prolonged eye contact, except maybe a few babies over the years. The cat continues to watch me, and I her, and the atmosphere is changed when she stops purring and starts speaking semi-excitedly.

            “Your awake, finally! I’ve been watching over your body for daays and I was starting to worry that you would never wake up.” Her voice is much clearer and far more emotional than I would expect from a talking cat, and while it is most definitely feminine, it has a distinctly cat-like rumble to it, a bit like Aslan from Narnia. The main emotion in her voice at the moment is relief, and I can even smell it.

            My eyes open a bit wider in surprise, when I woke up next to a cat, I did not expect it to talk. Perhaps in different circumstances I would freak out, start panicking, but she does not scare me or make me feel uncomfortable, instead hearing her talk makes me relax more onto the cave floor. I don’t reply though, how do you respond to a worried talking cat that you’ve never met before anyway? We continue to look into each other’s eyes, and as the seconds tick passed, she gets more and more agitated, her scent changing from relief to a cocktail of worry, anxiety and panic, her eyes growing wider and her breathing more erratic.

            “Can you not understand me? Please tell me you can understand me!” By now she’s full on freaking out, and I can tell she is about to have some sort of panic attack, which slightly confuses me, I don’t know why me being able to understand her is so important to her, but her freaking out is freaking me out.

            Before she can jump up and move away from me, I turn over onto my side and wrap my arms around her, pulling her closer to me. “Shh, its okay, I can understand you. Shh.” I can feel her start to relax, her scent informing me that she is calming down. “I’m sorry that I made you panic; you took me by surprise and I just didn’t know how to react.”

            My words and back scritches calm her further, and she relaxes into my cuddle, her purring picking back up again. As she calms, so do I, and I can feel a returning purr rising up in my throat, catching me by surprise and making me pull back a bit. We lie together for a while, so comfortable with each other and tired from panicking that we both drift off to sleep.

                                                                                                                        ﴾⸸﴿

            When my eyelids flutter open and I wake up a few hours have passed, the cave ceiling is less dark and is now sparkling orange. It must be sunrise. The to-yet-be-named cat stirs and pulls a bit out of my embrace, till she can look in my eyes. Her eyes convey gratitude to me, before she presses her forehead against mine.

            “Thank you.” she whispers, “The last few days have been really stressful, and if you could not speak to me as I have been to you, I don’t know what I would do.”

            “Were you using me as an excuse to talk to yourself?” I ask, my tone light but flavoured with worry. She pulls her head back far enough to look into my eyes again, with a look of mock outrage on her face.

            “What! Never would I stoop so low as to talk to myself. Such things are far below one such as I!” She ‘glares’ at me a moment longer, before she snorts and starts laughing, which triggers my laughter.

            The laughter carries on for a moment, gradually quieting until we are just back to looking at each other in silence. She breaks the silence first, once again speaking quietly. “Its really good to hear your voice and see your eyes, they are both beautiful and well worth a few weeks for.”

            Hearing her words makes me momentarily distracted, neither my eyes nor my voice were beautiful prior to the collision with the truck, just brown and boring, before my attention is drawn to something else she said. “That long? It feels much shorter for me since I was last fully conscious. I have a question though, do you know how I got here?”

            “In this cave?” she responds with a smirk, “I dragged you. If you mean here as in this specific forest, I know not. Only that I was hunting around dusk and something collided heavily with the ground not too far from where I was stalking a deer. That something was you. At first I was scared, much like the deer that I was after, but that gave way to curiosity and worry, so I brought you to my home.” Her words are not as helpful as I hoped, but they bring more knowledge about my circumstances than what I had before.

            “Thank you, it is very helpful.” She smiles, I smile, “I have another question, am I talking to you or are you talking to me?” My words bring a brief confused look to her face, before it clears and she responds.

            “Are you asking about what language we are speaking?” Wow, she understood that far quicker than I thought she would. I nod. “We are speaking Aŕemír, the language of the forest.”

            When I don’t respond, she jumps to another correct conclusion. “You thought I was talking to you, didn’t you?”

            “Yeah, in my head you were a cat talking a human language, not the other way around.” At my answer, she nods, humming in response. The conversation dwindles into the quiet of dawn again, but this time I speak first.

            “I feel really comfortable with you, but I don’t know your name.”

            “Oh goodness, of course. I’m so used to you being passively around that it never really crossed my mind. I’ll go first. I am Síle Bŕyna, last of my mother’s litter, but you can just call me Síle.” Knowing her name makes me smile, it is a beautiful name for a beautiful and kind-hearted cat. I tell her as much and her purr comes back in force, so strong I can feel it in my bones. My own purr rises in response once again, and together, perhaps, our purrs could knock a drunk person off of their feet.

            Síle looks expectantly at me, her purr and mine slowly fading away as I don’t tell her my name.

            “Do you not have a name?” she asks.

            “I guess not,” I respond, “My old name doesn’t really fit anymore.”

            “Oh. Old name? Could you tell me it anyway?” I smile and nod at her question, her interest in me making me happy.

            “My name used to be Samuel Robert Johnson.” Her face and scent express great confusion at this.

            “But that is not a name for a beautiful woman, it is a name for a man.”