“Cougar” by Maria Anderson is an interesting short story that features so many repeated points that create some kind of meaning for the story. I was really drawn to a couple of different pieces of the story that kept showing up at little moments that could almost seem insignificant compared to the cougar figure. I was interested in how at the beginning, the narrator’s father always kept a pink healing quartz on the steps of their front porch that he’d found deep in the woods one day. Later, after the father had passed away the neighbor/landlord Jenny kept tripping over the rock every time he came over to collect rent payments. This kept happening over and over in the story so I figured it must be significant. I feel like it was something that the father left behind to remind everyone that he still had some permanence in people’s lives. Even when Jenny got frustrated and threw the quartz, it still rolled back out of the woods. This also clicked in my mind when Koda was gone and her fur kept showing up to remind the narrator of her.
Another aspect of the story that interested me was the whole different kinds of hurt. The hurt the narrator is feeling with the loss of his father is huge and was wondering if the hurt that came from a toe would feel better than what he was feeling and thus distract him from it. This came up again when Koda died. He stuck his hands into boiling water so they’d become covered in burns.
