It was a cool fall day. The rest of the family had made a trip from the island to go into town. I stayed back at my mother's mansion, alone, that is, for all practical purposes, alone, so I thought.

I went into my mother's room, where she lay still in her bed. I had given her nurse the day off. It was all well planed. I got close to her and spoke, thinking she probably couldn't hear me, but doing it anyway, just in case.

"I'm sorry this is how it ends. You were always a good mother, and I like to think I was always a good son. It's just that you haven't spoken in over three years and haven't moved on your own for two. I can't stand to watch you suffer this indignity any further."

I looked at the still woman's face one last time, and then I took a spare pillow from the foot of her bed and held it near that face.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

Startled, I jerked around to see a pretty, but somewhat disheveled, woman.

"Who are you?" I rushed out, my heart beating fast, having not recovered from being startled.

"I'm a friend of the family, and I understand what you were going to do."

Panicked, I became defensive.

"Mother looked uncomfortable. I was merely giving her an extra pillow, before I was startled by a trespasser."

"No, I am not a trespasser. Your mother welcomed me into this house many years ago. And you were planning on smothering her. Trust me, I understand the sentiment."

I became greatly offended. No one had been closer to my mother than I, so I thought.

"How could you possibly understand how it feels to see this happen to my mother, especially when she was such an incredible person, a precious jewel in a world of common rocks?"

"Yes, with all she was it was quite noble of her to choose this state."

"Choose!" I laughed at the absurdity. "Choose to be like this! Why would anyone choose this?"

"For you, your family, and for me."

"For you?"

"Yes. She did it for all of us. She did it so that we may continue living in this beautiful mansion on this enchanted island."

The woman made her way across the floor. She was very small and harmless looking, or I might have forced her to leave. She gazed at my mother.

"You see, she knew that things were coming to take her enchanted island away. She was a powerful woman, but she could not fight them off in her usual human form. She couldn't die either, because then she would ascend and not be here to protect us. So she made a compromise between the spiritual and the corporal. She moves about this island protecting it from the evil that wants its power, while remaining connected to, but never in, this body."

She turned to face me. "If you kill her body, her spirit will be gone, and we will be left unprotected."

Back then, I was a very no-nonsense man. I was finding this woman more and more intolerable.

"You don't even live here, you sad, maddened women. Take your talk of spirits and evil beings and leave this island!"

She smiled at this.

"I can't leave this island, my dear. I have an inborn fear of the water, even when I'm not in the other state."

The shape shifter dropped to the floor, not as if she'd fallen, but just shrunken. I looked to the floor and saw she had become my mother's cat, Eliza. Eliza ran from the room.

That was twenty years ago. I still live in my mother's mansion, on my mother's island. My children have grown up and left, but I think they'll come back one day. The island will call them back.

Eliza is still with us, though it is rare I see her in human form. I think she just prefers to be a cat.

I become more in touch with the island's magic every day. I know one day I'll have to change in order to protect it. For now, mother's body remains still in her bed.