In a wood in Wonderland, on a long branch of a long tree, there lived a cat called the Cheshire Cat. He was a striped sort of cat, with green eyes and a very wide mouth, and he had a habit, the Cheshire Cat, of disappearing.

He could disappear all at once, if he wanted to, the way most cats can. But he had got into the habit of disappearing slowly. He would start with the tip of his tail. The tail would go first. Then the body. Then the paws. Then the ears.

Last of all would go his face. And the very last thing to go would be his grin. The grin would stay, hanging there in the air on the branch, for a long time after the rest of him was gone.

Alice met him on her wandering. She came around the trunk of the tree, and there, sitting on the branch above her, was a cat with a smile so wide she thought at first the cat must be very glad about something.

"Hello," said Alice. "Could you tell me which way I ought to go from here?"

The cat stretched. The cat yawned. The cat looked at Alice for a long while.

"That depends a great deal," said the cat, "on where you want to get to."

"I do not much care where," said Alice.

"Then," said the cat, "it does not matter which way you go."

He began to disappear. His tail went first. Then his body. Then his paws. The grin stayed last, a long time after the rest was gone.

Then even the grin faded. And the branch was empty.

Alice met the Cheshire Cat many times in Wonderland. He was always disappearing, always coming back. She got used to seeing him in pieces.

One afternoon, she was sitting under his tree, eating a small biscuit she had found in her pocket. She heard his voice from somewhere above her, although she could not see him.

"Alice," said the cat. "May I ask you a question?"

"Yes," said Alice.

"When I disappear, and then come back, do I come back all of me? Or only the visible parts? Have you ever noticed a difference?"

Alice put down her biscuit. This was, she thought, an unusual question. She looked up at the branch. She could see the cat now, halfway visible, with his face and his front paws but not the rest of him.

"I have never noticed a difference," said Alice truthfully. "You always seem like the same cat to me. Irritating, mainly. And full of riddles. And quite insistent on appearing in the wrong places."

The cat was very still for a moment. He came the rest of the way back. His tail. His body. His paws. He gathered himself together on the branch and looked at her.

"Have you?" he said. "Truly?"

It was not really a question. It was the kind of not-quite-a-question that someone asks when they have been afraid for a long time of an answer they did not think they would get.

Alice could see, even through his strange smile, that the cat had been worried about this for a very long time. That every time he disappeared, he had been a little afraid that not all of him would come back. That the part of him that nobody could see might one day not return at all.

"Truly," said Alice. "You always come back. All of you."

The cat sat on his branch for a while without saying anything. Alice ate her biscuit. The forest made its small forest noises.

"There is a thing," said the cat at last, "about being mostly invisible. People notice the grin. They notice the parts of me that show. Nobody notices the parts that have gone away. So I started to wonder whether the parts that go away exist at all. Whether I am really a whole cat, with insides and edges and a proper shape. Or whether I am only a grin that sometimes pretends to have a cat attached to it."

He looked at his own paw. He flexed it, slowly, as if checking it was really his.

"The Queen of Hearts," the cat went on, "has taken many things from many people. Heads, mostly. But also quietness, and the right to disagree, and the freedom to say I am not sure. She cannot take the grin. She has tried. She finds it very irritating, which is half the reason I keep it. But she could, in principle, take everything else. The body. The paws. The tail."

"And then," said Alice slowly, "you would just be a grin."

"Yes," said the cat. "And I do not know whether a grin without a cat is still me. Or whether the cat without a grin would be me. Or whether either of us is, really, what counts as a self."

Alice thought about this for a long while. She thought about the parts of herself she could see, and the parts she could not. She thought about the parts of her she only knew by their absence, the way you know a song by the silence between the notes.

"I think," said Alice, "you are the same cat whether or not anyone is looking. The grin is part of you. The paws are part of you. The bits that go away are still part of you. They go somewhere, but they are yours. They come back, because they are yours."

The cat said nothing for a while. Then he smiled. It was a different smile from the great wide grin. Smaller. Warmer. Less performed.

"Good," he said. "That is good."

Alice walked on through Wonderland after that. She had places to go and a Queen to avoid and a way home to find. The Cheshire Cat watched her from his branch.

He began to disappear, the way he always did. Tail first. Then the body. Then the paws.

But this time, just before the rest of him went, he did something he had never done before.

He stayed.

He kept the rest of himself there, on the branch, for a long while. He did not vanish quickly. He looked at the wood. He looked at the path Alice had taken. He felt, in a way he had not felt for a long time, like a whole cat. With insides. And edges. And a proper shape.

He stayed like that until the sun moved through the trees. Then, slowly, he began to fade. Tail. Body. Paws. Ears. Face.

The grin was the last to go.

But this time, when the grin faded, something was different. The cat went too. All of him. He went together, the way other cats do, the way he had not been doing for a very long time.

The branch was empty.

When he came back, later, on a different afternoon, he came back all at once. The tail and the body and the paws and the grin, together, the way a whole cat should arrive.

He had decided, on the day Alice told him he was always all there, that he would try coming back whole. It took more effort. But it was better, he found. It was much better.