Fiction

This Day

Angela Townsend


My waking thought: I would like to lie down. “Morning Has Broken” has broken my sleep over its knee.

I silence the folk music and summon my ancestors. Carry me on your backs, and we will love the salt back into this world. My expectations are ridiculous. They are manageable but not curable.

My new medication looks like the yellow button at the center of a daisy. They tell me it will take four to six weeks to find the sun. An editor in Florida tells me that my prose is “lyrical and lovely,” but he cannot find a home for my piece and wishes me the best in my writing career. I send my blessing to the Sunshine State and turn the ignition here in Pennsylvania. I am landlocked. “You’re okay,” I tell myself.

The first meeting of the day is a klatch of managers, four women ringleading a cat sanctuary. We have grown up together in this jungle gym. We pushed each other from the monkey bars when we were twenty-six, trying out sisterhood on strangers. Twenty years later, we are each other’s mothers—childless and half-tame. Now we have matching tattoos and scars. We have saved four thousand feral hooligans and each other. 

A cat sanctuary should not survive all these years, but we have pulled tails and found that they stretch. Today we conspire to honor our boss on the twentieth anniversary. He is father to none but four thousand. Neil favors particle physics to Hallmark. He melted down his stock options to build a cat sanctuary, and he is allergic to syrup. His generals will not let him escape a parade. 

I have written a speech for us to divide like pie. Three lines for Katherine, two for Dana, three for Siobhan, and a final buttered blast from me. Katherine, our Director of Operations, is Neil’s heir apparent. She is protective of Neil’s wryness and will not let me slather the sweet too thickly. “He loves you, but you will make him run if you say all that in public.”

I collar my adverbs. Siobhan rubs her new tattoo—it is a rainbow bridge of grief, with public tears in primary colors. She manages three hundred volunteers and fosters kittens she knows will die. She empathizes with my adjectives but is wiser than me.

We insert sentences about Neil’s one-liners and the way he subjects the lobby to the music of Captain Beefheart. Dana, Director of Veterinary Medicine, is pleased. “Just cram all the lovey-lulu stuff into a carrier at the end for Daisy.” They laugh at me. I laugh at me. They know I don’t feel well, even though I don’t tell them. I write the press releases and cat stories and doodle my name in all the margins.

My mother is calling. She is my shelter, even though I am forty-two. I dispatch the generals. Is everything okay? Well…the hotels are all booked for October seventh. She and my stepfather are coming for the twentieth anniversary, but my condo is the size of a loaf of bread. What are we going to do?

My mother is Brooklyn. I am Mayberry. She moved me to an innocent zip code when I was still in utero. We have never overcome the language barrier.

I tell her they can stay with me. I will pull out the air mattress. They are precious. They are my priority. She refuses and dams my rapids.

“I know it’s terribly hard for you to deviate from your routine.” Brooklyn. “I know you need to be rigid.”

“Ouch.” I don’t mean to say it, but I feel my tail puff up—all Halloween cat in the alley. 

“What do you mean ‘ouch’? I’m just accepting the obvious.” Brooklyn.

“I mean, my family means more to me than my routines.” They do, although the thought of my people descending on my shelter is jarring. I orchestrate the hours around my bony body. I will not admit this. “I love you more than life. My routines are tissue paper in the face of my titanium love for you.”

This is how I speak on an ordinary Wednesday. Nobody knows why. It is infuriating at lunch. It is power and light in my profession. Neil hired me for this. I am the Director of Development, and donors nestle between my paragraphs. It comes naturally to tell people that they are life on legs. Sometimes this is exasperating. Sometimes I witness resurrection.

“You have routines. I know they are important to you.” I hear more than she is saying. I hear Brooklyn, but it is mostly the voice in my own basement.

“I would rearrange the continents to make you feel welcome.” My eyes are filling with tears. “You are my incandescent mother!” 

“You are getting strident.” Brooklyn. “You are saying big words. You do this. You get histrionic. I will not talk to you about this anymore while you’re in your office. Goodbye.”

I put my head on the desk. I feel as though my last petal has been plucked. It is 10:25 a.m. My office mate, a dowager calico with one eye, rubs my cheek. I now smell like poultry by-product. 

I open my email. An acceptance from a literary journal would make things better. I exult to see that I have a message. But it is a woman from church telling me her daughter has cancer—eleven paragraphs of cytology and treatment plans. Will I pray? Of course, I will pray. I will type one hundred twenty words a minute to hurl myself to her side. This is what I do. I lay my head on the desk.

“Do you have a minute?” It’s Janie, one of my favorite volunteers. 

Janie wears fleece vests all year and usually seems worried. Her bangs are as short as a child’s. She prefers old cats to kittens. Today she is smiling, a Ross Dress For Less bag is in her hand.

She always begins in the key of nervous, even with me. “Um, this might be silly, but…” Her sister is getting bored recovering from hip surgery. Her sister knit scarves until her entire family overheated. Her sister has hatched a hilarious plan.

Janie reaches into the bag. She pulls out a crocheted cat, as fat as a rutabaga, with a curly pig tail. It is as white as my cat whose death I did not think I would survive.

“She’s made thirty, and she wants to keep going.” Janie sees me melting and grows two inches. “She thought maybe we could sell them at the anniversary thing.”

I grab the cat from her hands. I am a child. “We could charge forty dollars for these.”

“I don’t think—”

“—Okay, maybe twenty.” I stare into the rutabaga’s button eyes. “Janie, they are brilliant. They are magical.”

“They’re cute, right?”

“They’re going to save a lot of cats. They will sell out in an hour.”

“I can tell her to keep going?”

“Please!” 

She reaches out for the rutabaga. I stop her. “No, I’m buying this one.”

“Oh,” she laughs, “just keep it! You like it?”

I wonder how quickly I can explain.

“I just grabbed that one from the herd.” Janie is happy. “The others are a rainbow of colors, so I don’t know why I grabbed the white one—”

“—This is why.” I hand her the photo on my desk. “I lost Pippa in 2021.”

Janie’s smile changes. She is in on the secret. “Say no more.”

“You were supposed to grab the white one.”

“My sister will be so happy.”

“Your sister is going to save a lot of cats.”

I text my mother a picture of the white one. I text her a large amount of text. She responds, “I’m not going to talk about this right now. You need to get yourself together.” Brooklyn.

I check my email again. The church lady says my prayer made her cry. A donor has written to announce that he is sending forty shares of Merck stock “for the thin cat with diabetes, that gray one.” I call Neil to tell him. I hear Meat Loaf playing in his office. 

“‘Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through’?” I name that tune.

Neil is pleased. “You know your Meat.” Neil calls me his consigliere. Five minutes later, he tells me my writing is “content-free.” He mocks my exclamation points. I buy him Christmas mugs saying Best Boss Ever!!!!!!!!! He writes in my birthday card that I am “one of his favorite people in the whole wide world.” We make running jokes about taking a road trip to see Weird Al. He texts me to ask about my health. He does not ask in person.

“Jellybean just got a hefty stock donation.”

“I’ll line her litter box with the certificates.”

I have forty-two acknowledgement letters to sign before the Letter Lady arrives. She hand-addresses envelopes so that donors will open them. I scrawl a personal note on every letter, whether they have donated four holey towels or forty shares of stock. I greet their Cupcake and their Tigger and their hamsters and husbands. I tell them this world needs more people like them. I mean it. 

“Hey, lady!” Harriet is at my door. Harriet is one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, a bank executive disguised in a peace sign baseball cap and flood-prone eyes. Harriet and Neil hogtie spreadsheets, but Harriet spends most of her time on the floor of the hospice suite. The angry cats let Harriet brush them. She deflects praise to the power of squeeze-poultry. 

I am too busy for Harriet. “Maybe in an hour—”

“—Nope. You need to come with me.”

Harriet started as a donor, and she would email me photographs of my own letters. “Do you realize how rare you are? I donate to thirty nonprofits, and nobody else writes me poetry.”

It isn’t poetry, and it isn’t praise, just honest observations from a woman glutted with adverbs.

“I’m releasing ten today, and you’re gonna help me.”

We planted milkweed bushes last spring, and lime caterpillars converged in a gruesome congress. Harriet was exultant. Harriet convinced Neil to make Cat Haven a registered Monarch Waystation. Harriet has been trying to get me to help for months.

“Today’s the day.” Harriet has already turned her back, confident I will follow. My mother is exasperated, and Florida will not publish my story, and I follow. We meet in the Memorial Garden full of pink flowers and the echoes of cat ashes. 

Harriet has a kitten play-cube full of flight. 

“It looks like thirty.”

“Just ten.” She smiles at her progeny. 

“How did you first get into this?” 

Harriet’s eyes fill with tears, their most comfortable state. “It’s a bit of a story.”

“I live for stories. And I love you.”

Harriet smiles. I know. “Well…you know my mother died a few years back.”

“I know. I’m so sorry…” They were close. I close further contemplation.

“I was angry, Daisy. With God, and just kinda angry in all directions.” She is watching the cube of chaos. “I’m not a gal who asks for signs, but I did. I said, ‘Dammit, I need proof that she’s okay.’ You know she left behind her old calico, Lucy?”

“I remember.”

“So, I asked for a calico sign.” Harriet rolls her eyes at herself. “I said, ‘Send me something orange, black, and white to tell me she’s okay.’” 

“A monarch!” I am the child on the library floor, who rushes the story.

Harriet shakes her head. “No, a disgusting bloated caterpillar.” The lime larvae started appearing on her deck. “I looked them up. Then I learned they were monarch kids. Babies. There was no good reason for it. I didn’t have any plants they should like.”

“No reason necessary.” I signed up for stories like this.

“Exactly. And ever since then…” She gestures grandly at her cube. “…I’ve been looking after them.”

She teaches me how to distinguish between males and females, and tasks me with logging this information as she sets each child free. They pause on her fingertips.

“This feels like a Disney movie.” I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. I revise my review. “No, it’s better. No one can sell licensed merchandise for anything this holy.”

Harriet tells me about the Monarchs’ journey to Mexico, and I start singing “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes,” and now she’s crying again.

“I’m sorry, I—” I don’t know why I’m apologizing.

“—Wanna hear something ridiculous?” Harriet’s cube is empty.

“I need to hear something ridiculous.” I need it more than Synthroid.

Harriet confesses she is grieving Jimmy Buffett. “Daisy, I really don’t give a crap about celebrities, but for some reason I just can’t stop being sad that he’s gone. Isn’t that nuts?”

I want to show her my white rutabaga cat. I want to read her the essay I just submitted to a literary journal, which is about how listening to Jimmy Buffett feels like church to me. I want to tell her why I don’t go to church, but I believe I am God’s kitten. I want to tell her that I wrote an essay about her called “Hey, Lady!” after she cried with me about my divorce. I want to tell her that Florida rejected my essay this morning, but the Monarchs will still pass that way. 

My adverbs clot, and all I can say is, “Harriet, I loved him too.”

She hugs me. We wet the milkweed with our tears. “I need to go lay on the floor with cats!” Harriet laughs, unconcerned that she is a mess. In her second marriage, she does not feel the need to be glamorous. Her husband loves her in her peace sign hat. She tells me I will find a good man. I tell her all I want is sleep and books and the curmudgeons at Cat Haven. 

We pass the solarium, where chrysalises hang like Christmas ornaments. The new ones are seafoam green, turning black as they prepare to emerge. In the final cocoon days, you can see their calico wings wrapped tight.

“Did you ever notice the diamonds?” Harriet asks.

“Diamonds?”

Her strong hand lands on my shoulder. “Look.” She points at the green children. Sure enough, they are limned with tiny sparkles, strings of pearls. These gooey little burritos are overdressed.

"It’s a revelation!” The words outrun me. “That’s the most magical thing I’ve seen…” since the rutabaga cat.

“I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation,” Harriet notes. “I should look that up.”

“I don’t really care about that,” I admit. “I see poetry. I mean, it writes itself. You see it, right? We sparkle even when we need to hide. Our incubation is covered in stars.”

Harriet is grinning at me. “You gotta do something with those words, lady. The world needs them.”

I don’t tell anyone at Cat Haven that I try to get published. I want to get back to my desk to text myself a draft.

I text my mother a picture of the chrysalis. She responds: “Magical.”

Neil is paging me. “Development Director, we need you. Vet office. Sunflower.”

“Oh, Lord.” Harriet knows, and she puts a hand on my shoulder. “Godspeed, sweetie.”

Sunflower has been dying for six months. She is the rare female orange tabby, one of our “marmaladies,” my coinage that Neil loves and hates. A farmer fed Sunflower for ten years, and when he died, she came to us. She never let us touch her until she began dying. The lymphoma slowed her down so she could make up for lost time.

Now we gather for the final mercy, kisses and tears erupting into each other and shifting the continents. Sunflower is exhausted. Her hazel eyes blink into mine. My coworkers outdo each other in exalted language. “She was a queen.” “She was extraordinary.” “She was one of my best friends in the whole entire world.”

We “let her go,” as Neil puts it, and we hold each other’s shoulders like the axis of the earth. Neil sobs into a Willie Nelson bandanna. I text my mother.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

“It’s okay. It’s not okay. I mean, I signed up for this, but it will never be okay.”

I check my email one last time. A community college literary journal is pleased to say they loved my piece and would like to publish it in the spring. Is “Hey, Lady!” still available?

I take my rutabaga and collapse into my car. I am thirsty from so much salt. I want to get home to my routines and my own little red cat. My condition is manageable but not curable. 

About the Author

Angela Townsend (she/her) graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, Lake Effect, New World Writing Quarterly, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, Pleiades, The Razor, and Terrain.org, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.

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