Angela Townsend
Bones of the Shelter
When your day begins with barrettes from Ezekiel, you have fallen into a good world. You have fallen from great heights. You have a good deal further yet to fall. Whatever comes next, an acrylic skeleton has awarded you eight glittering claws for your greying hair.
When you work with people you cannot live without, the stakes skew high. When a substantial percentage of those people are cats, and one is an acrylic skeleton with his own budget, your situation is always precarious.
But you forget, which is how you survive. You forget that people in more reasonable worlds offer you fistfuls of tickets to be bitter. Your day began with a blood glucose reading of three eighty-nine. Your arteries feel dense with risotto that your Maker has forgotten to stir. You have informed the residents of all worlds that Type 1 diabetes is tame, forbidding them to worry. You have installed amnesia under their empathy. You have carved your bones into gratitude.
You burst into the cat shelter bellowing, “Good morning, beautiful people!” You never remember not to try too hard. When your blood glucose is three eighty-nine, exuberance is essential. Your insulin pump shrieks punk rock, but the turgid cat on the reception desk is louder.
There is a skeleton taller than your boss on the lobby couch. He sits splayed like Homer Simpson on Thanksgiving, his mouth frozen open. Halloween is weeks away, but the people you cannot live without cannot wait for whimsy. He is wearing a paisley fedora. A cat bed fills his lap, and a calico sleeps well. She is a paperweight for every pelvis, with or without flesh.
The skeleton wears a shelter volunteer name tag: Hello! My Name Is Ezekiel. His bones are dusted with the receptionist’s wit. She has commissioned a Name The Skeleton Contest, and apparently you have won.
You forget that you came to the cat shelter after a misbegotten career in ministry. You cough up cobwebs from the last testaments. The receptionist presents you with a Shop-Rite bag filled with barrettes for children, orange butterflies and sparkle-spiders. You commend her for knowing you well. She reminds you that the gift comes from the one you have named.
When you silence your pump, you can hear your boss telling someone that their suggestion is “content free.” You hear his phrase in your sleep, spangled across your press releases and blog posts. Your boss is speaking to an orange cat, who is speaking in expletives. You cannot live without this man, all bluster and improbables. He founded a church costumed as a cat shelter. He Saran-wraps “fatherly” under five fedoras of wry.
You have been here sixteen years, with no training and dilute memories of the life before. You forget, which is how you survive. You expel affection. It is best that the lobby does not know this is only your top layer of cream. You chug a Diet Coke to flood your sugar bowl.
The Director of Operations and the Director of Volunteers are in your office, draped with cats who fell out of the reasonable world. A tortoiseshell without eyes is aqueous in arms. A marmalade cynic bites often. The sanctuary swaddles the just and the unjust. There is no word for “worth” in the world you cannot live without.
You cannot enter your office. A man called Laundry Tony is throwing towels overhead like terrycloth toddlers who yell, “do it again!” He places a washcloth on your head and bursts into song. He is seventy and will never know that you are three eighty-nine. You inform him that he is “glorious and victorious.” He beats his chest. Sweaty retirees and truant teenagers cackle over soapy litter boxes and soiled blankets. You are unfit for worlds where your too-many words fall.
The Director of Operations finds you where you have hidden. Do you remember that today is the Conflict Resolution Workshop? She has shared your sixteen years here, and it took the first fifteen for you to remember that you are children. You have drowned the world in tears at the deaths of cats vicious and ungrateful. She is salty and staccato, and you cannot live without her. She comments whenever your freckles “look weird,” but remembers not to name blood glucose.
You have forgotten the workshop and scheduled a tour. Your donor is driving two hours for an audience with Jellybean. Forgetting is forgiven. The schedule is supple in this world, undulating like the spotted stomachs you touch at your peril.
You are always in danger, but you forget, which is how you survive. You toss at night, banishing dreams where you fold jeans at Target or pipe cream on coffee. The reasonable world has stubby stakes. There could be little to lose. You could keep your adverbs inside. You could get the glucose under control. You could drag your bones to the pulpit and pretend you know answers.
There is a cat on three legs pursuing dual degrees in acrobatics and homiletics, and someone must extract her from the hallway. The Director of Operations excuses herself. You watch the woman you have grown up with fold herself into a corner and raise herself to her full height, screaming quarry in her arms. You know she will lead when your feral faux father retires. You remind him that this is impermissible prior to age ninety.
You slip into the bathroom to question your ketones. They are still angry and purple. You vault into the Community Room and tell people with mops that they are “magnificence on two legs!” Joyce stops scrubbing to hand you a box. She has crocheted you a cat as round as the moon. It is meant to be Roy, the one who died last month, the one who inspired your two-thousand-word blog. You remember that you have fallen into a world where you are paid to bleed two thousand words about a twelve-pound empath. You tell Joyce she is a shepherd.
You put barrettes from a skeleton in your hair and wash your face. You remember your donors’ cats’ names and their children’s names and their fears of highway driving. The back roads were full of Queen Anne’s Lace. Jellybean was worth the wait. They press a fistful of fives into your palm, wet-eyed and contrite. They wish it could be more. People tell you this all day. You do not tell them that you say these words to God all day.
The people you cannot live without are learning their conflict styles. The Founder is Combative. Everyone erupts in snorts and equally revelatory statements: the sky is blue. Cats are despots. Diet Coke has an aftertaste. The Director of Operations is Collaborative. All three vet techs are Avoidant. You are Accommodating, boneless, fit for laps.
The Founder thanks the workshop man. He calls you into his office and tells you not to tell them that the entire exercise was content-free. He says your color looks “off” but your “thing about Roy” was “damn powerful.” You give him your round Roy. You tell him he is a “gigantic goober.”
You are in the sanctuary. You could say more. You have only been here sixteen years, which is not quite long enough to remember you are safe. You have fallen into a good world.
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Terrain.org, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately.
