BOXES

I sit on the floor, surrounded by empty takeout containers, knowing this will be the last time. Only an air mattress remains in the deserted room. It hisses and sputters, deflating under the weight of our silence.

Sarah says I can keep the Safavieh rug but the gesture of peace feels hollow. The rug was free off Craigslist.

I position myself behind the boxes like an infantryman taking cover. Sarah is there somewhere but all I can see from this vantage point is Muggsy, batting at the noodle dangling from her fork. The snap of a plastic container warns me that she has already moved on to the basil eggplant. Time is running out.

Clumps of dirt and fur roll like tumbleweeds. I wait for Muggsy to chase the dust bunnies but maybe he feels it is too fratricidal knowing most of them are spawned of his fur and dander. Or maybe he is dumb. I will not miss Muggsy, mostly because he is dumb and partially because I am allergic to cats. We didn’t know that when Sarah adopted him but by then it was too late just like it was too late for me to sign a lease to rent the vacant basement unit from that aggressively polyamorous couple at a suspiciously low rate instead.

How the tables could have turned. Maybe I would be leaving now. Not her but someone.

I wonder if they are still renting. Or married.

Sarah says I can take the table. She is saying something else but all I can focus on is the grease on her lips. Had she always intended to betray me? She points out that I had declared the end was near first. Bought one of those prep books. For the LSAT or the GRE or the CIA. I can't remember which. That was at the beginning of the pandemic when time seemed infinite and white people got too comfortable with Instagramming their Dalgona coffee. A ceasefire in the siege of new quarter-age responsibilities: HMO, 401K, LTR, IRA.

Time passed. We got a Nintendo Switch. I forgot why I bought the book in the first place.

I thought Sarah would be relieved. She hated the whole scam. Taking out loans to do something Noble when only an Evil job could pay them off. Instead, it cracked something open in her. I saw the disappointment begin to ooze out in her sighs and refusals to commiserate over my temp jobs. That’s when she knew I was falling behind. In adulthood and sometimes on rent.

Even when I couldn’t pay rent Sarah never judged me for continuing to order Chinese food. It made me happy she didn’t want to break the ritual either. The one we started the weekend we moved in together. The night before we celebrated by drinking bodega bottles of Prosecco and going to the local dive and drinking Tecate combos. We slept until 4pm the next day and by then going to fill our empty fridge seemed unfathomable. The noodles were hot and salty and soaked with possibility.

The night Sarah stopped talking to me I retrieved the LSAT book from under my bed. It was still shiny, untouched like a haunted doll. I sought out our local Buy Nothing group to exorcise it. Seventeen people responded and I knew Sarah saw the post. I threw it in the trash.

When Sarah first told me she was moving out I cut a hole in the toes of all of her socks. Just small ones. Enough of a hole that she would feel something was wrong but not enough for blisters or anything. I thought that maybe she would wait until, eventually, enough of my good ones had mixed in with her laundry and I got all the bad, holey ones.

I don't know if you even need socks to get a master's degree in musical therapy.

Sarah points out that I always complained about the way she never turned the clocks back.

But I said that the way you say that the train is always late or that there are too many rats in our toilet. The rats would never leave me for grad school, at least. If Muggsy hadn't killed them all. Maybe he is not so dumb. Maybe I will miss him.

Sarah says it's "not betrayal" to move on with your life, especially when your pandemic rent deal is ending but I know what an excuse sounds like when I hear one. Like the creak of footsteps on a floor, getting softer and softer until you're not sure if it's a ghost or just your own regret.

The floor is creaking now. I peek around my box fort and see Muggsy, his body hunched, drawn tight like a spring, and ready to pounce.

Sarah slides the dan dan noodles toward me. I add the box to my fort. We will be moving into boxes for the rest of our lives.

Tonya Riley is a journalist and writer working on her debut novel. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her cat.

BIDDING

When you are planning an event called Catoberfest, you are obligated to remain absurd at all times. You may know that your cause is noble, and your frippery lifts the fallen. You shall bask in the October sun of saving lives.

But when the phone rings at 8:41pm, and it is Alfred the Shticky Guy, you must accept that farce is your duty.

“Would we have booth space for a man selling The Shticky?” I turned to Katherine, Director of Operations. “He sounds sweet. He’ll donate 20% of his proceeds.”

“He needs a whole booth for Shtickys?”

“He has the whole fleet of Shtickys. Purse-sized to pole.”

“Sign him up. I could use one of those things.”

We had shared 9 pm nights at the cat sanctuary for weeks, herding silent auction items and procuring all the pageantry one might expect for the feline fundraiser to end them all. Katherine and I were the two ragged wings of this stubborn angel. We had both been employed here our entire adult lives. We were riddled with reservations about an extravaganza appalling to introverts like ourselves.

But we were in it now, making news, and making friends with old men selling Shtickys, and making a gaudy goal of fifty thousand dollars. We had one hundred feline mouths to feed. As Director of Development, I was equal parts fundraiser, storyteller, and afraid.

Katherine dealt with parking and food trucks and the concerns of the Third Ward Alderman. “What if the cats should break loose and descend upon the population center of Rango?” Our town of three hundred persons, one hundred cats, and three delis would be safe, she promised him, but there was insurance for all eventualities.

Meanwhile, I caressed the silent auction. We had intended fifteen items, Petco gift cards and kitten figurines and a ten-day stay at our best donor’s Sedona compound. But volunteer Lana was an “auction kinda gal,” and something about the manic bounce in her bob made us say, “run with it.”

No one knew Lana was a wind sprint in mom jeans.

“The Brooklyn Botanical garden will give us four tickets!” Lana’s voice always sounded like colors.

“We’re three hours from Brooklyn.”

“It’s worth the trip! Trust me.”

Trusting Lana became the only option, as her acquisitions had offspring. “The guy at Philadelphia Chocolate Tours called Rodney Dangerfield’s comedy club, and they’re sending seven tickets!”

“Is Rodney Dangerfield still alive?” Katherine worried.

“Does it matter?” The purple streak in Lana’s hair could somehow be seen over the phone.

There were avocado-based restaurant gift cards and puff paint sweatshirts. There was a necklace heavy enough to drown three Mafia enemies, and DVDs about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Lana possessed such nuclear powers of lovableness, no one could say no. Artists blew glass. Bakers boasted of gluten-free, gluten-rich, and gluten-considerate options. Paw-shaped soaps appeared like manna. Throwers and bouncers and paddlers of various sport balls threw tickets like roses.

“Lana,” Katherine cautioned, “our demographic doesn’t really do athletic stuff.”

“Those are going to be big ticket items. Trust me!”

When Lana burst into the sanctuary with a cat carrier that looked like a double-decker bus, my wheels fell off. “I actually kinda want that.”

“And it comes with this!” Lana pulled out a magenta MEOW hoodie.

“I need that.” I did need it.

“It would fit fourteen of you.” Katherine looked up from peeling string cheese for the one-eyed cat on her desk.

When Lana’s work was done, mine began.

Writing had always been my favorite part of the job, nose-to-nose with nuzzling cats and telling donors that they are paragons of holy compassion. I deflected all kudos, aware that storytelling is easy when your heroes are cats from hopeless situations. Forgiveness on four legs, they are egomaniacal sprites immune to self-pity. They made our donors laugh. They made our donors cry. They made “biscuits” with their powerful paws while making my job a jaunty joy.

We insist we don’t have favorites at the cat sanctuary, but we are long-tailed liars. Still, if you would like to expand your family of favorites, there is no surer strategy than to write about them. Time and again, the sheer act of circling a cat with language made me love her uncontrollably. Pay enough attention to anyone, and you will cherish her story. Tell the world of her rumpled bravery, and she will open a private chapel in your heart.

I wrote about them because I loved them, and the more I wrote about them, the more I loved them.

Writing about N’Sync concert memorabilia would be a different business.

I am not ashamed to say that I prayed over this task. For years, I’d tasked God with my impossible responsibilities: “They are your cats, and you love them more than I do. I can’t raise a million dollars, but you once made a donkey speak, so you can get me out of my own way.” The donations showed up.

Now I needed to show up for leopard-print beach towels and Rodney Dangerfield largesse. I needed to remember that to write is to love, and to write more is to love more.

A farcical thing happened on the way to two hundred eighty-three auction descriptions. I came to admire all the items. I wanted to acquire all the items.

The avocado restaurant was the Garden of Eden in green, a monounsaturated dream from which you wouldn’t want to wake.

The cat bus was the ride of your life, designer wheels to make your pet go round and round.

The puff paint sweatshirt was an ‘80s revelation, the start of your purple reign.

The Chocolate Tours would make you forget everything bittersweet.

The sport ball tickets had the power to make you feel young again, and besides, every stadium has vegan hot dogs now.

No one would forget you in that necklace…and you would never forget how many cats you saved.

I tried to explain it to Katherine. “Kath, I’m falling in love with these things. I want the chain-mail scrunchies. I want the henna tattoo of Cassiopeia. I want the eight-volume set of books about foraging for mushrooms.”

“You sound like you may have a few mushrooms in your system.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t want to at least put in a starting bid for a fairy-tale fungal fantasy.”

Katherine smirked. Her desk cat submerged his head in her coffee. “Surely you haven’t written one for the wreath yet.”

“Oh, but I have.”

My magnum opus, the coup d’etat for the love of cats, was the wreath. When our donors unfortunately caught wind of the silent auction, they began mailing fresh horrors unbidden, and none was more resplendently rancid than the wreath.

Fashioned entirely of crinoline and rabbit-fur bats, I surmise that this violent orange object was intended for Halloween. Its first effect was to cause Neil, our Executive Director, to scream as though being flayed alive. “MY GOD. I think it has ringworm.”

“Check the mushroom book,” Katherine suggested.

But someone made the wreath, and someone wanted to save cats with the wreath, and someone who already dreamed of purple puff paint and double decker cat transportation was up for writing the wreath to glory.

“October will never be the same, and your neighbors will never forget your fame. Go brilliantly batty with one wreath to rule them all.”

“That sounds a little Lord of the Rings,” Neil cautioned.

“Careful, or I’ll add a line about it being fit for orcs, dorks, and all who love sporks.”

“This auction has turned your brain to sardines.”

True though that was, the auction would turn up five hundred visitors. Like the Joads they came, carloads and truckloads of oddballs and innocents, cat lovers marbled with compassion and curiosity.

Lana fluoresced in all directions. “How did you hear about the auction? Do you like avocados? What’s your favorite sport? Can you imagine all the cats we’ll save after today?”

Neil hid in his office, glowering at me every time I summoned him to meet a major donor. “There are people everywhere. I am a cat. Take their money and send them home. Also, watch out for that Shticky guy.”

Katherine kept one eye on parking, sending overflow Joads to the grit yard, and the other on the cat bus. “I know you want that thing. How high are you willing to bid?”

“Two hundred?”

“Are you serious?”

I was far past the hinterlands of serious, fully engulfed in absurd. It was all for the love of cats, but looking around at this impossible extravaganza, I felt my love enlarge. I had summoned my words and my strength and my silliness, and now it felt like every clanging bell was calling my name.

We grossed fifty thousand dollars. We gave Rango, New Jersey the thrill of its corn-fed life.

I won the cat bus and bought five Shtickys. “You’ve got silly business up the yin-yang,” Neil observed.

Katherine and I collapsed and never fully recovered. Eleven years later, we still toast each other every October 3rd: “happy not-Catoberfest!” We have found better ways to raise cat-saving money. God loves his cats.

Fifty years from now, I hope I still write my way to love. I hope I remember to remain absurd at all times. I hope fun descends on the population center.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and B.A. from Vassar. Her work has or will be published in The Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Fathom Magazine, Feminine Collective, and Young Ravens Literary Review. Angie loves life dearly. https://www.instagram.com/fullyalivebythegrace/