Angela Townsend

There are few things I dislike about working at a cat sanctuary, but “surrender calls” are their king. We have room for one hundred cats. We receive thousands of calls for help each month. They are sympathetic or heartless, a long-striped gamut from “I am dying” to “my cat is orange, the new settee is pink, and I am too much of an artist to accept the dissonance.” 

It feels right to say “yes.” No whiskered innocent is unworthy, and my silly-putty heart stretches over humans. My friends rage – “an artist! I’ll tell her where she can put her papier mâché!” – but I am our resident empathy idiot. 

“We can’t know what someone is suffering,” I offer. “Just think what chaos and sadness might be behind an excuse like that.”

“That woman is a pinhead, and I hate her.” My colleague Siobahn speaks with great delicacy.

“Then think of this,” I slobber. “Think of how fortunate we are to feel so much love. Anyone so cold-hearted is missing out on joy.” 

“To hell with her.” Siobahn has spoken. “Still, I wish we could take her cat.”

But we can’t, not if we intend to be here for any cats at all. We are a sanctuary, not the holy of holies. Our walls can only hold a hundred.

We say “no” over and over, and it never gets easier. We try to tweak it to “no, but…” We have various lifelines for these humans and their cats, ways to help without becoming a hoarding house. We are earthbound. We are liquid love, but we are limited.

We were Rory’s “only hope.”

“I am dead inside.” This is not usually how surrender calls begin. “I have three old cats. They deserve better. You guys are my only hope.”

I knew better than to unspool my spiel, but my throat knotted up. “If they’ve been with you all their lives, you’re their comfort. The most loving thing is to let them live out their golden years with you…”

“I’m telling you I can’t see tomorrow.” 

Thunderstorms flashed across my brain, memories of my psychologist mother warning me, “if anyone tells you they are a threat to themselves or others, you need to report it.”

“Are you telling me—”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I’m not wooing the giant meteor.” Rory was beleaguered and jaunty at once. “I’m not going to do anything. But I don’t know what’s going to become of me, and I just want these guys safe.”

“If you love them so much, aren’t they a bright spot in your life?”

“Sort of. Yes. I don’t know.”

We stared at each other in silence over the phone. I could envision this man’s face, creased and kind and twitching.

“We can’t take the cats.” This was all I knew. “But why don’t we keep in touch?”

I don’t know where that came from, only that there is a M*A*S*H* unit somewhere between my soul and my pancreas. The roads are unpaved, the street signs covered in illegible graffiti. There are half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches littering the premises, with one-eyed cats and widowers wandering like monks. I have tried for years to have it removed, but not even surgical prayers can locate the damn place. 

“That would be nice.”

It feels right to say “yes,” and I believed I had counted the cost. Rory was two thousand miles away. I was a name on a website who offered him a goody bag of empathy. I entered a recurring event on my calendar, every other Tuesday: “Check On Sad Rory.”

The reminder proved unnecessary. Furry emails began.

“Daisy, hey. My life is a shitstorm, but I wanted to say hi. Let me tell you more about Oatmeal and Snickerdoodle.”

His stories were operatic, adverbs and observations crashing like cymbals. He made me laugh out loud: “Cats are gloriously despotic, uproariously powerful. Oatsy is a terrorist on Prozac. No sardines, no litter box. I am his puppet government.”

“You are too funny to hate your life,” I informed him.

“Watch me.”

He cracked my Cadbury egg and found the molten core. “You strike me as effervescently alive,” I insisted. “You are stubborn as a cat. You make words sizzle with the strength of a survivor.”

Rory was a writer and producer, but LA had broken his skin. He paid today’s bills with jobs that shredded his ego. He loathed beings without tails. He knew he was gifted but didn’t know what that was worth. He didn’t know what to make of me.

“You’re a hell of a writer yourself.” Rory discovered my blog. “You write crazy gush, but it’s somehow not sappy.”

“Everything I do is sappy.”

“No, but it works. You care about cats the way people should care about people. I’m still trying to figure out why the hell you care about me.”

“You’re a person, and I’m a person, and you reached out from a dark place.” I don’t get paid to write emails like this. “What else would I do? I don’t presume to know how any of this works.”

But for all the satisfying yeses galloping across time zones, Rory was resolute in his despair, unwilling to let me forget.

“I still want you to take my cats,” he finished nearly every email. “I still think I’m in serious trouble here.”

“You know I have to ask what that means.”

“I have no idea what it means. But don’t freak out, I’m not going anywhere. Are you a God person?”

“You could say that.” Of course, he would intuit this. 

He hadn’t intuited it. “Yeah, OK, confession: I Facebook stalked you. You have a Master of Divinity. Hell of a degree.”

“Reaching for heaven, landing among cats.” I found myself crafting my words, scampering to delight him. “I tell people that I thought I was called to a church sanctuary, but God has such a crackin’ sense of humor that I landed in a cat sanctuary. Sixteen years later, I think God got it right.”

“I used to believe in God.” I was not surprised by Rory’s posture. “I can’t believe in a void. I just have a theory that it – call it the universe – singles out some people to crush. We’re specks, so we’ll never know why. But clearly, I’m one of those people.”

It feels right to say “yes,” but I couldn’t cough out a fleck of sympathy for this. “You’ve flexed the biceps of that bad story until you believe it. But it’s bologna, Rory.”

He attempted to pull me down a cat tunnel debating “bologna vs. baloney,” but I am a vegetarian.

“You’re both more and less important than you think. You’re important enough that people and cats should care about you, but the universe is insufficiently Rorycentric to single you out. The only neutron star dense enough for that kind of attention is inevitably feline. Probably Oatmeal.”

“You know Oatsy!”

Three months into our correspondence, Rory wondered why my last name changed. “I assume you’ve gotten married. Congratulations.”

“Thanks!” Congrats were in order for the opposite reason. It didn’t feel right to correct him.

I finished each email by reminding Rory that my boss and I were praying for him. Neil, the founder of our sanctuary, is not a praying guy – “I’ll keep a good thought” is his theological zenith – but he is kind, and he is male, and his existence might remind Rory that I wrote from inside a shelter. 

“Just be careful.” Neil was tepidly supportive of my relationship with Rory. “He’s never asked you for anything, right?”

“Just a ride to his sub-basement of sadness, and that we take his cats.”

“OK. Just proceed with caution. I know how you get with people. I’ll never know why, but” – his wooly bear eyebrows shot north – “I know you.”

Rory sent me cartoon storyboards, joltingly childlike. Tiny Vikings sang birthday songs to dogs on unicycles. Motley mammals opened a seaside hotel. 

“Rory, this is enchanting stuff. Magnetic. I don’t watch cartoons, and I would watch these.”

“An audience of one! I’m set. Let’s see how long before the universe turns you off, too.”

But Oatmeal stopped rage-urinating, and Rory’s mother beat her cancer, and LA tickled Rory with its whiskers. 

“Would I be crazy to try again?” His email vibrated. “I’m so dead inside, what’s the worst that could happen, right?”

“You are ferociously alive.” I auditioned my best adverbs for our duels. “You are rebelliously honest. You have everything to look forward to.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I don’t presume to.”

I never presumed that I would see Rory’s face, and I had to read the email twice. “Daisy, hey. So, I actually need to come East for a couple of days, and I want to see the sanctuary. Are you in on Wednesdays?”

“Tell him we have a forcefield that won’t let in dismal men,” Siobahn insisted. “Take the week off and send him to me.”

“I’ll tell him I’m Daisy,” Neil offered.

“He knows what I look like. Besides, it’s fine.” 

It feels right to say “yes,” but my stomach swam with piranhas the morning of Rory’s visit. They snapped at my sanctuary walls. They reread ghost stories from my past. One flopped right up to the border of my M*A*S*H* unit. I drowned him in coffee and cut off his head.

“I’ll be watching you.” Siobahn’s eyes were as dark as any Byzantine icon. If I was the sanctuary’s marshmallow, she was our jalapeno. I settled into the creases of everyone’s story, setting reminders for birthdays and upcoming surgeries. In ten years together, Siobahn had asked “how are you doing?” perhaps once.

But today she was present, pulsing with friendship. “I got you, Daisy. Lemme know if I need to release Pimento.” Our most unhinged feral cat could come in handy.

No such interventions were necessary. The writer with the sagging plotline was soft-spoken and appropriate, tugging at his hoodie and his ponytail. Exactly my age and as handsome as I’d feared – Rory was not the only Facebook stalker – he handed me a thousand-dollar check while mumbling, “I probably shouldn’t hug you.”

“COVID,” Neil thundered over our heads as he walked by. 

“COVID.” Rory nodded. COVID had been kaput for two years, but it felt right to say “COVID.”

I looked at his offering. “Rory, this is…”

“Can we step into your office?”

“Of course.” 

Rory began twitching like a whisker. “Daisy. Listen. I don’t want to freak you out, but…I’m here because you were there.”

“What?”

“I mean I lied. I was gonna do something. I was giving up the cats because—”

“—I know.” I hadn’t admitted it either.

“And you need to know that I still hate my life, and I know the universe is gonna chase me around until it gets me, but I’m not gonna do anything stupid anymore.”

“We need you in this world.”

“Well, Oat does.”

“No, I mean the world itself needs you.” I don’t presume to know where words come from. “I mean you have something so brave, and so incandescent, you need to keep it alive. You need to spite the darkness.”

“Spite. I like spite.” 

“There’s a sacred kind of spite.” 

“That’s the other thing.” Rory started petting the cat on my desk until she bit him, hard. “So, the God thing. I won’t say that I believe in God, but I won’t say that I don’t.”

“You don’t need to say anything.”

“Maybe someday I’ll start a cat sanctuary.” He laughed at himself. “But first, LA.”

“Someday I’ll say I knew you when.” It took all my strength not to say, “loved you when.” It feels right to be lavish, but not all heat is warmth.

“We’ll still be in touch. I’ll take you to the Oscars.”

“It’s a date.”

Rory breathed deeply. “I guess I shouldn’t hug you.”

“COVID.”

“COVID.”

The surrender call stepped back into the light and drove west, and Neil agreed that he seemed okay. “Maybe a little toasty, but not burnt to a crisp.” My boss knows how to speak high praise.

Siobahn was not so sure. “I’m glad he’s leaving. If your yellow lights were flashing, I translate that to mean we should have called the entire fire department.”

“Siobahn, he was harmless.”

“You’d say Genghis Khan was harmless. But hey—” she peered all the way into my M*A*S*H* unit “—I’m proud of you, girl.”

“Why?”

“Because you stayed translucent.” Siobahn was not usually poetic, and she grinned at my confusion. “I was thinking about this. You’re usually this naked piece of Saran wrap.”

“Lovely image.”

“Stay with me. You’ve got no borders, no edges. You love people and think that means they should take all your candy.”

“Shiv, you’re making me sound like—”

“—like a big giant heart. Daisy, we should all be more like you, except we’d all get murdered. But today you were not entirely…what’s the word I’m going for here…permeable.”

“Hm.” I felt my face getting hot.

Her eyes tripled in size. “I’ve got it. You were a cat today, not a dog. Cats have dignity. Cats say no.”

“I prefer saying yes.”

“Maybe there’s a way to say both.”

I don’t presume to know God’s favorite species, but I know I was called to the sanctuary.