by Angela Townsend
Harriet would not be satisfied until I went out onto my balcony. It would be better if I went to ground level, but she would compromise. She texted me five blurry pictures of the full moon.
“Go outside! Soak up this moon energy!”
If Harriet ran the electric company, no one would receive a bill addressed, “Dear Valued Customer.” She would ask the Board of Directors to approve funding for high school students to hand-write every name. It would be good for the students and those named. If that wasn’t possible, she would propose a revision: “Dear Heart.” There is not a house on the grid unoccupied by a dear heart, though nobody answers to it.
“It is a gazing ball in ecstasy!” I am the lead writer for the animal shelter where Harriet volunteers. I am irresponsible with adjectives. I squeeze into stories like a cat in a cardboard box. My body is irrelevant, so they all fit. I am the cats’ hype woman. I am the woman whose last name was Barlow, until it wasn’t, and then it was again. Harriet met me in between.
“The moon is the anointed head of Mr. Clean!” When I do not want to go outside, I keep writing.
“It is the pearl from a socialite oyster! It is the eye of the Infinite!”
“GO OUTSIDE!”
Every week, Harriet sits on the floor with feral cats with no regard for her joints. The teenage volunteers see six feet four inches of woman outstretched and ask if she played basketball. Harriet admits that she did not, then asks if they think it is too late. No one will ever answer that question “yes” out loud. The teenage volunteers assume Harriet is someone’s oversized grandmother. They do not know she oversaw the Oncology Department.
“I see it!” I glance out the window at the moon, so I am not lying. “My heart is singing!” I assume this occurs uninterrupted, so I am not lying. I am happy behind my keyboard. I can write love letters. I can hide volunteers’ responses in my Encouragement folder. This is the first Christmas that I am able to write other things down. I am not going to have children. I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-three, but then I did. I thought this would be the same sort of thing. I erase the words.
“At least put your head out the window!”
Last week, Harriet found Sylvie the valedictorian-elect in the litter cupboard. Sylvie wears plastic earrings the size of runt kittens: French fries in one ear and a hamburger in the other, or two pancakes with laughing butter pats. Sylvie was hiding because she asked two boys to the Prom, safe boys, and they both said no. Sylvie was in the litter cupboard because she was all out of “cheer-up juice.” Harriet told Sylvie that in Norway, when someone asks, “How are you?” it is acceptable to answer, “I am standing, and I am not crying.”
“It’s cozy in here, and I don’t want to go out.” When my exclamation points lie prone like penitents, it’s over. “Harriet, I’m not speaking to the moon.”
“All the more reason to go outside!”
Harriet doesn’t mind talking about the first husband, the one in Corpus. He got her here, and she knows better than to yank loose threads from a good sweater. Now her accent only comes out when she’s slap-happy, like the day she poured one hundred catnip mice over my head when I didn’t even know she was in the room. Harriet asked the executive director if she could do something ridiculous, and that is not a question anyone responsible has ever answered “No.” Sometimes her accent comes out when somebody dies, which happens often at a shelter where the unadopted have a home for life.
I am too tired to fight, so I zip my beady hoodie to my chin. Going out on the balcony requires removing the security pole. I installed it the night the man who loaned me a last name said he would climb the wall. I asked if he was the devil’s ivy or Spider-Man’s bastard. He never thought I was funny. He said the volunteers were a throng of hysterics, and something doesn’t add up when people slather the word “love” around like they do. He said it’s irresponsible.
“Soak it up! Moon energy!”
I open the glass door like a vacuum seal. The fragrance is ninety proof November. People are on their feet around intentional fires not far from here. It has been so long since I went outside at night, the cold gnaws my forehead like a kitten who has not mastered manners. The moon is bigger than my hand. It feels like benediction. It fills my mouth like a poem that comes full born in the middle of the night.
“Moon energy,” I am writing from the balcony now. I know she knows. “There are no words.”
Angela Townsend (she/her) works for a cat sanctuary, where she bears witness to mercy for all beings. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, seven-time Best of the Net nominee, and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review‘s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Epiphany, Five Points, Indiana Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Terrain, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for over thirty years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.