Angela Townsend | Giganticat
Short nonfiction from the coalitionist mixed bag. Cat stuff!
My boy cat is good for me.
True, I’ve yet to meet a cat who isn’t good for me, good for souls, good for the brokenhearted world.
But when God sewed Kankipanks together, God giggled. And it was good.
When God sewed Kanki together, God needed reams of fabric. We are not talking about discount calico suited to lavender sachets and lady pillows. God had to go to the Home Accents aisle. There, between the country burlap and the genteel chenille, was the molasses velveteen, fringed and lustrous.
A hundred bolts of it.
When Kanki runs, his frills fly like independent beings, a personal posse of shag-birds goosing the air. When Kanki runs, France senses seismic activity. When Kanki runs, he grins like King Goofus.
In his infinite goofage, Kanki trots out proof that cats can smile. In certain velveteenage cases, they can’t do otherwise.
He is as happy as a gingersnap. But he does not come by his cheer through an unclouded life.
Under the smokestacks of Trenton, ragged cats rolled, their long hair tangling like moss on a family tree with few forks. Shaggy kittens sprang forth and forth and forth, groves of unpruned lions in one apartment.
The usual term is “hoarding situation,” and I’m told it took many tries from a worried daughter before their “rescuer” would relent and let her legions go. They blew like March wind into the shelter, then scattered like dandelions to foster homes.
“Trenton Makes, The World Takes,” as the famous bridge says. “Trenton Makes, The World Takes,” and God giggled when I took the gift.
I’ve been giggling ever since. Even when I’m also shrieking.
I am not proud of shrieking at a cat, much less a cat who lays like a besotted walrus in my lap and looks at me like I am sunrise. But Kanks has poked my sleepy anger more often than I care to admit.
He waxes unintentionally suicidal, inserting his entire grapefruit-sized head in the garbage disposal.
He abhors gravity, taking the usual feline violence against knick-knacks to pathological levels, consuming ketone test strips and brassieres and decapitating saints and gnomes.
He charges the curtains like a rhinoceros, but only after dark, causing me to scream, “do you want the bad man to see us?”
He inflicts grievous harm on the full family of paper products, unmoved when I explain that I already struggle to reconcile my concerns over climate change with my passionate love of paper towels.
And then he skipjacks through the thousand square feet we share, a fish-bird-lion of weird, yelping full sentences: “ow wow ooo woo oo ooo oooo!”
And then he stands like a prairie dog, racket-paws on my knees, eyes the size of Cinnabons and twice as swirled.
And then he fears the most translucent things, shower caps and crooked rugs and his own sister, half his size and thrice his jalapenos.
And then he looks into my eyes so deeply, I see the giggle of God.
And then he folds me into the fabric of forgiveness and zest, where I remember what it means to be a child, and I glimpse what it might be like to have a child.
And then we cling to each other like rhesus monkeys, too humble for gabardine, too Trenton for satin, too ragged and fearful and real for anything but velveteen.
“Ooo woo ohhh wooo!” My days start with spoken-word poems from a lion without manners. The world is unpruned, and the giggle is unconditional, and the eighteen-pound cat is giving me permission to yell at perfection.
“Woo woo ohh wooooo oo!” Moonbeams fall on us like laughing eyelashes.
Trenton makes, my mending little world takes. God saw that it was very good.
Angela Townsend is a five-time Pushcart Prize 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 World Literature Today, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College and works for a cat sanctuary. Angela has lived with Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.