When you work for the cat sanctuary, you have everything you need. You may not be able to afford the organic yogurt with its own sidecar of muesli topping. You should lay down any lust for handbags with proud monograms. 

But you will have a seat on the speed dial of a man whose email address begins with “108shamans.” When he signed up to volunteer at the sanctuary, the Executive Director misread the application and thought it said 1-800-Shamans. Now a man with cloud-colored curtain bangs picks up the phone when you call. He has disclosed that he is a lightworker. Most people think he is a real estate agent. He will always come to the sanctuary on short notice when the teenage volunteers forget to fold the laundry.

You have flotillas of youths who will never make Homecoming Court. They sit cattywampus at desks designed for the right-handed. They are too sincere for the suburbs and too striped for their peers. They cannot make themselves sinister or cool. They flick looseleaf footballs under principals’ radar to tell the others: the sanctuary is a sanctuary. Come all ye peculiar. They sit on the floor of your office and outline their plans to gentle the world. They wear crop tops with skulls and calm the thunderstorms in your head. They forget to fold the laundry. You wonder where they were back when you were under the bleachers.

You have a feline office mate with no eyes and a tail like carnival cotton candy. She was surrendered to the sanctuary when her diabetes became inconvenient. She has mapped every floor tile. She bilocates between the sanctuary and some medieval turret where popes and emperors seek her counsel by night. She comes with her own cowl, a tortoiseshell thatch that is equal parts Tina Turner and Bilbo Baggins. She is, and is not, a cat.

You have a Board of Trustees vaccinated against their own importance. The Treasurer spends Sundays inserting discarded cats in strollers and promenading them like small sultans down the sidewalk. The Secretary harvests errant caterpillars from the loading dock and repatriates them to her second bathroom, so they can pupate in peace. The Chairperson smells rain when you are sad and hides tie-dyed scrunchies in your desk. The sanctuary’s Security Council maintains a surplus of toaster strudel and Fanta in the volunteer lounge at all times. 

You have an annual picnic that is a global peace summit. One hundred active volunteers get elbow-deep in vegan mayonnaise and the eggs that live under niceties. The plant-based frankfurters smell like flatulence. Democrats and Republicans rub aloe on scratches and try to give each other the corner of the cake with the fondant flower. Grandmothers disclose their poetry. Volunteers from different shifts pray on the spot for each other’s test results, tangling their hands in a hand sandwich until you can’t tell whose fingers are whose. If you discuss your divorce, one hundred volunteers offer to activate into one hundred dragons. Persons aged thirteen to ninety offer to sit with you in a courtroom or deposit a ramekin of mealworms in a cold man’s mailbox. 

He found your exuberance unsafe. He was not wrong.

You have a job description that includes the word “solarium.” The sanctuary cannot pay you what a Development Director would make at a nonprofit without kibble on the conference table. It can give you permission to take your laptop to a sunroom for gold-eyed outcasts. The sanctuary consulted a “feline-sensitive architect” to envision pastel window boxes and Plexiglas tunnel-works. There are drains in the floor in the event of overflow. Creatures prone to leakage are safe. Hairy despots and spot-bellied psychologists camp under your knees while you write the annual fundraising appeal. It is a love letter. 

Donors respond with ten-dollar bills and blurry pictures of their favorite beings. You drop teary tidepools on their Snoopy checks. You alert them that they are beacons. The solarium cats bask like shag starfish. 

Every morning, you get to fold your master’s degree into a jaunty hat and laugh in the mirror. Twenty years ago, a chancellor handed you a Master of Divinity. He forgot the antivenom of irony. But the mapmaker was mischievous. You were not wrong that you were called to a sanctuary. 

You were not privy to the footnotes. 

Now you hear the whole conga line of saints and volunteers chortle. You once read that God is not safe, but good. You accept donations in all denominations. The sanctuary can accommodate one hundred cats and your jittery handwriting. Your beliefs are getting as fat as the cats in the solarium. In case of emergency, you can call 1-800-Shamans.

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, Blackbird, Epiphany, Peatsmoke Journal, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her poet
mother is her best friend. Twitter/X: @thewakingtulip Instagram: @fullyalivebythegrace