NONFICTION
ANGELA TOWNSEND
On the Ranch
Heaven has a wrap-around porch. The daffodils and frizzy chicks are here. The marriage that didn’t end is sitting in the loveseat. The post-chemo poet will give a reading after dessert.
Resurrection brings up chairs from the basement to make room for more symbols. The step-uncles and half-granddaughters are welcome. The table is long. Some crocus invited a late-in-life passion for particle physics. The marriage that did end is showing its watercolors. Everyone is passing around a kitten who was found cold. Everyone is rolling away stones and rolling vegan meatballs onto the floor for strays.
I am in the kitchen with a mop. They asked me to say the blessing, though I am the child least qualified. The saints snort at my degree, “Master of Divinity.” The step-uncles sigh relief that my prayers are shorter now than during my first year of seminary.
No longer do I feel the need to educate the resurrected on the treachery of the Amorites or the soteriology of 1 John. Most Sundays, my prayer is simply, “Thank you for mercy. Please have mercy. Mercy. Mercy. Meatballs.” Most Sundays, I wind up in the kitchen with a mop.
One hour ago, words crawled down my neck, feral and mewling. My blood glucose was forty-six. I could not recall the strength to laugh. I could not hold the hymnal, much less mop the kitchen. Type 1 diabetes has been my scavenger for decades, and it yanks me from the table to its lair.
It is less hyena than white wolf, a wise and lonely thing on the side of the strange angels. They are the ones who silently stack the chairs after dinner. They are the ones who sent this lean, loyal dog to chew the beta cells of a nine-year-old. If I had not needed insulin, I would not have known I needed resurrection. If my blood sugar had not dropped to forty-six, I would have forgotten how impossible it is to rise.
I mop the kitchen as laughter in the dining room bursts like fireworks. Back on my feet, I remember that Psalm 46 breaks the bow so we can be still and know God is God. It is preposterous that we received another dawn. There is no arithmetic by which we should all be here together. We break eggs on the floor and each other’s foreheads. We break covenants and hide in the ice cube trays.
We give life no reason to party with us, but it opens the ranch and toasts the marshmallows. The orphan who scrawled curses on the walls is writing a novel. The landlocked cynic is learning to sail on a manufactured lake. The body that can’t stop betraying itself is trusted to carry the fragile teapot. We will all fail and deny the possibility of resurrection before the night is over. Then the night will be over.
I mop the kitchen because I get overwhelmed in the hallway. I think I know the ranch, but resurrection does not share the floor plan. The architecture keeps expanding. I go looking for the kitten and find people in shredded jeans unconscious in guest beds that were not there before. A man in a loincloth is braiding his beard in a pink powder room. A woman with a spoon tattooed on her collarbone is rocking children to sleep. The kitten is playing with an alligator who has buck teeth.
I mop the kitchen because I do not understand all the icons off the walls. I only know I have been given lives. The rancher hands them out by the fistful. I get embarrassed, jamming them in my back pockets. I waste them and trade them for extra marshmallows. I think I am down to seven, and the kitten reminds me that no one has less than nine.
Resurrection shows its heart but not its cards, so I don’t bet against the house. I know enough to be still.
Angela Townsend is the development director at a cat sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Pleiades, and SmokeLong, among others. Her poet mother is her best friend.