Don’t Save the Cat
by Elijah Sparkman
1.
I gagged. I held up a piece of grilled chicken, with tongs, at my workplace: MIRACLE SALAD. My manager Tanya whispered, C’mon. I couldn’t handle it. I was a vegetarian. I put the chicken down. Ran to the bathroom and hurled. Acrylic, beige toilet water in my face, swirling up a storm. It made me sick that MIRACLE SALAD now sold meat products.
2.
A girl with amber hair entered MIRACLE SALAD. I exited the bathroom.
“My old best friend,” the girl said to me. “Victoria!”
“Hi, Hilary,” I said.
“This is the best writer I’ve ever met,” Hilary said, to no one in particular.
I blushed. The sentiment was beautiful. But embarrassing. That was middle school. And those were frog poems.
Hilary extended a business card and said, “I work for Cat Patrol now. We need a Newsletter Writer.”
My dream was to be a writer.
“You can write after work,” Tanya said. “Besides, you don’t believe in cat’s rights…”
I gave Tanya a grimace kind of look. A why would you say this thing that is probably true kind of look. She was right. I did not believe in cat’s rights. But I did want to be a writer.
“Think about it,” Hilary said, before turning to Tanya and ordering a number 3.
3.
At home dad was dying, so I couldn’t complain that MIRACLE SALAD now sold meat and how bad that was.
Dad said, “Hi Sweetie.”
His oxygen tank. Powerball numbers spun on the news. Protesters chanted outside of Cat Patrol. Cat Patrol fought for cat’s rights. The protesters thought Cat Patrol took it too far. In a world where cats are so cute, yet killed birds at unseenbefore rates. To those who loved cats, like Cat Patrol, it didn’t matter. Cats had a right to live and be cute.
“What should I do with my life?” I said to my dad.
The hot water boiled starchily.
“That’s just not a question another person can answer for you, sweetheart,” my father said. The weather came on. Dad’s voice was like a grandfather clock. “But, of course, you should follow your heart, your real heart, the heart behind your heart.”
4.
“Dad, what’s wrong?” The sound of spatula hitting kitchen tile. Unconscious. His body heavy. I heaved him onto my back and dragged him to the car. I sped to the hospital. I blew three red lights. No one cared. The seat belt cut his neck. I placed it behind his back. Highway lights flickered through the sunroof. The hospital brick, the color of graham crackers. I parked half on the sidewalk, turned the car off and put the keys in my pocket. I didn’t think. It was something almost comforting about crisis. There wasn’t the opportunity to overthink, thinking having been, for most of my life, my arch-enemy. The nurses arrived with a scrub-blue blanket on a bed. They picked him up so gently that it looked like art. They took him away. I signed paperwork and waited in a chair. All my life I’ve often thought about how life culminates in getting sick. Someone will get sick and life will become a series of hospital rooms. Waiting rooms. Bland paint. Like mom, back then. But it’s coming for everyone. I scrolled Instagram and saw Vox post an article explaining that bird deaths had gone up 265% in the last five years. Domestic animals, mostly cats, killed 120 million birds a year in the US alone. I scrolled. Curvy models with faces that defied feasibility drank aperol spritz. A graph showed how astrological signs determined sex life. A notification from Hilary: Hey kitten, reaching out because I was serious. You need to be our Newsletter Writer! Cat Patrol’s time is meow!
5.
The next day I entered a warehouse. A secret office that was not on Google Maps. The walls were turquoise. Hilary approached holding a gray mug with the white imprint of a cat’s nose and whiskers. No eyes. I had a pen in my ear and three notebooks.
6.
Hilary said, “Victoria, meet Paige.”
Hilary said, “Literally no one writes poems like Victoria. She’s going to be the best Newsletter Writer this side of the Cat’s Rights fight.”
The clock ticked.
Hilary raised the mug and said, “Hey meow, this is what dreams are made of.”
Paige said, “Let me show you to your desk.” Her voice lilted like a table whose feet were uneven and a ball would roll off of it.
A turn left and another turn left and we arrived at a cubicle covered in wallpaper that had more imprints of cats’ noses and whiskers with no eyes, just like Hilary’s mug. Paige said, “Cute, right?” And then she said, “Get cozy.”
I said, “So, like how long have you been working here?”
Paige said, “Eh, long enough.”
I said, “What do you do?”
Paige said, “Ha, more than you know!”
I thumbed the bottom of my summer dress because I was wearing a summer dress and it was nice outside although it was pretty damn cold in this secret warehouse office, the whole thing air-conditioned.
Paige said, “Hey, but maybe if you stick around long enough you’ll find out?”
7.
And then I lived happily ever after, at least for the next 495 words. I had the freedom to put my own spin on things. With each newsletter, language was born again. I told the world, ie: all 74,000 subscribers to Cat Patrol’s newsletter, about the joys of having a cat and cuddling up and having them lick the top of your hand with their sandpaper tongues. I included pictures. I “Awed Out Loud,” AOL, in fact, being the most used acronym in the Cat Patrol group chat, of which, I noticed, Paige never commented, instead Thumbs Upping everything.
Hilary took me out for lunch to eat bao or cobb salad from MIRACLE SALAD where my old manager Tanya would be so busy she wouldn’t have the time to make me feel like she approved or did not approve of my new life. Nonetheless, it felt like approval already, to not be so hammered by work in that way. I made money and bought my dad new slippers and ice cream sandwiches.
Since his near death experience, we’d appreciated every moment together. Before, we’d buy ice cream sandwiches, the kind with vanilla ice cream and a chocolate chip cookie on each side, once a month, and we’d cut them in half and share them on Sundays. Now, every night we each ate our own ice cream sandwich and we didn’t watch the news. We watched Wheel of Fortune instead. We watched those numbers and those colors spin. Our hearts jumped. The world was on fire with beauty. At any moment, it could stop, and someone would be a winner.
8.
In one particular moment, I was brave. And I wrote a poem about cats. I put it right at the end of the newsletter. It wasn’t something that Hilary had asked for. The newsletter was mostly heartwarming stories about life with cats, and functioned as an argument for why we need them so close to us, always. It’s not like it was a literary journal. But I just felt it in my bones. And I ripped off a haiku. I blacked out. And now there was a poem there. I almost deleted it, but then I, virtually unconscious, found myself hitting send before I did anything else, and it was like, whoa, wow, now that’s out in the world. Well, it turned out people loved it. It stormed the world. Hilary kissed me, she was so happy with the emotional response generated by the poem.
Hilary said, “This is transcendental, what you’ve done. It goes beyond the facts. You’ve characterized what it feels like in our souls to love cats.”
I wrote poem after poem and now they were placed at the beginning of the newsletter and now the newsletter went out once a week instead of once a month. Often, the newsletter’s title, when it appeared in the inbox of one of the 273,000 people subscribed to Cat Patrol, was the first line of the poem. I was an artist now. I was everything I had ever wanted to be. A writer.
9.
That is the moment when Paige pulled me aside. Paige said, “Hey, I think you’ve been around long enough, you seem like a smart cookie to me.”
I said, “Yeah, sure Paige. Can’t wait to hear what you’ve been up to.”
By this point, I was over Paige, I was over almost everything. I had proven myself to myself. Hilary walked in. Paige said, “More on this later,” and left.
Hilary said, “MIRACLE SALAD on me, great poet?”
Yes, indeed, and it wasn’t until later that night when cooking Alfredo dad accidentally clicked to the news and there were the Bird Protesters with their crazy signs and outfits chanting STOP RIGHT MEOW STOP RIGHT MEOW. There they were at a fake location for Cat Patrol, the location that did show up on Google Maps, not the one where I worked. This fake location was a front and thus the Bird Protestors had been fooled, and yet was the crowd thinning, were they heading somewhere else?. Yes, that’s when I got a call from an unknown number. I’d recently applied for a prestigious literary award and had heard rumor that sometimes in situations like this the famous poet judge will call you up personally to congratulate you and invite you to the dinner gala event in New York City. So I answered, with not a tiny amount of excitement. “Hello,” Paige said. “I have something to tell you.”
10.
Paige said, “The Bird Protesters are on their way to the secret warehouse and their arrival is imminent.”
My mind raced.
I dropped my wooden spoon in the tub of Alfredo. The spoon didn’t sink all the way because it was held up by the side of the pot. But Alfredo got everywhere on my un-aproned body. I said, “How do they know where it is?” But before Paige could respond, I figured it out.
I said, “Paige, why did you tell them? How long have you had this plan? What will they do when they get there?”
Paige said, “I was waiting until we had enough power. Now the Bird Protesters are headed to a place far off the map. We can unleash the Cat Patrol on them…”
“What?” I said, “I don’t understand.”
“You and your newsletter, and your poetry, it knows no bounds. You can write a poem. You can send everyone who receives the Cat Patrol newsletter there to stop the Bird Protesters once and for all. So no one again will hold the name of cats in disdain. They can do what they need to do, off the map.”
“You want me to do what?” I wiped and wiped but Alfredo wouldn’t come out of my clothes.
“The Bird Protesters are on their way,” Paige said. “You know what to do.” The phone line went dead.
The plan was insidious, but, also, ingenious in some tormented way. What Paige had done, had she done it with Hilary’s knowledge? Would Bird Protesters find the secret location sooner or later and put an end to Cat Patrol, burn the building, expose the secret base, ostensibly, putting an end to my work as a newsletter writer? As a poet? My dream? What would I do? What did I believe in?
11.
Boom. From the other room. That dreadful sound. Of something dropping. From a limp hand. And there he was, my father, unconscious again. All of it the same over again, over the shoulder and into the car and into the blue-scrubbed hospital bed. All of it the same, but this time not, because when the doctor came out with the prognosis, dad wasn’t in a wheelchair. The doctor said, I’m sorry. The doctor said, this may be the last time you speak to him. I entered the room, and above his body, I saw his gaunt face, and heard his last words. He said, “Victoria, my baby, remember the heart behind the heart? Well, there’s another heart behind that one. In fact, it’s hearts all the way down the line. In fact, there are so many, it can feel impossible to know what to do.” He said, “So you might as well look for the big heart, the heart of the world, in its burning magma heat, and be it. Embody it.”
“Victoria,” he said. “You are a poet.” And then he died.
12.
I cried in the waiting room with a clipboard full of paperwork and my tears were water on fire. I was absolutely sure of it. I had done everything wrong. I sold my soul. I sold the magma in the center of the earth. I was sitting there waiting for some fancy person to call me and tell me I was acceptable for the big time. I had neglected my father’s health. I had made an artform out of inciting violence. My phone buzzed. An email notification. A newsletter from Cat Patrol. Calling all cat lover’s to a secret location to defend the name of cats. It turned out Paige hadn’t waited. I had already built the super weapon. Now someone else had used it.
13.
But did they? I went back and read Paige’s poem in the latest newsletter. It was terrible. It rhymed. It had no sense of ethos, pathos, or logos. It had no sense of the artist, digging through the abstract, to hand a reader a crystal of truth. Paige, I could see it now, was not successful. Paige didn’t own the superweapon. I did. This is when I opened up Constant Contact and got to work. A new poem called: DON’T SAVE THE CAT. I wrote a poem to birds this time. And composed something absolutely translucent, that communicated to Cat Lover’s how beautiful birds were, how they were necessary, how not only them, but a whole ecosystem of animals and humans deserved to be loved with the same amount of passion as cats. When I hit Send, it was like I was floating. I couldn’t feel my body. I was writing. I was pure communication. It felt so good to be this vessel, and to let the voice of the world flow through me. I cried then for a new reason. I cried because I was finally honest.
14.
That’s when a new patient entered the hospital. Kicking and screaming, yelling, “I need to go back! I’m going back!”
It was none other than my old manager Tanya, from MIRACLE SALAD! The police slinked over to the receptionist talking about how they’d picked up this protester. They didn’t know where she came from, but they had to leave. Probably best she got checked out. But by the time they all turned around, the protester was gone. She was running down the street arm in arm with me.
“I sent out a new call to action,” I said.
Tanya said, “I know. Someone read that and forwarded it to all Bird Protesters.”
Tanya said, “Not so bad kid,” and patted me on the back.
We were on our way. We would join the fight. We would tear the Cat Patrol facility down. We would spread the truth. Yes, and we could see the warehouse in the distance. People congregated everywhere. No cars, and then, a car! A black limousine with an insignia on it. The classic nose and whiskers and no eyes. Out of the car came Hilary. She had a megaphone.
She shouted, PEOPLE, PEOPLE, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!
People turned, and to my surprise, they listened. And I realized that Hilary was an iconic person. They had read my words, but had seen Hilary’s face. They couldn’t pick me out in a line. And the power of looks worked. Bird Protesters and Cat Patrol were hypnotized alike, by Hilary’s realness in the flesh.
Out of the limousine, after her, came cats of every shade. They slinked around rubbing their backs on the legs of people. This was the moment. I grabbed the megaphone and shouted STOP!
A few people yelled, WHO ARE YOU?
Hilary laughed.
I said, I’M VICTORIA.
People picked up cats and petted them and seemed uninterested in this person, this person being me, some Bird Protester, who didn’t get it, the way cats feel on your ankles.
Hilary laughed again.
Paige showed up and laughed, too.
All hope was lost. But then Tanya got close and whispered in my ear, like in the olden days when we’d be working at MIRACLE SALAD and Tanya would have a funny joke, something to brighten the colors of the day. Something that was hot and juicy and witty and snappy and perfect like a whole ocean of the earth’s hot magma that could be laughed and poured inside of me.
Tanya whispered, “Show don’t tell.”
Show don’t tell… The secret warehouse. Protestors. Insignias. Invisible birds in the trees. Cats in yoga poses. An iconic old best friend. Mysterious co-workers. A black limosuine.
And that’s when I understood. I recited my poem from the newsletter, the poem that explained how all animals are cute. And the world stopped. The whole world paused. And then it started again. It bloomed into a new flower and the people, Bird Protestors and the Cat Patrol alike, tore down the secret headquarters. And gave the people peace from the bottom up. Above the rubble, or amid the rubble, I was floating in the air. Next to the words. And the people. Where I’d always belonged.
15.
FUTURE FLASH FORWARD: Tanya says, “Okay, famous poet, time to get to work.” She holds tongs behind the counter at MIRACLE SALAD’s new location in the Sustainability Hub of the mall across town. No more meat. There I am behind the counter, next to her, kicking it and making poems in between salads. Honest. I love you dad. I love you mom.
Elijah Sparkman is a writer from Harper Woods, MI. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Always Crashing, Sleepingfish, X-R-A-Y, and more. He is the Detroit Program and Volunteer Coordinator for 826michigan, a youth writing organization. He is a member-owner of the co-op bookstore Book Suey in Hamtramck, MI. Find him online here.