Conchas
I know a man whose name means “seashell.” Not even Dickens could have done better. Neither Mr. Bumble nor Mr. Pumblechook was more aptly named than Chuck Concha.
If you tell Chuck this, he will snicker and deflect. He will gather his licorice curls at his chin like a babushka woman’s scarf. “I am the whorl of the world.” He will trace a nautilus in the air. “I am iridescent. I am incandescent.”
Chuck has heard seashell gags all his life, or at least since seventh grade Spanish. He knew what his name meant. One flash card let everyone else in on the secret. Only seventh graders have fingers spindly enough to reach into a seashell and pull out an insult.
It is harder to offend Chuck than to compliment him. This is good news, since Chuck is the only unneutered male under sixty at the cat sanctuary. Cat Haven attracts the insoluble and unadoptable. It also shelters cats.
Among three hundred volunteers ranging in age from twelve to ninety, there are ten men. Honors students, chemists, and a woman whose nametag reads “MeeMaw” dominate the discourse. They name cats Ganache and Penuche, and they name men “Laundry Al” and “Other Lyle.” The men respond to their names.
Chuck came decades too young, with a surname that means “seashell.” A cat in a diaper greeted him at the entrance, and MeeMaw deposited a mewling despot into his arms before asking his purpose. Chuck put in an adoption application for a cat with no eyes and signed up for dryer duty.
Cat Haven reassigned him to tour duty. That was ten years ago. Chuck tells Girl Scout troops and day trippers that Cat Haven is the Hotel California. The cats get adopted, but the human beans never leave. Chuck waits for someone to ask why he says, “human beans.” He tells them we are all small, and we are all here together. The Scouts understand. Their mothers ask if they can bring him home. They don’t have anything like Chuck in their collections.
Cat Haven is hospitable to Presbyterians, Wiccans, and poets who pray to their deceased pets before they write a word. “Unadoptable” is the only heresy. Chuck gets asked why he has not been adopted. He answers with spontaneous acts of head-banging, boarding his escape hatch of hair. At the right angle, Chuck looks like he should be delivering pineapple pizzas or auditioning for a remake of Point Break. So, Chuck keeps moving. He has no flat surfaces where you can put yourself down. He has no sharp edges where a cat or a seventh-grader could get hurt.
If you get lost in Cat Haven, you need to keep walking. The sanctuary is a circle, and the last solarium opens into the first. I find Chuck at the end of his shift, at the end of the floor plan. He lies prone in the blind cat room. Vigorous prophets swarm him, tails in the air, unashamed of empty sockets. Some have had their eyelids sewn shut like stuffed animals on the discount rack. Some appear all-seeing, their irises black as grapes on the far shore of glaucoma. This is Chuck’s favorite room.
Blind cats map new territory within days, if not hours. They use the litter box and learn the way your profile shifts the air. People like to adopt blind cats, so Chuck’s heart is broken open most of the time. They are his hermit crabs, moving on to larger territory. He is a shelter within a shelter.
I tell Chuck. You can say anything to Chuck. I tell him to his face that he is a seashell. I am Cat Haven’s maple idiot, a hairball of verbs. I interrupt my own invisible illnesses by telling people they are peridots and revelations. I do not have the strength to mop the lobby, but I am good at looking donors in the eyes. I have been the fundraiser for seventeen years. I am unadoptable, so I will be here until they sprinkle me in the memorial garden.
Chuck scolds me for talking like that. He says the world is the seashell. We are here to pick up cats, and towels hot from the dryer, and conversations with the UPS man, and squash them against our ears until we hear our names. That is what human beans are here for. I tell him he is incriminating himself, because only a seashell would say such things.
I find a box tied with string on my desk, full of pastries called “Conchas.” They are covered in chocolate and small as cat treats.
Angela Townsend graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. She is a 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, Paris Lit Up, Pleiades, SmokeLong, and Terrain, among others.