People call to give us their cats because we are a shelter. People call to give us their cats because they are moving to Oregon. People call to give us their cats even though they are not the kind of people who give up their cats. People call to give us their cats because their new furniture is grey and their cats are orange. People call to give us their cats because cats are small and people feel too small to take care of someone smaller. People call to give us their cats because not even that vet in New York can cure their diarrhea. People call to give us their cats because they are exhausted and cannot elaborate. People call to give us their cats because everything fell apart and they can’t even afford the bad kibble made of corn. People call to give us their cats because they are in love with Darren and he is allergic and they can show us photographs of his strawberry hives. People call to give us their cats because they promised Pop Pop they would find a home for his cats and there are eleven. People call to give us their cats because they are crying in a Taco Bell booth for the fourth time this week. People call to give us their cats because people can carry tons in their arms but finally there is a limit and it may weigh seven pounds. People call to give us their cats because the cats peed on the bed once or one thousand times. People call to give us their cats because something has to give. People call to give us their cats because their son moved back home and they would prefer the cats but you know how it goes. People call to give us their cats because they are not bad people but they are people and nobody has ever been the same precise desperate as somebody else. People call to give us their cats because the landlord said they can only have one and he saw all five in the window. People call to give us their cats because they are trying to do the right thing. People call to give us their cats because their cats declared thermonuclear war on their other cats and even the behaviorist said this was not looking good. People call to give up their cats because they got a dog. People call to give us their cats because they joined the Peace Corps. People call to give us their cats because they are getting deployed or terminated. People call to give us their cats because they hear that we take cats who nobody else wants, although they do want them, and someday things will get better and they can adopt them back, and they hope we will consider that, because we are a shelter.

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Angela Townsend is an eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-one-time Best of the Net nominee, and the winner of West Trade Review‘s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, JMWW, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness.