Enormous

Angela Townsend

Cory and I have enormous heads. This is where the conversation goes when you’ve adored someone for sixteen years and know everything else.

We have validated the universal existence of emergency backup underwear. We have disagreed about which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle best embodies our boss. We have sculpted plans for our coup d’etat, despite the fact that we are fond of our boss.

I have accepted Cory’s offer to “go full Pompeii” on my ex-boyfriends at the first opportunity. I have no idea what this would look like, since Cory looks like kindness with a double helix and marmalade hair.

Cory was once considered the strongest candidate in the field of boyfriends, but that was many congressional sessions ago. We were young in 2007. Nobody knew that the new volunteer with the fire hair was the most gifted artist in the history of the animal shelter. Nobody knew that the new Development Director with no fundraising background was built to last past six experimental months. Nobody knew we would still be here a quarter-century later. Nobody knew we both had enormous heads.

Before I knew Cory, I knew I would love Cory. If pressed, I could have predicted our early laughs would be preserved, pickled as we tickled each other’s lonely ribs.

I had been hired as Development Director despite a lack of qualifications. I listened to “Take a Chance on Me” and “She Works Hard for the Money” on my drive home every night. I told my boss, a man empty of ebullience but possessing a hundred-acre underground lair of empathy, that I was a terrible choice for this position.

“I have never run a cat sanctuary before,” he countered. “We will learn together. Besides, you love people to a degree that is both inspiring and infuriating. I think this will serve you well.”

Cory had become so desolate designing ads for personal injury lawyers that he let his dentist convince him to volunteer at a cat sanctuary. He was the van Gogh of the Eastbrook Democrat, a newspaper read by the eleven residents of our Republican county. Nobody knew the background of the name, and nobody failed to comment that it was itchy and ironic. Cory laid out the obituaries and classifieds and coupons for gutter helmets.

Cory and I both had big enough heads to believe in more, so we came to a cat sanctuary. Cory’s dentist lasted a week here, but Cory found life among the litter boxes. The old women hugged him. My boss suggested Cory looked like a combination of Conan O’Brien and Elmo.

Before I knew Cory, I knew that Cory looked like my future, but not in the way that the old women suggested. He left me annotated drawings of our meanest calicos and our least kempt old women. I texted him scraps of poetry about being feral.

“Wanna be Facebook friends and real friends?” Cory stuck a Post-It to my laptop.

“I wanna be your best friend forever and ever and ever.”

“What’s with you and Cory?” my boss asked.

“Everything.”

I didn’t ask permission to ask Cory to redesign our newsletter. He did such a magisterial job – this was the word I used, which he proceeded to insert in his email signature, “Cory Benton, Magisterial Individual” – that my boss used exclamation points: “Nice work by Cory!”

“Neil doesn’t exclaim,” I noted. “Neil had to go to his sub-basement to dig up the fragile heirloom exclamation point his grandmother left him. You have conquered Neil.”

“Let’s take over Cat Haven,” Cory suggested for the first of thousands of times. “Your words, my art. Your heart, my crazy.”

Cory was too good for gutter helmets, so we conspired at his ascent. I wrote him testimonials using my own name and every name in every atrocious slip of fiction I’d ever written. Daisy Barlow and Ceridwyn Bell and Eugene Buddle-Lubbers and Sandee Skourinotz told the world that Cory Benton was a delight to work with and a designer without equal. We agreed that Biff McButterpants might be hard to believe, so his reviews landed on page two.

“You should marry Cory,” old women suggested, issuing edicts and gypsy predictions while brushing irritated cats.

“He’s too old for me,” I answered every time. Cory was born in July 1980, and I was born in March 1981, and this was our party line.

I raised more money, and we rescued more cats. Donors told me the cat sanctuary was their sanctuary. Donors told me that they hid my emails in secret “encouragement” folders. Donors took me by the wrists and reminded me without words that this had little to do with cats.

“This shouldn’t all be working,” I admitted to Cory. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“If you meet someone who knows what they’re doing, you should call the police.”

We took eight ungrateful cats from New York Animal Control, hours before their scheduled demise. A tortoiseshell called Koosh broke out of her carrier and sprinted the halls like liquid liberty. She rejected the suggestion of gravity and entered the drop ceiling through a loose tile. It took a marmalade man with an enormous head to believe she could be caught. It took a gay man with no secrets to stride into the Staff Lounge, covered in ceiling insulation, with victory in his arms.

“I have never been more in love with you,” I told him. It was an understatement.

A heavenly farm couple named Herb and Bettina applied to adopt Koosh, and Cory pleaded for my special dispensation. YOU CANNOT LET THIS TRANSPIRE!!!!! His text messages were and were not funny. YOU HAVE POWER. I NEED HER. I NEED HER!!! I AM MAGISTERIAL!!!

I went to Neil. Sentimentality would not work. “You know our policy. First come, first served. No special favors.”

“It’s Cory.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What if I convince them Koosh is not the correct cat?”

Neil threw a purple fur mouse at me. “I’ve learned not to underestimate you.”

Herb and Bettina went on to adopt Tiger Lily, an orange kitten who had never been at large in the ceiling. Cory took Koosh the next day. Cory signed his adoption contract, “Cory ‘The Conqueror’ Benton.”

Koosh hissed and spat under his bed for two weeks. Cory lay on the floor, reading Neil Gaiman novels and calmly repeating, “I need you, you hateful turnip.” On the fifteenth night, Koosh slept on his chest.

I kept writing Cory reviews – “Astra DelVecchio predicts Cory Benton will be remembered as the Galileo of 21st-century graphic design,” whatever that meant – and Cory kept getting freelance gigs, until Eastbrook County could no longer hold him.

“I’m moving to Hoboken.”

“I won’t allow it.”

We negotiated a truce. He would leave “Team Wednesday,” the Cory-Bertha-Gertrude troika who scraped midweek litter boxes. He would leave Bertha and Gertrude in tears. He would continue to design our newsletter. He would design all my fundraising collateral in perpetuity. “My words, your evil genius.”

He would text me multiple times a day. He would manifest when Peter the Pervert, our most repulsive volunteer, lingered in my office.

I kept raising money, and Cory was exasperated that my head didn’t grow. “It’s a fluke,” I insisted. We broke a million dollars. We broke free from Neil’s supplemental donations. Neil used exclamation points: “Cat Haven is self-sustaining! Hot damn!”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I told Cory nearly as often as I told Cory that I loved Cory.

“You are loving like a lunatic,” he observed. “It’s what you do.”

“I’m a child in a great big blazer. My feet don’t touch the ground.”

“And there’s a kink in your tail,” he agreed. “And you’re disgustingly ancient.”

We both turned thirty, and I convinced Neil we needed to start paying Cory. “Just enough for Koosh’s anti-anxiety medication.”

“You know I’d do this for free,” Cory admitted. “I have jobs.” He “forgot” to submit his hours for reimbursement. “Don’t call me a contractor. Koosh reviews all my contracts and pisses on them.”

Cory had more jobs than he could handle – Hoboken’s up-and-coming businesses trusted the opinion of Eugene Buddle-Lubbers – but still responded to my requests within an hour.

I would plead, “We need you to make this diabetic cat look needy but not sad. I want some kind of hairy orange border. It should feel festive but solemn. It should make people feel good about themselves but also kind of guilty. I’m not sure what that means. Here’s my text.”

He would present me with a masterpiece in forty minutes.

“How did you do that?”

“I’ll tell you when you tell me how you write so fast.”

This became our claim to fame. I could write newsletter articles and press releases faster than I could fill a water bowl. This was no inner excellence, only overflow. “The cats tell stories, and I’m there to catch them,” I said over and over.

“Big, greasy, olive-loaf baloney,” Cory said over and over.

I couldn’t keep up with all I felt, scrawling adverbs at stoplights and asking three-legged cats to slow down so I could get it right. “Cory, I love this place so much. I can’t get it out fast enough. I can’t find language to capture it all.”

“I’d say you’re doing pretty well.”

But if I was fast, Cory was a cheetah multiplied by heat lightning. If he didn’t get me a six-page, flawless newsletter within an hour, I texted: “Have you left the land of the living?”

“Deceased,” he confirmed, with a six-page attachment.

Neil came to count on our speed, disregarding deadlines. “Since when do you and Benton need a week? I’ll have it to you eventually.”

When Cory came to visit, he reminded Neil: “If you ever fire Daisy or let her join the circus, you lose me. Just so you know. Kowabunga.”

Cory married a man from Croatia, and when Miroslav met me, we both cried.

“I love my weepers,” Cory groaned.

We both turned forty, and Cory texted me a picture of a newborn: “DO NOT TELL ANYONE, NOT EVEN CATS.”

Nobody could know, until the final papers were signed, that Cory and Miroslav were adopting.

I had never heard Cory worry. “A lot could go wrong. There are powerful people who still think it’s 1825.”

“I’ll go Pompeii on them.” I would return every favor. I would return to Eden and conscript the cherubim with the flaming swords to dispatch all anti-Cory forces. I would bend 1825 and 2007 and 2021 into a wrought-iron cat tail and show the world just how much an angry marshmallow would do for a marmalade man.

“His name is Max. I have never loved anyone in this world so much. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“You can love someone before you know them. You can know things you don’t know.”

“Zoom in on the picture,” Cory exhorted. “He has a giant head.”

It was true.

“That’s how I know he’s my boy. Did I ever tell you that no hats fit me? I am a mutant.”

“I knew the second part,” I answered. “That’s funny, I always have to shop in the men’s department for hats.”

“Now I know why I love you.” Cory sent three more pictures of Max. “You have a pumpkin cranium like my son.”

“It’s because I’m brilliant.”

“Second brightest in this star cluster,” he agreed. “You know Donatello knows it, too.”

“Neil is Raphael,” I corrected. “He’s still taking a chance on me, so you must be right.”

I sent Max a ten-gallon Stetson that Christmas, and Cory sent me a camouflage trucker hat embroidered, MAGISTERIAL. Koosh died on New Year’s, and Cory designed a three-page funeral program.

“I don’t know why I felt the need to do that. The only people to see it are you, me, Miro and Max. We sang ‘Forever Young’ in the backyard and buried her. Max screamed so loud the neighbors came out to see if he was okay."

“It’s the end of an era.” I disliked the taste of those words as soon as I said them. “I mean, it is, and it isn’t…she’ll always be with you.”

“Don’t say the things you say to all the people.” Cory texted me a yellow face with no mouth, only wet eyes. “We’re a long way from 2007.”

“But what matters remains.”

“Don’t say the things you say to all the people.”

“Okay.”

“My heart is broken, Daisy. I don’t know what comes next.”

“You know you have me.”

“And if I didn’t, I’d come and find you, and along the way I’d beat up all the Development Directors who aren’t you. I’d leave a trail of broken Development Directors.”

“You have me.” I didn’t have words.

There was an extended pause. “We’re ancient, Daisy.”

“I know.”

Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears in Cagibi, Hawaii Pacific Review, Porridge, The Razor, and Spotlong Review, among others. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.