Missy’s Animal Rescue
Bryn Gribben
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Missy herself sits behind the desk, logging
adoptions, barely looks up from the screen.
“You can just open up the cage
and pet them, if you want.” Frowsy-haired,
her giant breasts are wet from doing flea dips,
“forty done already—twenty left to go.” Grimy with
the musk of sixty felines, lit like the cheapest motel room,
it is a cavern stacked with cats:
cages upon cage, a separate glass-doored room
for the feral, a labyrinth of tabbies. Green eyes
plead with me behind a price tag selling sisters:
“Led Zeppelin and Blink 182.” “Cash only,” says Missy,
still staring at the glowing screen.
Later, at another shelter, I’ll meet Kim,
who used to work for Missy, who shudders
when I tell her of the smell, the sense that “animal rescue”
has a double meaning there. We speak of Missy’s callousness,
her seeming sloth, rough mother of the cast-off
and forgotten. “She means well,” Kim says,
“but she should be shut down—a hoarder,
in a sense.” Missy grabs each kitten by the scruff,
plops them on the counter. “These two were left
in an apartment,” she says, injects a microchip in each,
abruptly sprays them, one more time, with flea repellant,
even as she warns me not to mop my floors
with anything but vinegar. “Just left behind—
the landlord found them. They were only babies.”
Behind us, the door’s bell jingles like a wayward cat,
admits a woman and her boyfriend. “Too late—this
woman’s buying them.” She tells me, “They’re the ones
who named them.” Missy doesn’t seem to mind
the woman’s tears, to mind their terrible taste in names.
to mind much of anything at all. For all I know,
she may be crazy for real—intent on rescue
without seeing harm in all the matted fur, the air,
the rows and rows of runny eyes.
But Missy—O, Missy—I know
your heart is bigger than your flea-dipped
bosom. Beneath your ruffled fur, there is
a savior for the small, someone
who knows that “wild” and “tiny”
are not doomed. Though you hold
them roughly by the scruff, there’s a clause
in your adoption contract to return all
cats to you, even in ten years, if we
fail in our commitments to their care.
You’d take them back, dip them again
in an unending baptism of what might be love.
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Nora, a calico named after Nora Ephron, striking a pensive pose.
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Fosca, the black and white cat on the right, was originally named Blink 182 at Missy’s, which has since been shut down. Luly, a tortoiseshell named after a Seattle fashion designer, was also adopted at Missy’s Animal Rescue. She perches to the left of Fosca.
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Bryn Gribben is a poet and essayist who left academia to write and explore antiques. Her essay “Cabin” was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and she was a finalist both for the 2021 Creative Nonfiction Porch Prize and the Peseroff Prize in poetry. Bryn’s first book, a musical memoir, Amplified Heart: An Emotional Discography, was published by Otherwords Press in 2022. She lives in Seattle with two cats and a love song of a husband.
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Posted in Third Annual Pet Writing Contest and tagged in #boudin, #poetry, Poetry