Holiday dinners are for making each other comfortable. The angels smack their foreheads every time someone brings up socialism, calories, or the option to change one’s name to Zenobia Applejack and move to Saskatchewan to avoid future holiday dinners.

Every family has one feral ragamuffin with excessive streusel topping. I have accepted my place in the order of things, and I fulfill my duty every time the fancy plates come out.

I don’t intend to doodle on the good tablecloth. I swear I do not plan in advance to affix green olives to all ten digits, although that looks fantastic when I steeple my fingers to give the blessing. These people have hung onto me for forty-three years, so it seems unlikely I will run out of paroles and mulligans now. I may as well wield my weird, up and down the double helix.

Besides, who else is going to beef up small talk by asking, “Do you ever ask Alexa if everything is going to be okay?” It turns out the Magic 8 Ball in your basement is braver than your smart speaker. In the right mood, that scratched old orb might declare, “it is certain” or even, “it is decidedly so.” But Alexa equivocates: “I don’t know about that.” And don’t even bother to ask her, “does anything good ever come from fear?”

My cousin with the onyx countertops attempts to participate in whatever this is. She says that plenty of good things come from fear. If you are afraid of losing your job, you work harder. If you are afraid of hitting other cars in the fog, you slow down. I see where she is coming from. If you are afraid of scurvy, you eat tangerines. If you are afraid of being kidnapped by pirates, you keep up your skills in hand-to-hand combat. Right? But generally speaking, don’t our worst decisions come from fear? I could adduce evidence of ex-husbands and pixie cuts to this effect. But the angels smack their foreheads if I bring up the ex-husbands, so I move on.

Would anyone like to see pictures of my cat? My cat has a beard like Gandalf. My uncle with the pergola interrupts to confirm that I am once again speaking of Hobbits. Well, technically, Gandalf is not a Hobbit, but close enough, and thank you for remembering.

My uncle went to Juilliard. Our family tree is rife with medical professionals and educators and tradespersons and sundry directors. I write for a cat shelter. I publish the news that one-eyed cats are surly small poets and bodhisattvas. People from six continents send donations to rescue more poets and bodhisattvas and procure meat nuggets for their pleasure. Did you know that we go through three thousand pounds of litter a month? Also, if you had to be either an elf, a Hobbit, or a wizard, which would you be? I would be a Hobbit, but that is too obvious to say out loud.

I am trying to get better about interrupting people, but it is not going well. My uncle may be mid-sentence on the topic of Toscanini when it becomes a matter of national security to inform him that he is a beacon of love, and also that his eyes are the color of truffles. I have been known to notify the entire assembly that they are my soulmates, even if that means talking over their conversations about gutter helmets and gout. I do not mean to make them uncomfortable, but this is what happens when you invite an undomesticated animal to your table every year.

About that blessing. For some reason, they keep asking me to give it, even though my hands are empty of anything except green olives. I don’t think they ask because I went to seminary. Nobody knows why I went to seminary, not even Gandalf, not even my mother who hangs crystals on windows to summon rainbows. I don’t think I went to seminary because I was afraid, although I am considerably less afraid now. I think that is how I ended up at the cat shelter.

My first year in seminary, I gave a blessing the duration of Gone With the Wind. I covered the minor prophets and the workers of iniquity and the Amalekites and the Bible people whose names are too cool to be forgotten, like Og and Dorcas. The dinner rolls turned hard as baseballs. The fried onions on the green bean casserole all linked arms and started rappelling down the table. Just before some unchaperoned angel stopped by to raise the turkey from the dead, my stepfather said “hallelujah!” and all the people said Amen.

But now I just say, “thank you” and “mercy” a lot, and also “heckin’,” as in “heckin’ rad.” I still reserve the right to freestyle about green peas that look like exoplanets, and the arpeggio of my mother’s laugh, and the perseverance of the saints in this room. I give thanks that none of us have died of scurvy or declared each other anathema. A cousin’s progeny the size of a healthy wombat laughs. Somehow, we are all comfortable even in our holiday pants.

About the Author:

Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-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.

Feature image by Clark Van Der Beken on Unsplash