A man named Yeah chose the daisy box for me. I am already assuming too much. I imagine that Yeah is a man, and that he pronounces “Yeah” the way I do. I believe we all pronounce “Yeah” the same way underground. But Yeah’s mouth may stretch it, bubble gum pink across three syllables or more.
All I know is that Yeah chose the daisy box. Yeah ships from a part of Brooklyn that has ceased to be Sicilian. Now it is everything, including Yeah. Yeah scraped off the icing of a last name, because Yeah prioritizes cake. Yeah is like Cher, or Madonna. Or perhaps it is his first name that melted off his monogram. Yeah is like Toscanini, or Gandhi.
Yeah is 95% likely to save my cat. He spends all morning filling dollhouse-sized Ziplocs. Yeah has saved enough cats to put rats on the endangered species list. Yeah is not allowed to turn spectral tabbies and threadbare calicos plush, but he does. For two minutes, Yeah thought of my cat. He knows my cat is called Kankipanks and lives in a suburb. Yeah daydreams of details, then moves on to the next cat. Yeah counted one hundred twelve white triangles, enclosed a silica Do Not Eat packet as a chaperone, and placed my baggie in the daisy box.
The return label says, “Yeah, Multicolordays LLC.” Yeah’s address slinks off the map. You can’t push a pin into it. Yeah knows how to ship undetected. This is not forever. Someday the antivirals will be legal, and Yeah will save cats without calling the white triangles “Luckies.”
The cats can’t wait. They have a disease that makes others look like a day at the sea. They died, gasping, until secret people caught an epiphany. The cats can live. The secret people try to trap the FDA, hiding feral in the woods. Yeah won’t wait.
Yeah sends white delta signs the size of lentils. He ships them to Santa Fe, and Birmingham, and my number with the bluebird on the box. Death drops mid-march, leg straight in the air. The cats revive within 36 hours. There are eighty-four days of Luckies. You cannot miss a dose. If Kankipanks is among the ninety-five percent, there will be three more boxes from Yeah.
Yeah knows how people feel about cats. He has experience with change. It would not go well for Yeah if he was named. There are Yeahs across three continents or more. No heat map can detect their movements.
I have a UPS tracking number from Multicolordays. Yeah walked into a brown Brooklyn store and released the Luckies. The UPS clerk tosses gifts into the wagon all day. She assumed these were earrings, maybe a lapel pin. That’s what you ship in a pink box with purple daisies. I expected a manila envelope, but Yeah chose the daisy box.
Angela Townsend is a Pushcart Prize nominee, seven time Best of the Net nominee, and a winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, CutBank, The Normal School, Pleiades, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College.
Show Angela some love via PayPal at fluffywhippy(at)gmail(dot)com.
The Disappointed Housewife 