Angela Townsend

Any Road

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

Confident people warned me. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get
you there.” They meant it as a cautionary tale. They did not mean it to be wonderful. They did
not know it was a portable resurrection.

They meant well. They believed certainty is a vitamin. They believed success comes in
small, medium, and large. They congratulated me for choosing a college by seventh grade. They
affixed gold stickers to my essay declaring that I would play Guinevere in the high school
performance of Camelot, finish med school in three years, and lead a team that restores
endangered beta cells to the Isles of Langerhans.

My grandmother may not have used “manifesting” as a verb, but she applauded my
intention to marry Steve Minto. My mother implored me to paper my walls and cerebellum with
collages of desires, coaxing them three-dimensional. I put the Eiffel Tower in my locker and a
cardboard Pulitzer on the back of my bedroom door.

But the choir director chose Rent, and one class on Tolstoy punted me from pre-med to
pre-seminary. There is no “pre-seminary.” The other pre-’s pick up their lunch trays and go
outside when pre-seminary shows up with a thermos of grape juice and a peanut butter sandwich.

I read foreign alphabets right to left instead of curing diabetes. I learned that the historic
Santa Claus punched a guy in the face at the Council of Nicaea. I decided God loves all the
heretics because otherwise God has nobody to love. Steve Minto moved to Portland and became
a cardiologist. The closest I got to Paris was central New Jersey.

But I moved into an apartment the size of a safe and crowded the panes with prisms. I
amassed the highest per capita ratio of rainbows per square inch. The windows were so old, I
invented sophisticated weatherproofing, wrapping them in sandwich wrap every winter.

I took a job at a cat sanctuary on a dare from God, and ended up agreeing it was too
astonishing to leave. I learned God has a sweet tooth for hilarity.

My mother and I wallpapered the world with poetry and prose. We sent breathless
epistles to journals that hyperventilated rejections. We cast pearls before editors. We strung
friendship bracelets with strangers who lifted syntax to show us soft bellies.

I dated narcissists who believed they were men. I loaned one my last name until he
expired like sour cream. I resurrected my own live and active cultures.

I raised three million dollars for the cat sanctuary. I found soulmates in donors and dryer
repair men. I wrote eulogies for every cat who died and discovered that grief gets harder, not
easier, the bigger your inner amphitheater.

I stopped wearing my insulin pump inside-out on my waistband, where it bruised my hip.
I dressed it in pink neoprene and introduced it as Mavis.

I advised acquaintances that I am a rock and roll show with six encores. I accepted that
people will erupt in “sweet little Angela!” no matter what I do. I accepted that I am pure in heart,
cunning, and still at large despite having eaten a man alive.

I told secrets to a cat who becomes a dreadlock with eyes if I do not comb her three times
a week. I paid a man named Big Mike to tattoo more cats on my calf. I sent him a Christmas card
addressed to Le Grand Michel and promised I would take the cats to Paris, by which I meant
somewhere that makes me feel alive.

I am growing incapable of finding places that do not make me feel alive. I am thirty years
more heartbroken and ecstatic than when I accepted the warning. I respect strategic plans, but my
bullet points are rubbery. I roll them into silly putty.

I break off pieces of my life and dip them in wine for the strays who save me when I
forget to bolt the door. I waive the right to weatherproof my love. I improvise musicals at the
kitchen sink. I eat juicy fruit and put the stickers on my forehead like nametags. Pink Lady. Jazz.
Gala. Cosmic.

I haven’t met a person who knows where they’re going. We will meet up at the end of
any road. We are all going to crack up when we see who else is there.

Angela Townsend works for an animal sanctuary. She is a ten-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. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Angela has -lived with Type 1 diabetes for over 30 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.