Angela Townsend

Listen to Angela read her story

Someone is adjusting the gooseneck lamp on her kitchen table, so the shadows won’t distract you. She pushes her chair a half inch back. It’s not quite right. She will try a different light bulb. 

She is not worried that you will see her jowls, wriggly as flapjacks. She is a sixty-seven-year-old woman in a three-dimensional chickadee sweatshirt. She hopes you are equally comfortable. She just doesn’t want you to fall into the hobo bags under her eyes, where you might not be able to hear what she is saying.

She started this YouTube channel because you keep grabbing her hand. You find her in the pharmacy, springing for the Hello Kitty bandages. You find her at the post office, offering individually unwrapped smiles to people who cannot return the favor. You find her at the trampoline park, guarding the bags while everyone she ever begat is bouncing. She doesn’t know how you keep finding her. Her husband calls it the “Dolores Glow.” He says they can see it from Mars.

She was six years old when she found out she couldn’t hide. Maybe five. It doesn’t matter. People whose first names were Mr. and Mrs. and Miss and Ms. started squeezing her hands, even though theirs were bigger. She taught the kindergarten teacher the words to “Tomorrow.” Her grandpa fell asleep with his head on her shoulder, and she pet his head until he stopped making little sad whinnies that nobody else could hear. The Sunday school teacher asked her to pray for him, and she did, even though he could not tell her what the Holy Ghost looked like, only that He was The Breath. 

You all find her. You never do this sort of thing, but you grabbed her fingers, and she squeezed back even though they were sticky. You told her what you are going through. She did what she does, and all she does is yammer and stay calm. She told you that you are not a stranger, though those were not the words. Her husband says she is an “empath,” but she says there’s no need to put a label on it.

What she is, is one woman with two hands. She can’t maintain eye contact with all of you at once, and she can’t live with that. So, her husband bought her a camera, and they read YouTube for Dummies. Now she is trying to do something at the kitchen table, if only she can get the lighting right. 

Her husband thought she should name her channel “The Dolores Glow.” That sounded a little too proud, so she went with “Soup Dumpling.” She is just a regular woman shaped like a soup dumpling. She doesn’t have letters after her name. 

She prints out articles and makes notes, so she can give you some meat with her babble. There is a lot of good stuff out there about self-compassion and neuroscience and whatnot. But once she presses that red “record” dot, all her plans split the joint. She starts talking, and lo and behold, the windbag is always full. She is nervous for the first two seconds. 

Half the time, her husband is scrambling eggs over her shoulder. She likes to record before breakfast. She won’t start over if the cat jumps up on the table, not even if he presses his belly against the camera in some kind of tabby takeover. You all comment that he is cute and ask his name. She asks if you mean the cat or the husband. 

She asks you to give her a “thumbs up” if she is helping. That is the only time she’s embarrassed about this. But she wants to know, and your thumbs keep popping up like daffodils. She knows they can’t all be her grandchildren.

Maybe the lighting doesn’t really matter. Alright, so she has purple half-moons under her eyes. You’re not here to see a beauty queen. Her husband says she should show up some morning with a full face of glitter, and a wand, like Glinda. She thinks that would defeat the whole purpose. Any old fairy tale could tell you pretty things. But you found a soup dumpling in a sweatshirt. 

Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the 2024 winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in over 300 literary journals, including Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Indiana Review, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Witness.

Read more from Angela:

The Broadkill Review – ‘Mavis and Bruce‘
Braided Way – ‘Keep a Good Thought‘