become a creepy cat lady

Everybody in my family lives to be either 89 or 93. I’ve decided to live to 93. I will wear long black skirts and blouses with high collars, and I will live in a tall, tumbledown house with too many cats. I will go out only to church, where I will sit in the back pew and glare at all of the children, and to the grocery store, where I will harass the stockboy about the price of canned cat food and make everyone in line behind me wait while I dig through my musty old handbag for exact change. Less than a month after I turn 93, I will step onto the front porch for the newspaper and drop dead, to be found by a neighbor, who will have a nervous fit and spend the rest of the day lying on her couch. When my distant relatives arrive to clear out the house, they will find a half-century’s worth of newspapers, all neatly stacked, and a band of 300 highly intelligent cats that have been running a counterfeiting ring out of the furnace room. All of my worldly goods will have been left to the stockboy at the grocery store. Every year, on the anniversary of my death, a single black cat will perch on my headstone like a raven and yowl 13 times. This is the plan.