Noa had a plan, and the plan was excellent. She would make Grandma a card, because Grandma was coming for tea, and cards were the sort of thing Grandma liked. Better than tea, even.
The card would have a cat on it, because Grandma's cat was very small and very grumpy and Noa loved it a great deal. She got out the good crayons, the fat ones that never snapped.
The first cat came out looking like a potato. The second cat came out looking like a potato that had fallen over. Noa pressed the orange crayon a bit too hard, and the crayon broke clean in half, which was not supposed to happen to the fat ones.
She sat very still and looked at the broken crayon for a while. Then she put both hands flat on the table, the way you do when a plan has gone quiet.
Mom looked over. "Two crayons," she observed. "That's more crayons than before, technically."
Noa was not sure that was true. But she picked up one half and drew a whisker with it. The half worked. It worked, in fact, quite well, being small and sharp and good at whiskers.
So Noa used the small half for whiskers, and the potato became a cat after all — a grumpy one, with three whiskers and one enormous eye. It did not look correct. It looked, Noa decided, exactly like Grandma's cat.
She folded the card. It folded crooked. She wrote her name inside, and one letter was backwards, and she left it that way on purpose because the backwards one was her favorite.
When Grandma arrived, she held it out. Grandma looked at the one enormous eye for a long, serious moment. "That," she said, "is the best cat I have ever received."
Later, tucked in, Noa thought about the broken crayon and the crooked fold and the cat with too few whiskers. Good things, all of them, in the end. Her eyes went heavy, slow as a curtain closing, and the small grumpy day drifted off to sleep with her.