She had been awake since four in the morning. That was the first fact of the day, and rswfire stated it plainly into the camera as the vehicle moved — Luna had been up since 4:00, keeping us all up, and what she wanted was out of confinement. He named the hope directly: maybe today. Maybe today the cage protocol ends. Behind the wheel and en route to a scheduled appointment on the Oregon Coast, he turned the lens toward the carrier and asked her to say hi. She had lots to say. She always did. Tortitude, he called it, and the word carried something like affection for a temperament he was still learning the shape of.
The data he had was the data his own attention had gathered. She was eating a lot — she had eaten a lot that morning — and from that he drew a conclusion and immediately fenced it: I think she's getting better, but we're going to let a vet tell us that. The distinction was held carefully. His observation counted. It counted as something real, as a channel he had been running continuously since she came into his keeping. But it was not measurement, and he did not let it pretend to be. Blood test. Whatever they tell us to do.
They arrived and the vet was gone. An emergency — cows. Somewhere in the county a large animal needed him more urgently than a kitten with a pending blood panel, and that was the practice's shape and its arithmetic. So rswfire settled into the waiting area with the carrier and said what he would do: stay here with Luna and hang out with her until he gets back. She pushed at the door. He let his hand in to pet her and told her to stay. He read her wanting not as play but corrected himself toward the more precise word — explore. That's what you want. You want to explore.
He almost called her Leila. He caught it, corrected it, wondered aloud at it, and moved on. Then she lay down. Then she groomed — bath time, that's always good — and then the purr came through and he named it back to her, hearing it, saying he heard it. In the quiet of a rural waiting room he narrated her forward through time: three or four months old now, adolescent before you know it, another six months and Oliver-size, and sometime after that a little adult kitty. You're going to grow fast. It was a growth curve spoken over a body that had not yet been confirmed out of danger, and he spoke it anyway, flatly, as a thing that would be.
He checked her gums, or moved to. She had been anemic. He did not know if she still was, did not know how long it takes to fix that, and said so — the not-knowing stated as cleanly as the knowing. Then the sentence that anchored the whole recording: you've been through so much in your tiny little life, short life, you're going to have a long life now. Yeah, going to make sure of that. A commitment set against a history he did not detail, entered as a decision rather than a wish.
She kept trying to get out. He kept putting her back. Get in there. You got to stay in there. It's not forever, I keep telling you this — but no, that's not what you want to hear, I get that, I wouldn't want to hear it either. He shut the door. He asked her to nap and admitted he could use one himself. He told her she was precious and that she knew it. He told her he loved her little feet. She came out again and he closed it again. And then, at the end, he turned her resistance into evidence and handed it back to her as good news: that means you're getting better, you're definitely getting better, if you're not wanting to sleep for this long — it's been like five or six hours.