The morning came before rswfire was fully awake in it. He had been up a while already — Luna's cage cleaned out, the kitten squared away, fed, watered, parasite treatments given, her bed washed because she had gone on it in the night. He thought she had used the litter box too, at least some of the time. He allowed that she might simply not have the time to get there, given what she was dealing with. Four or five days had run together by then. He had not showered over the weekend because he did not want to leave her alone, and Bailey needed watching too — the cage between them had not made either of them comfortable yet.
The constraints of the RV were not abstract that morning; they were the shape of every procedure. Every time Luna soiled something, the fabric went in the trash. There was no laundry on board, and the laundromat was not a place he could reach right now, so bagging things up for later was not a plan available to him. Blankets went. Towels went. He states he tried cleaning up after her and it did not feel sanitary to him, so it had to go. The holding tanks were full, which meant the bath could not happen inside, so he walked down to the campground shower house for hot water and washed her outside in the morning air. He had to buy towels again before he could take a shower himself.
He named the cage plainly: fifty dollars, temporary, occupying floor space he does not have to give. He had known when he bought it that it was temporary. But Luna is 1.7 pounds, the RV is not kitten-proofed, and he states that if she slept beside him he might crush her — so the cage is where she sleeps, and the small space holds a smaller space inside it. Later in the day he intended to deal with the last of the unorganized things, the objects with no assigned place, so that the kitten-proofing could begin and she could have a little floor, a little at a time. Bailey needs time. Luna needs time.
The costs he laid out in order, deliberately, because he states he really does need the help: roughly one-fifty for the first vet visit, three hundred for the second, where the vet ran a thorough exam and gave her a B-vitamin shot among four or five injections and, by rswfire's account, really took care of her. Then the cage. Then the replacement textiles, and now hand towels bought small and in quantity, because her body temperature runs slightly below where it should be — not by much, he said, but by a little — and warmth is a thing that has to be manufactured and rotated.
He said the part that sits under all of it without softening it: this is not the right environment in which to care for a sick kitten. He had called the cat rescues. All of them. None would take her. None had the resources; every one of them was stretched thin. He mapped that outward from his own doorway — a system running on volunteers who do not have what the work requires, himself included, one of many places where resources could be allocated better than they are. A kitten like that, he said, should have had good professional care from the start. There should have been a way for her to get what she needed without her pleading with him to take her in and without her ending up in a small space with full tanks and no washing machine. Nobody else would help her, so he did it.
The recording ended at the cage. He had come over to check on her and, in doing so, woken her — she saw him, which he noted with something like regret, because he really needed her to be sleeping. She had had her worm treatment and it seemed to have made her tired; she had not eaten as much as he had hoped, and he named that as his own miscalibration, overestimating what she was capable of right now, deciding to give her less. She is so dark that she blends into the back of the cage. He could not tell whether she was looking at him. He told her he could see her back there anyway, said hi to her, and then told her to get some sleep, that he knew she needed it. Then he went to start his day, with everything in it still waiting.