An Empty Box

Content Warning: Animal sickness and death.

I held a small dusty box in both hands. It was green and red with shapes evocative of Christmas. It was small enough that I could almost wrap my hands around it completely. The six sides bore six words scrawled in an uneven hand:

Taquito. Hopper. Diamond. Midnight. Pot Roast. Bean Dip.

They were mostly foods. Was it a recipe box? But there were no recipes inside. There was nothing inside.

I ran down the attic stairs and into the living room.

“Daddy, daddy. What’s this?” I asked holding out the box.

“What?” He took the box in one large hand and studied it for a moment. Then, his hands began to shake, and he dropped the box onto the ground sending the cap flying.

I picked up the box and return the cap. “Hey! Don’t drop it!”

Daddy exhaled and fell backwards into his chair. “Sorry about that. Never mind about the box. It’s just a story from a long time ago.”

“I want to hear! You’ll tell me won’t you?”

“I don’t think I should.”

“C’mon pleeeeease.”

“It’s not a very nice story.”

“I’m thirteen! I can handle it.”

Daddy sighed and relented. “Fine. I’ll tell it. Just sit down and don’t interrupt.”

Dawn of the First Day

Emily and I lived alone with our cats back then. I woke up early to leave for work. She was still asleep when I walked out the door. But I paused my morning routine when I stepped onto the patio and looked down. There was something there. A dead black rat was just lying on the welcome mat.

I sighed. There were cats in the neighborhood. I figured they must have caught this one and left it there. I went back inside and returned with a paper towel to scoop up the body. When I bent over, I noticed that the creature was still moving. I picked it up with the paper towel and took a closer look.

It was small and black sure, but it wasn’t a rat. It’s eyes were shut and it made pitiful sounds as it tried to move it’s paws around looking for something. It was a tiny baby cat. Some umbilical cord was even still attached. I gasped and looked around. Where was the mom? She must have lost him somehow.

I found a second kitten on the sidewalk not thirty feet away. I went inside to get a shoebox with more paper towels and collected the second kitten. This one was black like its sibling with little white socks on its back feet.

I called into work and went back into the bedroom to wake up Emily. She was shocked and delighted by the discovery. We left the house together to see if we could find more kittens or the mother to return the kittens to. I didn’t know much about newborn cats, but I was pretty sure the mom would not have abandoned them unless something was very wrong.

What we found instead was a horde of children who had found one of the kittens and were petting it and carrying it around.

“Hey, you kids! Bring that kitten over here.”

“Why?,” a girl asked. “We found him. It’s our kitten now.”

“Kittens this young need to be with their mom. It’s very important. You can adopt the kitten when it gets older.”

In the end we came to an arrangement with the kids to let them pet our cats in exchange for helping us find the other kittens and the mom. There was a lot of ground to cover, and we had to keep track of all the kittens we’d found at the same time. This is one of the many decisions we made that we would come to regret.

We picked up five kittens from around the apartment complex before it looked like we weren’t going to find any more. We did not find the mom. The kittens were strewn around yards and sidewalks and ditches. They were all over the place. It looked like the mom was giving birth to one kitten sprinting away as fast as she could and then giving birth to the next before sprinting off again. She must have been in considerable pain or being chased by something. We never found out which.

We had been outside for hours and I was starting to get worried. Emily and I did some Googling and found out that we would need a lot of supplies to take care of these kittens if it we weren’t going to find the mom that day. I left her with the kittens and the pack of children still running around us trying to paw at the newborns while I ran to the pet store with the list.

I found pretty much everything. They had bottles and syringes and multiple kinds of kitten formula, plus a big red heat lamp and a heat retaining blanket. I returned with my haul around noon, and we brought the kittens inside to try to start taking care of them.

Emily watched over the kittens while I was gone, but they didn’t find any new kittens and the children were growing increasingly unruly. We had pressured them into using hand sanitizer before touching the kittens, but they kept running off to play and got their hands dirty again before coming back to pet the kittens. There were too many kids with too many dirty hands for Emily to ward them all off. At least we got some peace for the kittens when we finally brought them inside.

We separated them from our cats, just because they seemed so delicate and we didn’t want to risk the cats swatting at them. I wondered if being around adult cats would have helped them somehow. Our cats were calm and very interested in anything that smelled like the kittens, but we were still careful to keep them separated. It was another decision, but was it the right one? We didn’t know. We just kept making choices.

We set them up in a larger box with paper towels and the heat lamp for warmth and mixed and heated the first bottle of formula. The bottle did not work at all. They were too small and too weak to drink any formula that way. We had to switch to the syringe. We microwaved the milk briefly, let it cool for a few seconds, and then slowly squeezed the milk into the kittens mouths one by one. This worked well. We slowly streamed the milk into each kitten’s tiny mouth until they turned their faces away to indicate they were full.

We named each of the five and I recorded their weights.

Taquito, the first all-black kitten: 60 grams.

Hopper, the kitten with white socks: 65 grams.

Diamond, the kitten with white diamond on its throat: 62 grams.

Midnight, a second all-black kitten: 63 grams.

Bean Dip, a black kitten with white front and back feet: 68 grams. He was already the biggest kitten. I had to snip off the placenta before I could weigh him. Another decision. 

They were all good eaters on the first day. Bean Dip was the best eater. He usually ate around twice as much as the other kittens.

The kittens needed a lot of food. Either Emily or I had to get up to feed them every three hours. It was exhausting work, but we were happy to do it. We learned to sleep in shifts.

Dawn of the Second Day

The kittens were very cute in their box. They would sleep all day and night in a big pile, occasionally climbing on top of one another searching blindly for a nipple to drink from. We gave them the syringe in place of the mom who we still couldn’t find, and they drank deeply. After every feeding we had to pick them up and rub their privates with a warm, wet paper towel to make them go to the bathroom in imitation of a mama cat’s tongue. Then, we let them go back to sleep in the kitten pile.

We spent all day looking for the mom, asking neighbors, and began looking for someone with more experience to take care of the kittens. We tried phone numbers for shelters and private charity groups, we sent messages on various forums, but we were just hitting dead ends in every direction.

They called it the Covid kitten boom. During Covid, far fewer cats were being fixed than normal, so during the following years, everyone had way more kittens than they could handle. Everyone in the county seemed to be well over capacity for kittens.

“Can I see the kittens?” the girl from yesterday asked after ringing the doorbell several times.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Emily said.

“You can see them when they get a little older,” I said.

Another decision. Was it the right one? We’d been very fastidious about cleaning our hands and it seemed like a good idea to keep the area the kittens were in as clean as possible while we looked for the mother.

The neighbors told us about a black fluffy cat they thought was the mom. They also told us about the sixth kitten who had been found under someone’s car. He was dead when they found him. A decision we hadn’t even realized we’d made. We stopped searching too soon. We named him Pot Roast.

That night I set a racoon trap in the area where we’d found most of the kittens baited with used kitten paper towels. I caught one black and white male cat named Squidward who was a good candidate for the dad but let him go. He would need to get fixed later. Still no sign of the mom.

Some of the kittens were not drinking as much. Midnight was becoming less responsive.

Taquito: 62 grams.

Hopper: 67 grams.

Diamond: 62 grams.

Midnight: 63 grams.

Bean Dip: 75 grams.

Dawn of the Third Day

Sometime before dawn we lost the first kitten. I was the one who found Midnight. Unlike the rest of the kittens, she simply was not responding no matter how hard I tried. I tried moving her around, giving her the syringe, I put her with the others, and separated her again. Nothing helped. I even tried chest compressions. I only succeeded at making milk bubble out of her tiny, slack jaw.

I woke Emily up and we held each other for a time. I found a small green box and used it to carry the body. I dug a deep hole in the earth in front of our apartment and buried her there. She looked so cold and alone down there in that hole. My cheeks felt wet as I forced my hands to cover her tiny body with dirt. 

I didn’t catch anything that night. Another kitten was becoming less responsive and refusing the syringe.

Taquito: 65 grams.

Hopper: 72 grams.

Diamond: 65 grams.

Bean Dip: 80 grams.

Dawn of the Fourth Day

They called it FKS or Fading Kitten Syndrome. Lots of newborn kittens just weaken and pass away even in the best conditions, and those were far from the best conditions.

Without their mother, the kittens odds were very poor. Since their mother had been running and giving birth, they likely never even got the first dose of their mom’s milk. Without that milk, they have no immune system. Formula can give the nutritional benefits of a mama cat’s milk, but it contains no antibodies. Since Bean Dip was the only one we found attached to the placenta he had the best shot at building some sort of immune system, but the rest of them… all those dirty hands.

Diamond made it through the night, but not much further. He was always the weakest eater of the bunch. I knew logically that he wasn’t likely to make it, but it still hurt like hell to carry that small kitten with his little diamond throat and bury him with his sister, knowing that he would never grow up.

No one had any capacity for our kittens, but we got some invitations to private kitten fostering forums to post our case and see if we could find anyone out there who could help.

That night, I caught two female cats at once, a mother and a daughter that I’d seen around the neighborhood before. Neither had the tell-tale teats of a recently pregnant cat.

Taquito: 64 grams.

Hopper: 75 grams.

Bean Dip: 88 grams.

Dawn of the Fifth Day

Hopper’s death was especially crushing. He was the most energetic of the bunch from the start. No one was as good of an eater as our fat little Bean Dip, but he was a strong second. He was always climbing on top of his siblings to get the syringe, always at the top of the pile.

But he wasn’t eating as well on the fourth night. I found a tip online to smear a tiny bit of honey on the kitten’s mouth to get them to drink, and miraculously he started drinking again. At least for a while. I left Emily a note about the honey when I went to sleep.

Emily was the one who found him around 3am. She woke me up crying, and I went into the kittens room. Hopper was not moving. His mouth was covered in honey, but it wasn’t doing any good anymore.

I dropped the shovel three times while I dug his grave next to the other two. It was so dark down there. It looked so cold and lifeless. I had held his still living body so recently. I felt like I had brought him back only for him to slip away completely. My hands shook as they pressed the dirt down onto his tiny body.

Taquito: 65 grams

Bean Dip: 96 grams

Dawn of the Sixth Day

Taquito was such a sweet girl, the one who appeared on my doorstep that morning that felt like years ago. She died in the morning on the sixth day. She was never the strongest eater, but she felt like she’d been left for me and now she was gone. Just gone.

We had had so many kittens. So many living, hungry little kittens. We felt like we had failed them. Now there was just one kitten left and he looked so lonely by himself in the red light, waking up to look for anything to cuddle and finding nothing but crumpled up paper towels. We both swore we wouldn’t fail this one.

Emily found a small white octopus she had crocheted. Bean Dip cuddled up to it almost immediately. He suckled at the little tentacles and seemed to sleep much more comfortably under the heat lamp with the small toy that was still bigger than him. He was still such a good eater. Maybe he would make it.

Bean Dip: 104 grams

Dawn of the Tenth Day

On the tenth day, we finally caught a break. Emily and I were both exhausted. I had been juggling work with caring for Bean Dip and Emily was stuck feeding and peeing him alone for most of the day. And then neither of us were able to sleep for longer than six hours at a time. The world took on that perpetual fog that comes from extended sleeplessness. We were both running on empty when a foster finally got in contact with us.

“We can take on one kitten. We can put him with the others in this litter.”

It was a godsend. The only problem was that they were fifty miles away and there was no way Bean Dip could survive the trip unaided. We thought about this for a while and I made a trip to the grocery store and to Best Buy. I found a cigarette lighter to three prong converter at the electronics store on a high shelf near the back of the store and a boatload of Hot Hands at the grocery store.

We set up Bean Dip in the small shoebox we’d first put them in along with this heat retaining blanket, and the heat lamp connected to the cigarette port. We also stuck his octopus toy and the hot hands in with him. He cuddled up immediately. We loaded Bean Dip into the car along with all of the rather excessive kitten supplies we’d bought in the past week.

The output for the lamp failed periodically and we had to rely on the hot hands intermittently, but we were able to keep Bean Dip’s temperature up. He continued to eat well through the trip, demanding nearly all of the preheated milk Emily could give him. The trip was only mildly terrifying. I was sufficiently sleep deprived to really be struggling with operating heavy machinery at this point. I had to drink three energy drinks to get us through without passing out.

It was extremely relieving and burdensome to hand Bean Dip over to the foster family. They had a large house and two dogs that they assured us were kept separate from the kittens.

“We’ll take good care of him.”

Bean Dip: 134 grams

I stepped back into the car and realized that this was the last decision. Was it the right one? Were any of them? Would I ever know?

When it was finally over, I wrote each of our lost kittens’ names on the green box I had carried them in.

I wiped my eyes and stood up to hug daddy. He hugged me back.

“I love you,” I sniffled.

“I love you too,” daddy said.

We hugged each other for a long time. It was only later when I thought to wonder, if the last kitten was okay after all, then why was Bean Dip written on the box with the others?

I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.