Veintiseis de Junio

Between the toilet and the adobe wall of our bathroom, barricaded into the corner by various jugs filled with water, lies Salvadora. Every 30 seconds, I peer around the wall, hoping to see her lying perfectly still.

I hope to find her dead.

Several hours ago, my lean was very slow and calculated, preparing my emotions for what I might find. I would wince my eyes and let one see before the other as I would tilt myself into the view of her.

Yet as the hours, twenty-four of them, have passed with her lying on this blue tiled floor, I’ve had time to consider the alternative to her living through this hell. With that in mind, I now habitually and obsessively bend around the corner in the middle of every minute, hoping to witness her during or after her final breath.

At first it only happened once an hour. She would be bundled in a cooking pot next to my side of the bed, swaddled in dishrags to keep her bones warm, sleeping deeply, when slowly her eyes would open. Her cedar brown eyes would widen and widen, making way for her enlarging pupils and the devil behind them. Next, her tiny pink nose would turn white and begin to confirm the rapidly increasing breaths, in and out, in.out.in.out faster and faster. Next, all of her tiny limbs would become unnervingly stiff and force her to coil awkwardly right out of her pot and onto the cement floor. She would twist and writhe in silence, often folding as if there we an invisible string tied around her neck, tying her skinny body into knots. After a few seconds she would begin a growl that grew and grew until it was a piercing shriek of tremendous agony, many moments long. She would seize and tremble, contort and wail until, after 3 minutes, the devil would leave her. She would take a tiny gasp, release a petite meow and fall right back asleep, exhausted.

First, this took place once an hour and lasted a short time. But over the past two nights, these fits began occurring every 10 minutes…. on the dot. The volume of her wail now amplifies through the house and through the night. Ruling out demonic possession, we have decided she has either been trying to pass an awful infection or has been dying for the past two days.

Observing this suffering, I come upon a dismal dilemma: Shall I continue feeding her? For a short time, she was looking very much alive and healthy, sucking eagerly from the syringe, but as she deteriorates, as the disease takes over, she is recently only in two conditions: seizing or sleeping. I wonder if, by feeding her, I am keeping her alive only so she can suffer. I decide to keep feeding her, but do so less and less frequently, as it gets difficult to get a sleeping kitten to swallow.

Most terrible is the fact that there is absolutely nothing that we can do. There is only one animal clinic in this entire town and the veterinarians are volunteers who come to Nicaragua only for sporadic weekend trips. There is no veterinarian this week and no one cares about dying kittens because there are too many mouths to feed as it is. I fight a few disturbing ideas to help terminate her distress. I think of lifting her frail body and setting her gently into the depths of the toilet water, knowing she would be too weak to argue. I think of swaddling her in plastic, or simply holding my finger over her tiny nostrils.

I obsess mentally over her condition and what to do about it, concluding only that, at this time, I am as helpless as she is. I am left to battle against my attachment to this wee being. I do not simply give her permission…

but I command her to die.