I Work So They Can Loaf (Cardboard Mansions)
My name is Azmi, I work in Meknes, and I have done the maths on my salary. After transport, groceries, and the serious business of keeping a roof over our heads, one hundred percent of the remaining budget converts directly into naps. Not my naps. Their naps. I slave away at work for cardboard mansions, professional loaves, and lives truly lived by rabbits who have never paid a bill and never will. This is my household budget, and I publish it here so that other keepers may compare their own figures and feel less alone.
Income: one salary, several landlords
Income arrives monthly, modest and hard-earned. It is immediately claimed by tenants who measure rent in nose bonks. The rabbits do not know what money is, which has not stopped them from spending it with total confidence. A box I bring home for groceries becomes, within the hour, a multi-room mansion with custom doorways chewed to specification. I cut the doors, they approve the layout by eating parts of it, and the property rises in the corner of the living room like a small brown palace. Estimated market value: one afternoon of my labour. Estimated rental income: zero coins, paid instead in loaves.
Expenditure line one: construction
Construction costs run year-round. Cardboard is technically free, arriving with every delivery, but the labour is mine: cutting doors, taping seams so no sticky edges face inward, replacing wings as they are eaten. And they are eaten, always, within days. A mansion that took me an evening to build becomes a ruin by the weekend, chewed with love and slept in with devotion. I rebuild without complaint, because the tenants inspect each new wing with genuine excitement, and there is no feeling like watching a rabbit choose the exact corner you hoped they would choose. My own house, I note for the record, has fewer rooms than theirs, and none of them come with a rabbit loafing inside.
Expenditure line two: loaf maintenance
The loaves themselves require upkeep. A professional loaf, the position where the rabbit tucks every paw out of sight and becomes a perfect bread shape, needs a warm room, a soft surface, and absolute peace. I provide all three. Heating in winter, shade in summer, blankets arranged and rearranged to order. The rabbits hold up their end by loafing at all hours, rent-free, in full view, radiating the contentment I am supposedly working for. On bad days at work, the remedy is standardized: my partner sends me a loaf photo, and the spreadsheet of my mood balances instantly. I have written about contested furniture before in the bed takeover log, and the mansions run on the same legal principle: possession is ten tenths of the law.
Expenditure line three: catering and housekeeping
Catering is hay, water, and small fresh portions, served on a schedule stricter than my own meals. I buy the hay in big bags that shed everywhere, including, mysteriously, inside my work shoes, and I consider this a handling fee. Water bowls are washed daily, bottles checked, greens rinsed and patted dry. The rabbits eat better than I do on weekdays, and I say this without resentment, only with the mild envy of someone reheating leftovers while preparing a fresh salad for animals who will abandon half of it to nap. Housekeeping is daily: litter corners refreshed, blankets shaken, stray hay collected from places hay should not physically be able to reach. I do this before my own breakfast most days, moving through the flat with the efficiency of staff who know the residents wake early and judge late service. Anything that ever looks like a health matter, appetite, droppings, breathing, goes to the vet rather than the budget, because medical judgment is professional territory and this ledger covers cardboard only.
The hidden costs nobody budgets
Then there are the lines no budget predicts. The baseboard fund, for corners sampled by travelling teeth. The blanket reserve, for throws that become burrowing sites and emerge reshaped. The toy subscription I never signed up for but pay anyway, willow balls and seagrass twists arriving monthly because an unemployed rabbit is a demolition rabbit, and demolition of my furniture costs more than demolition of approved stock. I pay gladly. Each destroyed toy is a wall left standing, a chair leg spared, a Sunday chore I do not have to do. Viewed correctly, the chew budget is property insurance, and the premiums are very reasonable.
Returns on investment
Ask me what I get back, and I will show you the evening sitting I described in the blanket television evenings: one rabbit loafing against my leg, one mansion occupied in the corner, the house quiet except for soft chewing and the television nobody watches. My life exists for bunny in the sense that matters, not as sacrifice but as arrangement. We do this for them, and they repay us in the only currency they hold: trust, presence, the daily decision to flop in the open where we can see them. Jealous of the mansion owners, honestly. They nap better than anyone I know, in houses I built with my own hands, on salaries converted at the best possible rate. The books balance. The loaves are professional. The mansions stand until eaten, and then they rise again.
Next in this chapter…
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