Hampsters!

            by Audrey Haynes

 

The musty smell of wood shavings and old bird food hit me as I entered The Lucky Dog pet shop. Cages of assorted mice, rabbits, and parakeets squeaked next to rows of rabbit pellets and dusty hamster balls. I quickly tugged my parents through the maze until we reached the checkered wire I was looking for.       

            My tenth birthday had just passed and as my family and I were sitting around eating my favorite chocolate-raspberry cake my dad slipped me a white envelope. I opened it slowly, savoring the crisp touch. Once unsealed, I deciphered my dad’s miniature scrawl, grinning sheepishly as I read its promise of two hamsters. The very next day I dragged my amused parents down to the pet shop to claim my prize.

            “I like the black one, the one with the little white spot,” I said quietly but earnestly to my parents. My mom ushered the sales woman over.

            “Is that one a girl? We want two girl hamsters,” she asked, pointing out my selection.  The sales woman adeptly extracted the furry ball from the wriggling mass of hamsters.

            “Yea, it’s a girl,” she replied casually, flipping the hamster over to rudely examine its sexual apparatus. She grabbed the other dozen or so hamsters left in the cage, “So’s this one, and the three in the corner there. Which one do you want?” she said looking at me expectantly.

            Taken aback by her abuse of a hamster’s dignity, I stuttered. “I…um, I think I like the little, brown one, over there,” I told my mom.    

            “Whad’choo say?” the sales woman cocked an eyebrow at me.

            Unable to think, I attempted to reply, “I, um...I said...that um..”    

            “That one,” My mom jumped in, saving me from myself and my curse of unbearable shyness. The sales woman whipped out the other hamster and threw the pair into a small box. “I’ll go get them ready to go,” she said, walking into the back room.    

            In the car ride home, I clutched my two dubiously packaged hamsters on my lap. I studied the cardboard boxes, trying to somehow use my X-ray vision to see through to my new pets, but all I could hear was the soft pattering of their paws as they wandered aimlessly in the dark.         

            “What are their names?” my dad asked, rounding the corner to our house.

            “The brown one’s name is Pear,” I said definitively, while gently getting out of the car and tiptoeing across the cement sidewalk, careful of my precious burden, “I don’t know about the other one yet.”

            “How about Smelly Kelly?”

            “Daad! That’s dumb!” I huffed and giggled as I ran upstairs, momentarily forgetting my delicate cargo.

            After I successfully assembled the wire cage, complete with fluffy bedding, a hamster wheel and an adorable yellow house, I decided to meditate a little more seriously over the black hamster’s name. After a great deal of sitting on the floor and not many names, I decided to consult my old friend: the dictionary. I settled its enormous weight on my lap and opened the book to W. That seemed like a good letter for a hamster.

            Wiener schnitzel. Maybe not.

            Wide receiver. Definitely not.

            Widgeon. Hey, I kinda like that one. What’s it mean? Either of two, wild freshwater ducks having a grayish back and a white belly and wing coverts. That sounds about right. With that strange little-girl logic, my two hamsters were christened, functioning members of our household.

 

¤

      Finally. I sighed and put down my chewed pencil, done with my math for the night. Haphazardly, I piled my papers back into my bag and slumped up the long stairs. Switching on my light and padding across my dusty blue carpet, I could feel the night breeze rustling my hair through the wide open windows. I grabbed the plastic jar of pellets to feed my hamsters. Pear was running on the wheel. Where’s Widgeon? I searched for the black ball with a white star on its chest. Maybe she’s in the house, I eyed the miniature plastic house in the field of grey bedding. Reaching down to pull the red roof off the building, I noticed something shift under the bedding. Widgeon emerged from the house. Oh good. Suddenly I noticed something else trailing behind. Something very small and very ugly.

            “Mom,” I stood rigid in the doorframe to my parents’ bedroom, “There’s something in my room I think you should see.”

            “What is it?” she asked, clearly concerned by my shell-shocked expression.

            “I’m really not sure, just get dad.”

            “Geoff!” she called, her voice carrying farther than she intended. My dad appeared in the doorway, his shirt half-tucked and hair tousled.

            “What?” he looked from my wide eyes to my mom’s pursed lips.

            “C’mon,” I declared, turning to lead them to my room. Together, we examined the cage. Peering through the mesh of wires, we saw, in a small bundle, five baby hamsters. Five hairless, wiggling, tootsie-roll sized hamsters. In a cage with two supposedly female hamsters, this left us very confused. We looked from Widgeon, brooding over the offspring to Pear nonchalantly running on the wheel and decided that Pear may be hiding something.

Indeed, my delicate lady hamster turned out to be a boy, a dangerously hormonal boy at that. His libido had taken over and the results squirmed and pawed blindly in front of me.

            However, as the days went by I grew to appreciate the ugly addition to our family. I was fascinated by my new babies. I observed them at every moment possible, peering through the criss-crossed wire to watch them silently mew and see the shadow of fur appear on their backs over time. I checked on them obsessively, keeping track of their numbers like a kindergarten teacher on a field trip. One renegade hamster in particular caught my attention. He liked to question authority. He was that kid. I would find him waltzing through the bedding by himself, off on one hare-brained adventure or another, when he should be back in the nest with the others. No matter how many times I scolded him, he would continue to explore the wide world at his leisure. Despite my outward display of annoyance though, I secretly worried about the little guy every time I had to scoop him up and place him back into the warmth and camaraderie of the nest. What if he got too cold by himself?

            Besides dealing with the rebel, I had to worry about the predicament of Pear’s fate. It seemed like a bad plan to leave him in the cage with Widgeon for much longer, lest he become reinvigorated with procreating passion. However, what else was there to do with him? My parents and I decided that it would probably be best if we took Pear back to the pet shop. After all, we had only known each other for a short time, it shouldn’t be too hard to let go.

            Still, as I unhooked the silver latch to take Pear out for the last time, a wave of affection washed over me for this dusty, brown, ball of fuzz. I inhaled the musty odor of stale bedding and birdseed as I opened the top of the cage. Gently lifting the lid, I reminisced of the time when I had let Pear run around in the hamster ball. He had almost catapulted down the stairs, the tinted-pink, plastic orb spiraling out of control as I lunged to save him from his doom. 

            “Ready to go?” my Dad interrupted from the doorway. Seeing me bent over the cage, he asked, “How are the rascals doing?”

            I ran a quick spot check of the babies. One, two, three, four…What the corn?!  I scanned the cage for the fifth. Nothing. Slightly frantic I rustled my fingers through the bedding, searching for the soft, delicate warmth. Still nothing.

            “What’s up?” my Dad asked, his brow furrowed by my sifting.

            “I don’t know where the other hamster is,” I answered shakily, images of finger-puppet bodies lying in my mind. It didn’t usually take very long to find the lost baby. He was never far from the nest. My Dad and I got down on our hands and knees, brushing the carpet for a fallen pup. Finding nothing, I stood to analyze the cage holes, wondering whether or not a hamster could possibly fit through.

            “I bet he’s still in the cage,” my Dad reassured me, “Could he be in the little house?”

I looked once again in the cage, peering into the yellow house but only Pear’s foggy image looked up at me. How was I supposed to find a pinky sized baby in my entire room or even house? “Let’s just take Pear back, Dad” I resigned myself to our original mission. I pulled the red roof off and scooped Pear into my sweaty palms.

            I took a double-take, looking back into the house right where Pear had just been lying.  No. That can’t be right. But sure enough a hamster lay below. Sleeping just like he would beneath Widgeon, the rascal was found. I yipped and turned to my Dad, “Dad, Dad, I found him! And look, Pear saved his life!”

            “Oh, that’s great, Sweetie! What a nice Dad he is!”

            I held Pear in my hands and we both stood unmoving, knowing this was the part where we should be taking Pear back. But how could we take him back now? He just saved the baby’s life by keeping the babe warm with his own body heat.  Pear had proved himself a hero, and in return we would dump him back in that musty old shop? We looked at each other and silently agreed, I turned and placed Pear back in his rightful place.

 

¤

            Life went on in my household, plethora of hamsters and all. My mother submitted, with help from my Dad, to my sentimentality and let me keep Pear. We bought him a shiny purple cage from PetSmart and soon Widgeon had a new neighbor. “But that was it! We were taking the rest back, pronto,” my mother argued. “Except maybe one of the babies, just because we raised them and all and they’re so adorable. But just one! And it had better be a girl.”

            Once my babies had grown and the shadow of black on their backs had formed a full coat of fur, we took another trip down to the pet store. I walked through the door, cardboard box in hand, as the bells on the door chimed our arrival. A scruffy young man looked up from his place at the front desk, calling a rehearsed greeting to us. My mother strode forward, “We’d like to return these hamsters.”

            “Sorry, but we don’t take returns on pets. It says that right on the sign,” he said motioning towards a laminated paper on the front desk. I shifted nervously. He had a point.

            “I know, but I think you need to make an exception. Your staff told us that our hamsters were both girls, so I think it’s probably your fault that we have five extra hamsters.”

            “Oh well, I guess in that case…”

            “One other thing, we actually want to keep one hamster, but we want to be a hundred percent sure that it’s a girl.”

            “Oh, okay, sure thing,” he replied, obviously somewhat baffled. I somberly stepped forward and handed him the quivering box. He placed it on the counter but before he opened it he called, “Hey Lizzy! Wanna help me with something? And, actually grab anyone else back there too.” A young woman in a stained green apron emerged from the back room.

            “Sonia’s coming in a second. What’s up Chris?” The newly christened Chris explained the situation. Together they opened the box and began to inspect all the babies in that same intrusive manner our saleswoman had done before. Eventually they decided on a medium-sized tan one. Just then Sonia entered too. “Hey Sonia, is this hamster a girl?” Lizzy asked handing her the babe.

            “Look’s like it,” she said easily, flipping the hamster over.

            “Who else is working right now?” Chris asked, clearly wanting to get as much consensus as possible. Soon enough, there were five employees hunched around my hamster, muttering agreements and pointing to different parts of the anatomy. An employee’s head popped up out of the cluster, looking at me. I started back, caught unawares by his prairie dog stature. “This one is definitely a girl.” I smiled weakly at his expectant gaze.

            “Great!” my mother asserted. Soon enough we were back in the car, the wheels humming on the road as I clutched the cardboard box.

 

¤

            Two weeks later, I stood in my parents’ door frame. “Are you kidding?!” my mother exclaimed. My Dad and I laughed. But sure enough there was a fresh batch of wriggling balls in my room. Although this time there was one less.

            “There’s only four Mom, don’t worry about it,” I attempted to appease my mother before she went down to Lucky Dog and dropkicked Chris all the way to Nebraska. There was one other thing that separated the two batches.

            “Dude, that’s his Mom, he slept with his Mom,” my brother quickly pointed out.

            “Ewww,” I shuddered, “They’re inbred!”

            “Aren’t Pear and Widgeon siblings also, didn’t they come from the same litter?” my dad observed, clearly amused.

            Realization dawned on me, “Ack! That’s sooo gross!” I squealed and danced around, trying to rid myself of the inbred germs, obviously present in the air.

            “They’ll probably grow extra eyes, Audrey, that’s what happens to inbred kids. Or maybe just extra legs,” my brother taunted.

            “Bleh!” I shrieked and ran upstairs.

 

            While being terribly grossed out, I still felt affection for my herd of hamsters. When we made the familiar trip down to the pet store, a sinking feeling filled my stomach but my hands didn’t grip the cardboard box quite so intensely. I was used to this by now.