Excerpt from "Hamsters"

Where This Piece Came From:
As an adult I realized that when I was young, I seldom spent time outside.  Sure, I wasted away my summer days outside in neighbor's yard waiting until it was time to turn off the sprinklers.  However, rarely did I go go outside and roam around in nature.  Startlingly, I'm still not exploring the world outside of walls.  I should probably get to that before leaf subsides to leaf.

An Excerpt from "Hamsters"

When I was a kid growing up in New York, I always wanted to have a dog.  However because New York is an extremely cramped and congested part of the states, I never had a dog.  It certainly didn't help things that my house, though often cold in the winter, was heated by the radiating financial stress of my parents.  Thus I never had a curious wet nose poke me awake too early on the weekends.  I never had a furry reason to go outside and meander endlessly, perfectly content because of the present tail wagging company.  I never had a constant companion to play with or whisper secrets to. 

But, what I did have, that my parents' meager income could afford, were hamsters.

***

Every child wants to be the beast master or a Disney princess when it comes to interacting with animals.  This desire may come from something biological within us. Nonetheless, it is very strong and undeniable during Animal Planet marathons.

It was my obligation as a soon-to-be taker-carer of a wild animal to learn as much as there was to know about this wild creature.  After all, my family would be this creature's guardians in civilization.

***

However before that happened, my brother dropped the bomb.  These hamsters were probably born and raised in this very store.  Hell, the most they have ever seen of the world may be as far as the Checker's Burgers across the parkway. 

So really, how hard is it to keep a tiny hamster alive?  My brother was the only one in my family who had raised living creatures very successfully.  The fact that they were simply meal worms didn't dissuade the validity of this revelation.

***

Hamsters are animals, aren't they?  When I thought of the word animal as a second grader, I thought of something elusive, wild, and living out in the open land trying to survive ahead of its link in the food chain.  But really, hamsters are just caged furry beings whose reality is limited to the four plastic walls around them--if they're lucky, they may get a sweet ball to traverse a living space in. 

Well, depending on perspectives, I had some lucky hamsters. 

I could say that these new members of our family were prosperous, grew to an old age, and died watching their great- great- great- great- greatgrandhamsters frolic through woodchip meadows, but I think hamster owners know of the horrors of having hamsters.

Game of Thrones is bloody.  This is true.  However, the murders, cannibalistic tendencies, and amount of fucking that took place within those clear plastic walls was on point with shit from season three.  The original four were not lucky, but bloody in life and death.  The lucky ones came from their blood as three of their surviving children.  The lucky ones did something their parents nor siblings could not.

They escaped.

***

These hamsters were caught after many a high jinks with water pail traps, strategically piled sunflower seeds, and three late nights of guarding the water heater.

The only hamster I can remember of the three that escaped was Gus.  He was the first born, last captured, and longest lived hamster we had.  They didn't live long anyway, but he was the one we buried in our backyard. 

***

These animals lived and died after such a short glimpse of the world.  What torture it was to be perfectly and copious fed without the remotest struggle to survive.  What torture to be denied the open field and air.  They saw a sliver of a world from one plastic box, through a paper box with holes on the sides, to another plastic box with another slivered perspective where they died. 

The total geography of those hamsters' lives was within a ten mile radius.  The actual spaces they lived in were tiny, and smelled of fake lemony wood chips.  As delicious as sunflower seeds seemed when those furry nut-mongers stuffed their cheeks, I'm sure freedom would have been sweeter.