I asked my friend Gwen.
When Gwen had called me and asked me to come over, I'd gotten the feeling that something was wrong. She'd sounded funny. I had not, however, anticipated that something would be as wrong as a decapitated hamster.
There the little body sat, by the wall of its glass cage. It was a lump of fur with two dainty forepaws poking out in just the right spots, but with the head, which should have been between them, missing.
I looked at Gwen again. "Where," I asked, "is the head?"
She said, "I don't know."
The reason I was asking is because it was actually quite plain to see that it wasn't in the cage. Which led to an unfortunate conclusion about the surviving hamster.
This would be gross enough for anyone, but particularly for the approximately-eleven-year-old that I was. I took refuge in a mantra: "This is no time to be weak."
"This is no time to be weak," I told Gwen, ordering her to get me some toilet paper.
"This is no time to be weak," I reminded her as I used the toilet paper to fish the corpse out of the tank.
"This is no time to be weak," I added, wrapping the little thing up and demanding more impromptu graveclothes.
"This is no time to be weak," I encouraged her, wrapping and wrapping and wrapping. I continued with that theme all the way downstairs and out to the back yard, where we dug a shallow hole and laid the gauzy hamster to rest.
#
Much personal writing takes the form of secular homilies in which some kind of revelation, meaning or, in a worst-case scenario, lesson is learned. I am here to tell you that I did not learn a goddamn thing from burying that headless hamster. Nor did I reach any new stage of friendship with Gwen (not her real name, btw). We were just shellshocked. I went home, and the next time we saw each other, we pretended that the whole thing had never happened.
Gwen died young. Leaving a five-year-old son. And I didn't learn a damn thing from that either.
