(this essay is soon to be published on http:///www.freshyarn.com)

It was raining on the day my mother brought Hammy home. Our mother named it because my brother and I didn’t hold much of an interest. She’d always thought we picked offbeat names for the pets anyway and when she told us what she’d named him we were appalled. After all, we had fish named King Vitamin and Prince Vitor and Taco – good names. Imaginative names. Hammy wasn’t much of a name and not the least bit creative. We always knew that from that day on, Hammy would be an addition to the family that was at best, vanilla.

We kept Hammy in the living room in front of the bay window so, as my mother put it, he would have lots to look at. Lots to look at? There was a dead tree right outside the window and a blue Dodge Ram. Besides, did hamsters even care about the world outside their humble cages? You don’t see a hamster sitting in a pile of shit daydreaming about white sandy beaches or Pina Coladas or amusement park rides. We tried to enlighten our mother to this fact but she wasn’t having any of it. ‘You don’t care about Hammy…what did he ever do to you?’ The truth of it was, Hammy didn’t do a lot, really, and that was the point. On his best day, he’d run a couple of laps in his wheel before retiring to a puddle of his own urine. This was not impressive to us.

Hammy was a replacement for our family dog, Brigid, an Irish Wolfhound who died after a tumor in her leg exploded in front of me when I was getting ready to take her for a walk. On the night she died my mother and father took my brother and me out for Chicken Parmigiana at a restaurant downtown. My brother and I just wanted another dog and if we couldn’t have another dog then we didn’t want anything. Especially not some stupid hamster with a dumb name who didn’t do anything fun like chase its tale or bark when it saw the McDonald’s sign from the back of the Ram.

My mother did all she could to make Hammy a part of the family. She bought him wild accoutrements for his plexiglass cage – balls with bells in them, multi-colored hay, even a little house for him to hide in when the world got to be too much. He used none of these things. It could be Mardi Gras in there and Hammy would remain sitting on his pile of feces staring at nothing. My brother and I thought for a while that he was retarded. “Leave it to Ma,” we’d say, “to pick out the only retarded one on the North Shore.” On special occasions, like birthdays and anniversaries and Saint Patrick’s Day, she brought the cage into the kitchen so that he could be a part of the festivities. One time on Saint Patrick’s Day when my father was drunk, he put a couple of drops of Guinness into Hammy’s water bottle. When my mother found out, he spent the night sleeping on the couch. Superbowl parties were the most fun for my mother. She knitted him a Patriots sweater, which was no small feat considering that she didn’t have the daintiest fingers. When she realized Hammy was too wily to sit and be dressed, she taped it to the side of the cage and was just as pleased than if he had been wearing it himself.

About eight months after we brought Hammy home, he got an infection in his eye that caused it to tear. Eventually it gave him an infection. My mother says when she woke up that morning, the sun was out and there was a bird on the feeder outside the bay window, and there Hammy was looking at the ‘glorious tree’ (that was still dead) as in awe, even though his body was stiff as a dowel. She waited until my brother and I woke up to break the news to us. She told us to sit down on the couch, the way she did when we were both in a lot of trouble, and she looked at my brother and me and told us that Hammy had died in the night. She searched our faces for grief; she wanted to leap over to us and hold us tight and tell us that everything was going to be fine, that Hammy had lived a full life for a hamster. But my brother and I just looked at her without any expression that she wanted. “Don’t you care?” she asked us. She was practically begging for us to say that we did, but in reality, we didn’t. Honestly, we were relieved that his plexiglass Xanadu would no longer be in front of the bay window next to where we played Nintendo. With Hammy dead, we’d no longer have to listen to our mother asking us to turn down Contra out of respect for Hammy’s hearing. “Well,” I told my mother, “at least we’ll get a better view of that tree you’re always going on about.” It was not the time for that kind of joke. My mother broke down into sobs and shouted at us to go to school. When we asked her for lunch money she didn’t budge. The joke about the tree cost us a cafeteria lunch and we’d have to embarrass ourselves that afternoon by asking for an IOU meal ticket. ‘Good goin,’ my brother told me, and we went to the bus stop.

I told my brother not to worry about lunch. After all, we were probably going to have a nice dinner downtown to celebrate Hammy’s passing. I was definitely going to have pie for dessert, and maybe a cheeseburger for dinner. Yes, I was going to have one of those Downtown cheeseburgers that are bigger than my head and my brother decided he might have the same. Who needed to worry about crappy cafeteria lunches when you had head-sized cheeseburgers in your future.

When my brother and I got home from school, my mother was nowhere to be found. “She’s probably just getting dressed,” I told my brother. We knew how she liked to get dressed up for dinner when we were going out. We sat down on the couch and waited for her to come out of her room wearing her pillbox hat and dangling the keys to the Subaru. “Let’s go,” she would say. “Let’s go have those giant head-sized cheeseburgers that are served with french fries the size of cats! We’ll take no prisoners and we’ll eat like Rockefellers, all thanks to Hammy! We’ll show that crazy God of ours that just because he can take away our pet, he can’t take away our appetites! First one to the car gets an extra slice of pie!”

We waited a long time for my mother to come out and it was no longer so sunny outside the bay window and the only sound in the house was the rumbling of my stomach and my brother’s stomach. Sometimes when I got very hungry my hands would start to shake and I’d get very warm and start to sweat. I was going to sit there and possibly die from a hypoglycemic coma if our mother didn’t come out of her room soon and it was all going to be thanks to Hammy. Hammy’s mansion of a cage had not been moved and neither had Hammy. He was still in the corner near his puddle of pee with his tiny Patriots jersey draped over him. “I hope he doesn’t start to stink,” I said. It was at that moment that the door to my mother’s bedroom flung open. She stood in the doorway in a rage and she was not dressed for dinner. There was no fancy dress, red lipstick or pillbox hat. Her face was ravaged from crying and she was wearing the same nightgown as that morning. She didn’t say anything but still we knew we were in a lot of trouble. She glared at us and then stomped her bare feet into the kitchen. My brother and I stood up and followed her in there, and we watched as she swung the refrigerator door open and slammed packages of coldcuts on the table before heading back to her room, where she locked the door behind her. My brother and I looked at each other and shrugged. ‘It’s probably just menopause,’ he said. ‘Timmy Fagerberg told me his mother does the same thing. Do you want mustard?’

I think it was a year later when my brother and I were out in the snow, wrestling and raising hell and nearly killing each other by shoving wads of snow down each other’s throats until we were blue in the face. By that time we had taken to putting rocks and icicles into the snowballs and throwing them at each other’s heads. We had an unspoken rule, which was if one of us started bleeding then we couldn’t yell out for our mother or tattle tale – unless it was really bad and we needed medical attention. That bridge, we said, we’d cross when we came to it.

My brother had my face so far down into the snow on the ground that all I could do was flail my arms and try to scream. All I could hear was my brother’s voice calling out for me to “Eat it.” I dug deep, practically to China, for a piece of rock or chunk of ice to defend myself. I reached down into a soft part of the ground and took out something hard like a rock or something; I couldn’t see it exactly because I had snow in my eyes. But it felt right to me and so I rolled it in snow. “Eat this,” I told him, and I flung the snowball directly at his face. I heard a crack and suddenly my brother collapsed to the ground. I stood there smiling for a few moments, but when he didn’t move I walked over to where he lay and stood there. I turned my head to get a look into the bay window to see if my mother had witnessed anything. She hadn’t and I was relieved to find that my brother was still conscious. He sat up and we both looked at the snowball I threw at his face. It was no rock or chunk of ice that I had rolled into the snowball.

My mother had done a burial for Hammy without us. She used the box I made for her for Mother’s Day, the one with all of the seashells and the puffy paint on the lid, as Hammy’s coffin. My mother has never been one for the outdoors or for digging or gardening, which explains why Hammy’s grave was so shallow. He was flawlessly preserved in the snow – so much that we could have put him back in his wheel and my mother would have come out of her bedroom to find him there and she would have shouted “O happy day! Hammy’s come back!” She’d have clapped and jumped and she might have put her pillbox hat on and taken us for a Downtown cheeseburger and cat fries after all to celebrate his resurrection.

In the snow Hammy looked peaceful. His eye was no longer tearing and he was smiling a little, like he was just waiting for us to find him so we could wake him from his cryogenic slumber. But on the other hand, there weren’t many rocks or chunks of ice on the ground and it wasn’t dark outside yet so my brother and I weren’t ready to go inside. My brother picked Hammy up and rolled him in a pile of snow. “Eat this,” he said, and he chucked the snowball at my head. I picked Hammy up and rolled him again. “Want some, get some!” I declared as I flung it right back. This went on until it was dark. My mother opened the door and that’s when she saw me, my arm raised in the air like a quarterback throwing downfield. My brother stopped smiling and I stopped and I turned, ever so slightly, to face my mother. She had seen everything and she had that look on her face – the one that you find on those people who are found frozen in the Andes just before they were about to get eaten by their friends, when their jaws are open to scream but no sounds come. I knew we were in trouble and I knew there was no way out of it. The wrath would come down on us and so I thought I might as well make a joke. “Look,” I said. “He came back. Just like Jesus.”

She glared at us with her face still frozen in time and she had turned pale. The door slammed shut. “Is it locked?” my brother asked. “No,” I told him. “It’s getting dark and the temperature is going down. If she locked it we could die. Don’t you know anything?” I walked up to the door just to validate my point but when I got there I was wrong. She had locked us out and there was no sign that she was going to open it. “See?” my brother said. “I told you. Dad’s working late, too. We’re going to die like those people whose planes crash on mountaintops.”

I went around to the porch. The porch was always our best bet when we left our keys in the house and couldn’t get in. She had locked it from the inside and there was no hope. “Well?” my brother shouted in his high-pitched girl squeal. I jumped off the porch and back into the snow.

“Well,” I said. “If we’re going to die we may as well make the most of it. Where is he?” My brother walked over to the spot in the snow where Hammy lay. He picked him up and rolled him in the snow. I ducked and he went off the bay window. Had he broken the window we wouldn’t have cared – we were freezing and we wanted to be let in the house. We pitched Hammy back and forth and every now and then we looked back at the bay window, searching for some sign of our mother. Maybe she’d see it our way, I thought. After all we were finally playing with him. But there was no sign of her and no sign that we’d be fed anytime soon, either. Hammy had cost us not one but two dinners and if we were lucky enough to make it through the night there was a chance the symptoms of hypothermia would be too great to ever enjoy a downtown cheeseburger with cat fries again.

After a while our hands were too numb to throw Hammy around and we were bored of him. “What should we do with it?” my brother asked me. We walked over to the creek that ran behind the backyard, just over the hill. I took the Mother’s Day box that my mother had used as a casket and I put Hammy inside. “We’ll send him down river and it’ll be like King Arthur. Do you have a match?” He didn’t have a match, just a frozen booger hanging from his nose that spoke volumes of his uselessness. “Fine, then,” I said. “It’ll be like Moses but already dead instead of just born. It’ll really be something.”

I closed the lid on Hammy and down river he went. “Goodbye, little soldier,” my brother declared through chattering teeth. “Goodbye.”