Alex

My hamster ate her babies, and my mother is going to kill me for it.

“Oh, Alex,” I said in the same disappointed tone you’d use with a dog that chewed up the Sunday newspaper. But my hamster didn’t just nibble on the classifieds. Didn’t they euthanize dogs for this sort of thing? Alex paced across her cage, her tiny beady eyes shifting back and forth. Every now and then her twitching paw would rub against her mouth, which was stained red. Like she was trying to clean herself up. Like she needed to hide the evidence.

I hadn’t known she was pregnant. She’d been growing wider in the two weeks I’d had her, but I just made a mental note to feed her a few less pellets. I didn’t know that much about hamsters. Up until now, I wasn’t even sure that she was a girl, hence the uni-sex name.

Actually, Alex is an objectively bad name for a hamster of either gender. Hamsters should be named after a sweet food, like Apple, or Gingersnap, or something tongue-in-cheek, like Hamlet or Hamburger. Alex is too serious. You don’t give hamsters names that human children have. But my mother was the one who got me this hamster, and she was the one who named it. She’s also the one who’s going to blame me for turning the sweet buttercream creature she kindly bestowed upon me into a cannibalistic rodent on murderess row.

A month ago, in my last semester of college, I took a forensics class to fulfill my science requirement. I imagined what the report for this crime scene would look like. It was hard to guess the number of deceased - I saw at least twelve detached little legs scattered around the wire cage, but that only made for three babies total, and since I just googled “hamster baby facts” on my phone and found out that litters are usually six to twelve, it seemed unlikely that the death toll was that low. When I went to the pet store two weeks ago to buy a cage, the pimple-faced guy at the counter suggested I buy a pine flooring because it was more absorbent. I thought he meant piss, but now the wood chips were soaking up blood. All the infants were new-eraser-pink. No fur. Skin that just looked like guts.

I almost felt bad for Alex. Maybe she hadn’t known that she was giving birth, the same way I thought I was hemorrhaging when I first got my period in a Burger King bathroom stall. My mother hadn’t explained a lot of that to me, because no one had explained any of it to her. There’s no sex ed for hamsters, and it was a bit presumptuous for us to believe that Alex would just figure it out, wasn’t it? Just because you have the ability to give birth doesn’t mean you know how to be a mother. I knew that more than anyone. Except my mother.

Maybe Alex hadn’t known what was happening. The corpses looked more like bacteria than hamsters. Alex could have just been trying to protect herself. She continued to walk in circles on her extra-absorbent shavings, her haunches low as if she were hunting. She glanced from her feeding tube to the bag of wheat-veggie pellet mix sitting on a nearby chair, the same way she did right before I fed her dinner.

She was still hungry.

I guess this was just the forensics training kicking in, but I didn’t want to leave any fingerprints on the scene. In fact, I didn’t want to touch anything in case I did the wrong thing, which was stupid, because my hamster just ate all her children. Clearly, I already did something wrong. I took a step back, surveying my options: put Alex in the travel case and take her to the vet, get rid of her myself, or clean up the cage and continue on.

I wished that Ben was here right now.

Whenever I found a spider on the kitchen counter, I wished Ben lived with me. I wanted him to be sitting next to me when my best friend called to say that she’d gotten engaged to her Ryan-Reynolds-look-alike-lover in front of Niagara Falls. Instead, I took the phone call alone on my Ikea couch, wearing yesterday’s clothing and eating dry cereal for dinner because I’d used the last of the milk for my third cup of coffee.

If Ben was here now, he’d stretch his long fingers down and grab the rodent around the middle so she wouldn’t bite him. He’d drop her into the travel case and zip up the top, and just like that, the problem would disappear. His other hand would slide to the small of my back, into the place that feels like it was molded just for him, and he’d tell me, “Liz, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

And I’d put on my best brave face and say, “It’s okay,” because I’m not high maintenance or easily scared. He would notice those two attractive traits of mine and think to himself, “She’d be a good person to watch a horror movie with on a Friday night that stretches for too long if you don’t have company,” or, really, any kind of movie, any night of the week, for the rest of our lives, possibly.

But Ben’s rent had just come up for renewal, and while we were waiting for our Matzo ball soup at the diner he told me that his roommate Fred wouldn’t have anywhere to go if he moved out. Plus, Fred really was almost done with his app. And once GoBros hit the market, helping match gym guys with their perfect workout partners, Fred would be a millionaire and Ben would get a cut of the money. When the waitress set down our soups, steam fogging up his rectangular glasses, he took my hands into his and said, “See? I’ve gotta stay. For our future.”

I just smiled back at him, that little tight-lipped smirk I do when I want him to think that I’m above it all, that I am cool and nonchalant about life’s pesky setbacks and distractions, because I know that in the grand scheme of our love, these obstacles mean nothing. Also, I think I might have had lipstick on my teeth. I was really smiling because I liked the way he said, “our future.” Like the future was ours and only ours, and we’d raise it like parents would a child.

My mother sure as hell would love for me and Ben to have a kid. I think he’d be a good father, because a couple of weeks ago I sat up straight in bed and said, “I forgot to take my pill.” He stirred himself awake, held my hand, and said, “If anything happens, I’ll support whatever you want to do.” He looked so earnest that I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was actually referring to my supplement pills. I have a Vitamin D deficiency. Don’t we all.

Now I wished I told him the truth to begin with. Because I’m actually pretty bad at remembering to take pills in general, even the big one. My mother might not have told me a lot about having a period, but I’m pretty sure that if you completely miss one like I just did last week, it’s bad. Really bad.

Or, if you ask my mother, it’s a miracle. The hamster was her college graduation gift to me. She’d put an oversized red bow on the cage, like it was a car in a Christmas commercial, and pushed it towards me. “So you can learn to take care of something,” she said.

I was almost embarrassed for her. Hadn’t she read the Cosmo article that said desperation was men’s biggest turn-off? Next thing you know, she’d buy one of those Forever 21 shirts that looked like a normal v-neck until you realized it said “#BonjourBitches” on the back or something, except my mother would buy a shirt that said “Grandchildren please!!” in bubble letters.

You can’t ask too much of men. That’s why I didn’t tell Ben that I’m going to the convenience store today to buy a pregnancy test, and that’s why I didn’t call him about the Alex situation. In the end, I just stuck my hand into the cage, grabbed the ball of fur, and stuffed her into the travel case. There’s a vet right around the corner of the CVS. I had time for two stops.

I go to the convenience store first, because I heard that pregnancy tests take a few minutes to show a result, like how a polaroid picture develops. I thought that I’d have to ask someone behind the pharmacy counter for help, but I found a test on the shelf, packaged in a cardboard box with a pregnant stock model smiling broadly at the package. You could buy the knowledge of a child in the same aisle that they kept the nicotine lollipops and the beef jerky.

The trash in the women’s bathroom is almost overflowing with discarded tampons and toilet paper. Alex is in her travel case, staring at me as I lock the stall. I’m pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to bring hamsters into stores, but I didn’t ask, just stuffed the cage into my faux leather tote bag. She’s still looking at me when I pee on the stick. Didn’t her mother ever teach her any manners? Maybe not. Maybe her mother ate her siblings and Alex only survived by playing dead and hiding under the wood chips.

There were no paper towels to dry the pregnancy test with, so I tried to evaporate the drops of urine with the air hand dryer instead. It didn’t really work, but I threw the stick into my bag anyways. Fifteen minutes until results.

I walked over to the vet, only to see the Closed sign on their front door. Not open for another hour. I didn’t really think this through, but then again I’ve always been bad at making plans. My mother likes to remind me often that even my existence was unplanned.

I’m the same age that she had me.

You know, if I called her and said I was pregnant, she’d be absolutely thrilled. Sometimes I think my mother is hellbent on me repeating her mistakes, as if that’s the only way I could truly understand her. As if being understood was more important than anything else in the world. My mother knows me completely. Not even Ben gets me like she does; it’s better that way.

Some people think that being understood is the same thing as being loved, but if you understand someone, there’s no way you could love them. My mother gets me because she knows all the way I get snappy with the waitstaff when they get my order wrong and how I invested a $1000 college scholarship into the GoBros launch campaign because I wanted Ben to see my name. If you understand someone, then you know everything that they’re trying not to be.

My mother would understand how I felt when I pulled out the pregnancy test to see what had appeared in the little box.

There it was.

I threw the test back in the bag, and pulled out Alex’s cage instead. Another half an hour until the vet opens. I’m not sure what I thought the vet could do for her. Kill her, probably, with whatever they used to send cats with cancer and biting dogs to the rainbow bridge.

“Alex,” I said, peering into her beady eyes, “What the hell.”

What does it take for a mother to eat her own kid? To force it back from where it came? I tried to google it. Apparently, this was not an uncommon phenomenon for hamsters. Not sure if that makes me feel worse or better. I scroll through the top results. Stress. Hunger. Fear. I usually feel all of those things before noon each day.

One site said that it might be a mercy response. If a hamster didn’t think it could provide for the kids, it tried to give them an easy way out.

“What am I going to do with you?”

Alex did not answer.

If I brought her to the clinic, they’d kill her, but I couldn’t keep her, not after what happened. I couldn’t take care of her. Alex was walking in circles around her cage again. Nowhere to go.

I undid the clasp on her door. “Get out,” I said. I didn’t look up whether or not hamsters could survive in the wild. Didn’t need to. I knew they couldn’t. But Alex scurried out of her cage, onto the sidewalk and down the street, no hesitation, like she’d been waiting for this all along. Then I was running after her, thighs burning and hands swinging at my side. I sprinted so fast that I decided I didn't even need to go to the gym later. I went even quicker, until I forget about workout regimes, until everything blurred. Alex and I raced down the street as if we could outrun who we were.

Vivian Parkin DeRosa is a writer, blogger, and Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Poets Reading the News, and the Huffington Post. She lives on the Jersey Shore and is currently writing a novel.