In health

I wake for work and am struck that Amber left bed around five and did not return. She is upstairs when I get there, sitting on the sofa.

"Pico isn't dead," she begins, "but he isn't doing well."

On her lap is a water bottle covered in a towel, on which rests our hamster Pico, wrapped in a dry washcloth. He had been sick for at least a month, though possibly longer and we missed signs of his decline, such as an inability to climb up the arms of our sofa. He came out of his bedding or wooden house less frequently. For the last three weeks, he had startled and screamed when we tried to tend to him in his cage, an action that horrified us. I was unaware a hamster could scream. Last night, for the first time in at least a year, he bit Amber's finger, which still bore the Band-Aid.

After a few initial months of acclimation, Pico had been keen to be with us, more affectionate than it occurred to me a rodent could be. (In my childhood, we ran through hamsters and gerbils, but they were never fun or cuddly pets.) He was truly a member of our clutch, something I daily remembered to love, in opposition to our hermit crabs and half the lab animals waiting out the rest of their existences in our living room, whose passing would not much affect me because they do not care to love or are incapable of it.

I sit beside Amber, resting a hand on her shoulder and gently rubbing the fur on Pico's forehead. He was no longer the fluffy, golden ball he had been even recently. Amber attributed this to ringworm, to a leaky water bottle, to comorbid infection. He bore wide patches of bare skin that did not get better no matter what salve or prescription unguent Amber rubbed onto him. The creams gave him a more matted experience than he was necessarily owed.

A few weeks ago, Amber asked me to give him oral syringes of antibiotics and medicine. It was the first time I had taken Pico out of his cage in a while -- Amber assumes the responsibility for the care and feeding of most of our pets, so I did not take the occasion to do more than coo at him through the mesh of the cage, noticing his eyes squinted and he move with little agility. Touching him was upsetting, as his whole body was taut, hairless and distended. Amber thought he was putting on weight and had accordingly changed his diet, but this was not obesity. When she brought him into her vet office days later (brought him back in, because he had been there once to get a prescription for antibiotics and antifungals, but didn't press for anything outside her hypotheses), they gave him an ultrasound and revealed that he had a massive cyst, possibly on his liver. They relieved it of its fluid, thick and brown, and sent Amber home.

Pico lost a quarter of his mass in this lancing, going from a water balloon to being hamster-shaped again. With less pressure inside him, his fur pretended thickness. He wasn't comfortable, but seemed markedly more at ease. He walked with a staggering gait, his body having adjusted to a greater size, his tiny muscles atrophied and simultaneously overcompensated.

Amber adjusted his diet again, because he was not overweight. Now, she feared the opposite. She researched the best foods and treatments. We walked to the health food store to buy him milk thistle pills, of which he could have one one-hundredth of a capsule. The night before, Amber had carefully bathed our hamster in thyme tea to help his skin, though I am uncertain which of his potential conditions this was meant to treat.

Pico lies on his side on the hot water bottle, covered but for his face. His marble black eyes look at nothing, blinking weakly. He is aware of my touch and maybe smell, but I don't know that he sees me.

"He was so cold when I found him. He must have been there for hours. I don't know how long. He was just on his side in the cage," Amber says. "I thought he was dead already."

I am torn between my duties. I need to shave and eat breakfast so I can leave for work, but I am obligated to her and to our ailing hamster.

I run through a scenario where Pico recovers enough that Amber can take care of him through the day, or can take him back into the vet office, but I can't build enough hope. Nothing of it makes sense, not after an hour and a half of Amber's futile ministrations. He won't recover.

With one hand, I automatically work my electric razor over my face, not taking my eyes off Amber or Pico.

Pico begins gasping, opening his mouth as though hiccupping. I remember this from his predecessor hamster, Wilfred, who existed in our life briefly and only because, after a period of obvious neglect, a mother wanted to get rid of him before he died in front of her daughter. I remember holding one of the three baby voles Amber tried to rescue from a missing mother, mistaking gasps as playful vitality, for trying to graze my finger with its teeth. When Pico gasps, I know.

Amber cries, but she keeps rubbing him through the towel. When she tended to him recently, she did so with robin-egg nitrile gloves so she might not get infected with possible ringworm. Last night, she had me walk with her miles to visit the grocery store and buy a box of these gloves. As she tries to massage heat and life into him, she doesn't have on gloves.

His breathing steadies, which Amber audibly notes. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe he has stabilized. I watch his tiny body rise and fall.

It may not be two minutes before he stops moving. Amber sends me downstairs to find a stethoscope to confirm he is dead, though I cannot find anything. I return upstairs to her rolling him side to side for a reaction. His eyes move, eyelids seeming to open and close, but it is just her manipulations. Pico died.

"I just..." Amber begins. "I just thought at him, 'You can go if you need to,' and then he died. I did this."

I can do nothing for Pico now. His death loomed since I held him and felt how unnatural his body had become. I focus on Amber, reading in what I know of her what she needs to hear. "You did everything you could for him. You did far more than almost anyone would for a hamster. You gave him an amazing life. He knows how loved he was at the end."

She isn't ready to hear this, giving a litany of everything she could have done wrong, from not recognizing the beginnings of his symptoms in maybe-July to anointing him with the thyme tea last night and possibly making him colder than he could bear (though she dried him carefully and put him on a heat mat, so this self-flagellation is useless).

I press my forehead to hers. "You did everything you could," I reiterate.

I ask what she needs and she hesitates in making any decision. Then she says that she wants me to stay home with her today, if I can. I call out immediately.

We cry together, though she cries for Pico and I cry at least partly for her. She had made him a part of her routine. I loved Pico more than I imagined I could love a rodent -- and he deserved it more than I imagined a rodent could -- but he was a small creature I enjoyed having in my life. But for syringe feeding him medication, I wouldn't have called myself his caretaker.

Amber got to bed late last night because she was caring for the pets and studying. She awoke early with some intuition. I suggest she nap, but she says she has things she needs to do before she can sleep. Then she revises this to asking if I will take Pico's body to the vet, explaining that I am to say I have a DOA, want an individual cremation, and a necropsy if they deem it necessary. I am not sure they would cremate a hamster. I supposed we would give him the same funeral we have given to other of our small decedents: a hole on the edge of the property and a weeping eulogy.

As though I cannot remember these few instructions, or in case I am too distraught, or from her need to make this concrete, she writes out a letter explaining all of this.

She hands me the body, still wrapped in the washcloth, tenderly, as though he might wake up and we will need to corral him. His body is still warm, though it is impossible to say whether this in his native heat or borrowed from the hot water bottle. He is still pliable and has a weight I recognize intimately. I do not unwrap his head because, even though rodent faces do not tend toward broad expressions, I can't stand to see his eyes empty.

I think to tell Amber that this is the last chance she will have to say anything to Pico. Then I don't say any of that because it is an awful thing to think and she had at least two hours of his end to think and say all she wanted to.

I hold him in my hand while I ready myself to leave, then return because I cannot find the transponder to open my car and must borrow the one on Amber's keychain.

"See," Amber says, "you weren't going to be able to go to work anyway."

I return to the car and find my transponder frozen in the grass.

I place Pico, what remains of him, in my passenger's seat. "If there is going to be a time for you to spring up, this is it," I say.

He does not.

I drive a town away, alternately fine, eyes on the road and listening to a podcast, and eulogizing him. He was so good and I want him to know he was loved, that he did the best job at being a hamster.

I don't cry much, just the edges of it.

Flurries surround my car, the first snow I have seen this year.

I walk into the vets' office, where a woman talks to someone about their dog. I stand patiently, Pico in the washcloth in one hand, the letter in the other. When she turns to me, I say I am Amber's husband, then repeat what I was told: DOA, Individual Cremation, Possible Necropsy.

She pulls out a yellow form, telling me how sorry she is for our loss, asking if Amber will want a paw print (then checking the box anyway because of course Amber will), and mentioning the specified doctor isn't in right now. The form has a box for individual cremation and she doesn't even blink at the fact that he is so tiny and his ashes would be a wisp. She paperclips the letter to the form, and I surrender the body.

I return home. Amber seems composed in the moment, though less mature. We embrace long. I kiss her face, the salt from her cheeks. I ask what she needs now and she is ready with the answer: many bad movies.

We watch through Empire Records, which she pronounces excessively nineties and which we critique for the sleepless white people who do not face serious consequences for an actual hostage situation. Amber appears normal. Once the credits end, she crumbles anew.

We watch A Wrinkle in Time, which is bad enough for her, but it wears on her. She needs to tend to things. Her moratorium cannot be long.

"What do you want to do right now?"

"Get a new hamster," she pouts, but doesn't need my gentleness to respond that she isn't going to do this right now. "Plus, the hamsters I want are in Long Island."

I look at the clock. 1:37PM. We could make it there and back.

"No," she says. "I'll wait until after the semester is over. Also, it's a breeder. They don't necessarily have hamsters right now."

Weeping, she composes a social media post about Pico, to let people know. A part of me sees how strange this is, this mourning over a being I could hold in my pocket (to his satisfaction). A rodent is a simple thing, an animal parents give to their offspring to teach them about death. They are not meant to last the ages. But those unfortunate animals are not this one. We loved this one and so he is unique in the world. Given his smallness, we are among the few capable of mourning his passing and so the duty of it is concentrated between us.

"The worse part," I say, knowing it isn't, "is that there is no part of him I could have kept. His pelt would not have been a beautiful keepsake."

He was cleverer than I would have expected. In his first cage, a contraption of yellow painted bars and molded plastic, he figured out to twist a round piece where a tube might otherwise have gone, pull it into the cage despite it straining the limits of physics, then lower himself to the ground that he might wander directly below his cage until we found him in the morning (and duct taped that piece in place). When Amber handmade him a new cage of wood and mesh, he contrived a way of using a cloth hammock and leverage to escape so he could stand on top of the cage (which Amber ended with a twist tie. Pico didn't have enough time left in his life to discover how to thwart this).

She reverently cleans out his cage, removing its bedding and giving it an antiseptic scrub. It won't move from its place in our living room, though she shrouds in in the blanket she used to keep it warm and dark last night. After the task is done, her eyes dart over to it still.

"I keep wanting to check on him," she says.

Soon in Xenology: Superpowers.

last watched: Bojack Horseman
reading: It Can't Happen Here
listening: Yeah Yeah Yeahs