2001-08-18 - 11:26 p.m.

So Soon Gone

It's a Saturday in the middle of the month, and that means comic book order forms!

The Manager and I were downstairs working in the store, with the idea that after a certain point we'd break for dinner. The usual dinner choice - Chinese delivery.

I gave a call upstairs to Lily to see what she wanted me to order for her, and her voice sounded somber.

"I have some bad news," she said. "I just looked in the kitchen and Leet is dead."

So, we lost the battle.

I had looked in on her a few hours before, and she was asleep in her corner, still breathing.

I'd been giving her medicine over the last couple days, which she absolutely hated. In spite of this she was looking worse and worse. She was terribly thin, all bent over and old-looking.

It was really sad, because we'd become attached to Leet over the week she'd been living with us, and during the one day that she was healthy she was absolutely adorable.

She was very tiny, but because we'd given her a name she wasn't just a faceless baby hamster. And now she's gone.

The not-so-good pet store we bought her at has a 7-day return policy on livestock. I'm not sure exactly what that means and I don't know if I want to get another hamster from there. Wet-tail is so contagious that I would wager all the hamsters that were in that cage in the store have it too. In fact I'd bet some of them have already died.

When we went upstairs to eat our Chinese food, I took Leet's cage off of the kitchen table. I don't think Lily would have been able to eat her Chicken Lo Mein with the poor little dead hammie lying in front of her.

Like I said, wet-tail is very contagious, and Leet and Pooka came home in the same holding cage, and they slept together in a pile on the way back to the house. I would have expected Pooka to get it too, but she is the picture of health.

Right now her cage is sitting on my desk, on the right hand side of my computer. Pooka seems to have grown visibly in the six days she has been here, and she looks like your basic chubby young hamster. This very minute she is running in her wheel so fast that her little legs are a blur. The wheel is vibrating so much the whole cage is shaking.

Keep on running, Pooka.