You have to believe me, I really do like small animals. I like all
animals, really. But as a small child I especially enjoyed small animals. I
owned small animals for almost the whole of my childhood and adolescence -
eighteen years of owning little critters. However, during those eighteen
years, twenty-six small animals fell into my care. Spoiler alert: not one
of those remains. That's not to say that I single-handedly and
systematically killed off an average of one and a half small animals on a
My family's menagerie in miniature began even before I was born; my parents
owned parakeets. I remember very little about them, except that the green
one was Flit, and the white one was Snowflake. We owned Flit first; he
loved to fly around and land on my dad's head. He loved to fly around so
much that he would peck through the plastic food dishes on his wire cage,
dropping the dish to the newspaper floor and spilling his seeds, and would
fly out through the hole. We usually were fine with him flying around; the
problem arose when he couldn't figure out how to get back into his cage,
and therefore couldn't find food. My mother attempted to solve this problem
- once we got Flit back in his cage - by taping the hole shut. This
actually did work; Flit never escaped again. Unfortunately, this is because
parakeets are creatures of repetition, and scotch tape is poisonous.
Snowflake met a similar careless death. One night it got chilly on the
first floor of the house, and we neglected to cover her cage with a sheet,
and ironically Snowflake froze to death. At that point in my life, it wasn't
so much that the pets died, it was just that we didn't have them anymore.
We moved on. My parents did something with the bodies and made sure we
You would think that we would have grown used to handing pets over to
either a better caretaker or Death, but my mother and I undeniably teared
up as we lost our ...