She started to act funny just that morning.

She, which means Alexandra – the hamster I got for my eighth birthday.

Alexandra was a hamster that had mostly dark gray fur that was caged by bold black stripes that ran parallel to her spine. Her belly was a yellowish white like the shade of bleached cashews, and her feet dainty pink stubs that stretched into small pointed toes. Her eyes appeared deep black, but in the light they were the same shade as dried blood.

In her cage, there was a ramp that led to a suspended platform – it was a good six inches of the bottom of the cage, and two of those inches were filled with fluffy purple bedding. When I found her, she was on the platform, pancaked into a blob, flat against the blue plastic and eyes unblinking.

At first I thought she was fine. I thought that maybe she was just sitting in the heat. It was winter after all, and her cage was rather close to the radiator. Then I saw how shallow and quick her breathing was, little jerks that happened in staccato rhythm – when I leaned closer I heard squeaks, small and choked, almost as if they were being forced out of her.

I brought her out of the cage, carefully laying her limp – gosh, she was limp – body into the curve of my palm. I could feel her sucking at my skin. She always used to nip you if you picked her up.

I couldn’t hold her. I didn’t know what this meant, exactly, and I just couldn’t place her in my palms knowing I’d have to let her go later anyways. So I placed her on my glass table and watched her breaths become shallower and shallower, from closely knit intakes to sparse exhales.

I watched her, sitting in my swivel chair, eyes watching the rise of her back, watching it slow down, watching her eyes droop over.

It took a couple more seconds for me to do something else – but eventually, with shaking fingers, I went to the closet containing hamster supplies and took out a treat. It was a blue cylinder shaped thing – small, maybe the length of half a pinkie, and about as thick as a pencil. Rock hard, and Alexandra’s favorite.

She used to munch on them during the night. It really annoyed me back then, sitting in the dark and hearing the steady scarpe of sharp vermin teeth against treats she would pick up from her bowl.

When I placed it under her mouth, she couldn’t eat it.

She sat there, trying to bite at it, and I sat in front of her, trying to hear that sound again-

My eyes stung, but with every blink my eyelashes stayed stubbornly dry.

I watched as she tried to bite it, tried to muster up the energy to taste one last time, but she just couldn’t. And eventually, when my careful eyes picked up the fact that her chest wasn’t rising or falling anymore, she stopped trying. Her eyes glazed over, head falling over slightly, treat pressed into the table under the weight of her chin.

I slipped out of my room, searching for my mother. When I found her, she was sitting on the couch, reading.

I stepped in, vision blurring, and said, “Alexandra stopped breathing.”

Perhaps making it real, making it into sound and words that mean something, did it.

Crying, I found, isn’t pretty.