One of the gerbils died. Mabel was the only one of us who could ever tell them apart. When she announced that it was her gerbil and not Sally’s which had died, she was despondent, though she could easily have convinced us (and herself) otherwise. Sally, for her part, immediately sought to negotiate a replacement pet. One absorbing the loss, the other deflecting it.
I was the one who fed the gerbs and cleaned their cages and shared the study with them in the daytimes. Today, clearly hearing only half the accustomed amount of rodent scrabbling, I am the very model of forlorn.
In the process of removing the corpse and making a rare unscheduled cage cleaning (it’s usually every other trash day, and can take up to two hours to do properly) I scaled down the cage arrangement from a connected duplex to a single apartment with a whole lot of tubes around it.
I don’t know how I’d care to live if a constant companion suddenly expired, but I expect I’d want to nestle snugly in a small soft area for a while. And that’s just what’s happening with the surviving gerb, who’s developed a new bedroom area for herself, and has stuffed the running wheel with tissue paper as well—perhaps in tribute to her deceased athletic sister.