It’s the hamster I’m thinking about here. One night he nosed out of his poorly latched cage and scampered across the glowing iron surface of the gas heater, blistering the bottoms of his tiny pink feet, the same feet whose weensy, lizard-like nails Violet had wanted to lacquer Sashay Pink. (Her mom said oh no Violet.) The vet prescribed a greenish antibiotic balm Violet was meant to smudge on with a Q-tip every morning. This balm, deemed icky by Violet, was so tasty to Hamster that he not only licked it up but ultimately (unbelievably) came to nibble off the digits (fingers? toes?) on all four of his feet, which act left him—when Violet burst in from school that day—with bleeding stumps so painful for everybody to look at that he had to be put to sleep. Violet told this tale of woe in the skating rink’s tiny toilet—her blue eyes misting over and her Earth Angel Pink mouth quivering while Ruth Ann, Sherry, and Suzy Torvino gathered around. The skating rink was a hurricane-fence cage with a brown canvas roof and vinyl flags like those you see in a used car lot strung whapping around its perimeter.
