The hamsters were dead. My sister still insists that I am to blame, and I may still wonder. Because this is certainly likely. If you drop and throw a thing enough times, parts will eventually come loose inside it. Even if you name your hamster Little She-Rambo. Even if you slip on little bandoliers, and smear its face with mud, and drop it in a backyard-jungle obstacle course of dandelions and broken glass. Especially if you try to tie a miniature bandana around its head. Words and reenactment are insufficient alchemy. Tiny skulls need only tiny cracks for tiny swells and leaks to end tiny lives. Regardless, it wasn't me. (Probably.) More likely it was the cold slipping in from under the door with a half-rotten board nailed to it. I remember, because I was there the night my father drove in the nails. I held my green plastic hammer as he swung his, and I kept watch for the things I thought my father meant to keep out with wooden planks and bent nails. A board over a slit between the metal door and tile floor, wood like tape over rust-covered lips. And I turned my green hammer in my hands and waited--for the devil in the backyard, for the god of rats in the oven, for the men with rifles deep inside the mountains. For all of them to kick in the board, rip off the tape, and slip in through the crack beneath the door. Mostly, however, "rats." My father insisted, "Big rats, Lina." So, "Yes, Dad," I said, "rats." Except I said, " Si ," and I said, " Si, Papi, " because I was five and I didn't speak English then and words are still insufficient alchemy--but here I am. "Yes, Dad, ratas ." And I spun my green hammer in my hands and planned on killing myself a rat. A good fat one, " Una ratisima ratota. " Just for practice, just for when the others slipped in. A brown-fur devil I saw peeking behind the tamarillo tree in the backyard one night, or the men in the news carrying AK-47s, or even the soldiers they shot at who stacked bricks of cocaine in front of the screen and seemed to me, back then, to be no different one from the other. Or, rather, the three-tailed god of rats my aunt Chiqui swears she saw once in the yard, covered in purple-black feathers and yellow spikes, running on two legs and leaping into the oven as it howled. So I imagined it. Turned my hammer in my hands and heard the coconut skull crack of many heads beneath my swing. Just like my father did when the rats squeezed under the thin slit, swinging tiny feet and shaking black fur heads until they were inside and their little claws made plick-plack noises on the tile floor. Then he'd swing precisely and finally. A broomstick like a spear or a hammer like a sling. Swift and sure, down like a paperweight atop a flattened, soggy head while tails and feet twitched as if a mad wind were trying blow the whole thing away. So in went the nails. To keep some things in and others out. Because some are pets and some are not, it's hard to tie a leash around a tamarillo tree devil and ill-advised to let the men from the mountain in and lure the rat god out. Though, of course, they all make it inside eventually. And I carry them with me all my life. But not yet. Right there, right then, my father had a plan. Hammer, wood, nails. Out rats, in hamsters. Out the conflict, in his children. A man crouching beside a hamster cage swinging a hammer, driving in nails and keeping out rats. "Because rats eat hamsters, too," my mother explained. "They eat everything." As she scrunched up her nose as if there were whiskers under her skin trying to sprout through her pores. "Disgusting." And I turned my hammer again and again, picturing rats sitting cross-legged in a circle, pulling on hamster bodies like they were trying to fold bed sheets. One on each end, tug-tug-tugging until hamsters came apart and all went down rat hatches--legs, fur, whiskers, and bellies. It was not the rats, however. It was the cold. That's what killed them. Because a wooden plank can only hold back so much. Excerpted from Don't Come Back by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
