for henry, who has just gone

neil hilborn

Henry was my pet rat, and he died
last night in my hands. He was three
years old, which is way longer than

an albino rat is supposed to live. To be
honest, he wasn't a very smart animal,
but he was so sweet that now I wonder
if intelligence has anything to do
with leading a good life. He had been sick
for a few months, and every twelve hours

I had to apply antiseptic and lotion
to both his back feet. By the end
they didn't really work anymore,
so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way
so cute and sad that I started calling him my little
sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,
a surprise: you would think that when your rat
is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months
you'd be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel

and mixed the solution, I picked him
up and noticed his breathing
was so slow. I lay down with him

on the towel, the towel where we'd spent
the last few months, where I think we
finally, really, completely loved each other,

not like humans do: humans always want
something from you and he and I
would rather just be together than apart,

and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way
that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain,
his head fell forward, and there was so much less

light in the room. The lamp was so far away,
like the light of a house to which there is no
road. I know, he was just a rat. So many

just like him, all white, red eyes,
die every day and only one or two people
in white coats are even there to see it.
He was all in white, he was always there
to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare,
so many nightmares, I would turn on the light

and there he was, holding on, a constant companion
to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment,
the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying
in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside
my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat
once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big

Mouse. Named proof that something could need me
and still love me. Named please
can I have some of your apple? Or I know
you're sad but I'm hungry. Don't go; if you go
I won't survive: a child reaches for her father;
a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;

a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly,
sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together.
Some day I'm going to have a child. She's going to have

eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like
she'll need me alive then, she needs me alive
now; I can't say goodbye before I've had a chance

to say hello. I don't stare off bridges anymore.
I don't count out little blue exit signs and even today,
with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away

it feels like someone else buried him using my body,
today I came home and only wanted to sleep
for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed

me once, and I know something will need me
again. One day I'm going to have a daughter.
She's going to sleep through the night

sometimes. She is a light on a rock
at the edge of a lonely see. You see that light
out there? That's where I'm headed. That's home.

at the end of 2008 i was exactly 6 and a half years old. i had just gotten a computer for christmas and hence was Online for the first time.
i mainly used this to play an assortment of Virtual Worlds, look at optical illusion websites for some reason..?
... and look for videos of puppies and kittens (i haven't changed much). mainly icanhascheezburger and its assorted sister sites and youtube. i remember one moment where i saw the one coffee ad car jumpscare video and was so scared i refused to touch the computer for days.
this isn't about that. it's about videos of puppies on the internet. yorkshire terrier puppies.
there were a few specific videos i liked but my favorite was this one:


we moved to the house where i currently live in 2007, and part of the appeal of the house my parents chose was a big garden. my parents asked if i wanted a puppy now we had plenty of space for a dog, and if so what sort of puppy. i showed them that video, probably. an assortment of things i was not involved in or really remember because i was 6 years old happened and we found someone nearby selling a litter of yorkshire terriers and were offered a girl. i was allowed to name her.
i don't really know why i named her what i did? i remember exactly where i was when the conversation happened. it just felt right, i guess. and so mollie came home with us. i've always though of birthday as the 23rd of april but i don't know for sure if that's the day she was born or the day we took her.

we grew up together. i don't remember a lot of specific details because i have the memory of a goldfish but she kind of just a constant presence. if i had the opportunity to name a dog anything in a video game it'd probably be called mollie. before i was really into the series my favorite pokemon growning up was always lillipup entirely because i assocated them with her.
here are an assortment of baby photos :] on my 7th birthday not long after we got her my birthday cake had a picture of me holding her printed onto it.
so tiny... she always looked like a plushie but you can see it even more in all of these ones around actual ones. once when she was particularly blind and senile i found her sleeping in a bag of toys she mistook for her bed. before stairs and being left unattended on beds or sofas were too dangerous for her she'd sleep at the foot of my bed sometimes.
she was a good size, little and easy to pick up and hold but not teacup little. when we were both adults she was about the length of my arm from the elbow to the fingertip and it was easy to buy clothes for her. i liked dressing her up so over the years she picked up a sizeable wardrobe of little dresses and shirts.
there were assorted little health scares through the years. about 2016 she had an absess on her face that necessitated having some teeth pulled. ever since whenever she got sleepy or otherwise distracted she'd stick her tongue out a little bit. whenever she was just sitting near me i'd try to get my phone as close to her face as i could to get cute photos of her sniffing the camera or blepping at it.
she never really cared for toys that didn't squeak (or made some kind of wheezing sound when she tore enough of a hole in them to break the squeaker. we could never give her plush or softer fabric toys because she'd tear them apart instantly. she'd chase the neighbor's cats and then just stare at them when she caught up to them, not sure what she even planned to do.
she stopped playing with toys as she got older, i'm pretty sure because her hearing was going. she struggled with walks , too. would just sit down and refuse to go on partway through however short a distance.
the one thing she always loved was lying in a warm place. whether that was in a sunbeam coming through a window or on the back step on a summer day. in the colder months a fireplace would suffice.
...and food, of course. at some point she was trained to tell people she wanted things by tapping them with her paw. this was a cute trick when she was tapping her lead before a walk or the back door when she needed to pee, but it manifested as her smacking packets of human food off tables at times. when she could still kind of see but barely her usual response to sensing something in front of her mouth was trying to eat it. she'd snap at any hands in her face out of this but never out of malice. if my laptop was on the floor plugged into the tv she'd walk up to it and start licking the keys until she turned off whatever i was watching on it.
for a few personal reasons i ended up as mollie's main caretaker during her last months. she'd had cancer a few years ago and enough had been removed to give her a few more years with us. she lost her vision as well as her hearing, and canine dementia started to take over. she'd spend most of her time wandering aimlessly, getting herself wedged into corners and crying until somebody freed her. that somebody was almost always be since my dad can't hear well. if she woke up at night she'd inevitably get stuck, so if i had to help her during the night i'd usually just.. sit with her for a while until she managed to fall asleep. watch her wander or help her when she got stuck again. close to the end, her back legs began failing and the nightly episodes got worse. she'd wake up and not be able to get up at all and immediately panic and cry until i helped her stand up, covered in her own waste.
... there was another way we needed to help her. the appointment was booked not long after this started.
i spent a lot of mollie's last two days just.. sitting with her, letting her sleep or watching her trundle around in circles like she always did these days. she was too far gone to have many favorite places or activities and she didn't like walks or car rides. i went to the nearest pets shop to find some fancy treats to spoil her with and broke down when the cashier asked if i needed help finding anything. she gave me a few extra treats with what i bought, and also a hug. i tried baking her a cake but it hurt her teeth so she didn't eat much of it. her bowl was filled with all of the treats that were left in the house.
a few hours before the appointment i realised i didn't have a lot of photos of the two of us, just ones of her, so i sat her on my dad's bed to use the mirror in his bedroom to take some. she fell asleep where i placed her and i laid down next to her until she woke up and wanted to be wandering around again.
she hated cars. howled for the whole brief drive to the vets while i apologised and fussed over her. she was briefly taken to another room and fed copious amounts of biscuits by everyone in the office and came back with a cannula but other than that i held her the rest of the time. it still throws me off just how fast it was. had a little last minute spike of regret just as the vet's needle went in and just buried my face in her fur to not have to watch it happen. just felt her little head go limp and rest on my arm.
she passed in my arms, full of treats and still covered in crumbs at the ripe age of fifteen. i feel like that's how she would have wanted it. her tongue slipping out a little bit when i pulled the blanket away to look at her face, like it always did when she slept.
she came home lying on her bed, wrapped in her blanket. she tended to be a little more settled at night if i tucked her in. if she got up anyway she'd walk off with it still draped over her back. we buried her in it. before that, i set her bed down in its usual spot on the living room floor (where else would it go?) and laid down next to it. held onto her for a little longer.
it hasn't been long as i write this. her things are in a pile in one room so i can avoid looking at them unless i want to. i'm still so used to needing to check on her several times a night that i hear a tiny sound and think for a moment that it's her claws clicking against the floor, or her crying because she's stuck in a corner and needs me to help her. it takes me a second to remember i've already helped her as best i can.
rest well, moll. thank you for being my friend all this time.