Fiction: Black Pill

By James O’Sullivan

 

Now, in the middle of my eighth decade, I have come to terms with an ever-growing list of physical infirmities and an expanding portfolio of physicians. Having exceeded the average lifespan for a White American male, and grateful for the extra time on this fragile planet, I have no reason to complain. Among those infirmities, however, I do not list a poor memory, consoling myself with the knowledge that I have never had a good one, and that this limitation is not the result of aging neurons. When I say I don’t remember, my wife, who has a decent memory, perhaps selective at times, and occasionally subject to gaps and errors like everyone else, refuses to believe me and is convinced that I am either lying or repressed. My only response to the latter charge, which might call into question my reliability as a narrator, is that some moments in my life have been so distressing, if not downright traumatic, that I do recall them in vivid detail. Such a moment occurred when I was twelve and realized for the first time that something was off with my parents.    

My father was on strike that summer. Whenever a strike was in progress, an atmosphere of tension filled our house. My father would run out of home projects and then would run out of crossword puzzles. My mother would run out of food in the refrigerator and worry about how much we were spending at the grocery store. But the general tension during a strike was elevated a notch one morning, when bounding into the kitchen, I saw my father standing at the back door in silence. I remember very specific details. The palm of his left hand pressed flat against the wall, a boxer's bicep tensed in a knot under a white t-shirt. My mother sitting at the table, ready for breakfast, her hand placed on the shoulder of my younger brother, Edward. My father backed away from the door and padded shoeless across the linoleum floor to the pantry. He opened the cabinet and removed a short barrel .22 caliber rifle strapped to the back of the door. He put the rifle on the counter and reached deep into the shelf and retrieved a box of bullets. He took a single bullet from the box, slipped it into the chamber, and re-crossed the room to the doorway.

I crossed the kitchen behind him, standing to one side looking over his shoulder into the back yard. A brown rat sat motionless under a lilac bush, its left eye facing the house. My father motioned me away with a wave of his right arm, his tricep standing out like a twisted rope. He edged the barrel between the screen door and the jam and squinted along the sight. He held the stock in a steady, relaxed grip. He took one breath, released it, and stopped. Imitating him, I exhaled a half breath.   

My father squeezed the trigger. A loud pop filled the kitchen. The rat did not move. My father pulled the rifle back from the door, removed the shell casing and put it in the pocket of his grey workpants. He stepped out into the yard and walked over to the rat. I followed him. The rat's ear had been replaced by a large hole that oozed red. “Bury it,” my father said and went back into the house.

I turned over the brown rat with my sneaker, exposing a white belly.  The rat was ugly, unlike Goldie, my pet hamster. The rat had a hideous long tail. Goldie had a cute stub of a tail. The rat had a sharp, pointed snout. Goldie had a broad flat face, soft whiskers, and fat cheeks that could hold a handful of sunflower seeds. The rat had greasy, brown fur. Goldie wore a lustrous, golden-brown coat. I picked up a stick and prodded the furry pearls at the base of the tail. Unlike Goldie's smooth crease. I probed the mouth. The rat had long curved canines that were disturbingly like Goldie's teeth.

I tossed the stick and crossed the yard to the outside door to the basement. I descended the stairs and walked through the laundry room past a round washing machine with a ringer that swiveled over the twin tubs that my mother would later put to such a horrendous use. I stopped at a silver cage parked on a shelf. Goldie slept in a corner on a bed of wood shavings. Her side swelled rhythmically with her breathing. I found a long-handled shovel. I carried the shovel back to the dead rat and scooped it onto the blade. I walked into the woods where I dug a hole and buried it. 

When I joined my family in the kitchen, they were eating cereal. No spit and crackle sounds, no smell of frying bacon, no eggs cracked over a pan. My father scooped up the soggy cereal with a spoon and swallowed it without chewing.

“Your teeth bothering you again?” my mother asked.

“Same as usual,” my father said.

“You need to see a dentist.”  

“Can’t afford it while the strike’s on.” 

“I’ve been thinking about how we can make some extra money,” my mother said. She turned to me. “Goldie needs a mate.” 

* * *

On the weekend, our family piled into the 1949 Plymouth and drove north on Route 51 to the pet store. I jostled Edward in the back seat, still angry over my mother's edict that my brother would get to name the new hamster. As my father parked in front of the pet shop, Edward taunted me.

“I get to pick,” Edward said.  

I sulked. My mother rebuked me.

“Matt! Be nice to your brother.” 

Edward ran to the glass enclosure that held a cluster of young hamsters. I followed and looked in. The hamsters looked the same. 

“Take your pick,” the manager said. He was a tall man with puffy flesh and a short black moustache.

“Go ahead, Eddie,” my mother said.

Edward reached in and pulled out a hamster.

“Is it a boy?” Edward said.

“You have to turn it over,” I said, reaching for the hamster.

“I can do it,” Edward said. He turned the hamster over in his hands.

“You picked a girl,” I said.

“We want a male,” my mother said.

Edward put the female back and caught a hamster that scampered along the glass wall. He turned it over and exposed its belly.

“That little guy has the right equipment,” the manager said.

The hamster turned his head and bit Edward’s thumb.

“Ouch!” he screamed. Edward immobilized the hamster by pressing each side of its head.

“Pick another one,” my mother said.

“No,” Edward said. “I want this one.”

“He'll get used to you,” the manager said. “The more you handle them the gentler they get.”

We followed the manager over to the cash register. He took out a receipt pad.

“Name?”

“Dalton,” my father said.

“Spell it,” the manager said.

“D-A-L-T-O-N,” my father said. His voice was cold and deliberate.

“I guess that's Irish,” the manager said, exhaling a chuckle.

“You guess,” my father said, glaring at the manager.  

“Do you need hamsters?” my mother said.

“I might,” the manager said. “They're popular right now.”

“We may have some,” she said.

“You going to breed them?”

“I know about animals,” she said.

“Give me a call,” the manager said. He handed her a business card. “You need a cage?” 

“They're expensive,” my mother said.

“Since we might be doing business, I'll give you a discount,” the manager said. He lifted a metal cage off the shelf and handed it to Edward.  

On the way home, Edward gave his hamster a name. Spike.

* * *

When the first litter was born, I went shopping with my father. We drove to Option Supply Company and parked along the spur of the Pittsburgh & West Virginia Railway Line. We bought a roll of one-inch welded wire mesh, a wire-cutter and a pound of loose staples that I scooped out of a barrel. Then we drove to the Williams Lumber Company and loaded wood shavings from a waste pile into a bin in the trunk. Finally, we stopped at the A&P and bought a large bag of sunflower seeds and eight plastic dinner roll baskets. At the back of the A&P, we went through the trash at the loading dock and picked up discarded wooden crates.

At home, I broke the crates down and stacked the pieces by size in neat piles beside the work bench. My father cut the sides of the crates in half with a hand saw and nailed them to the thin floor piece. Three sides were wood, and the front was covered with a wire mesh screen. He built a frame for the lid and then stapled a wire mesh piece cut to size to the frame.

I worked on the tread wheels. I took a plastic dinner roll basket and drilled a hole in the center. I pushed a bolt through the center with a nut and washer on either side and attached it at an angle to a wooden base. We finished the first cage in an hour. By day’s end we had finished eight cages. We worked in a happy silence, my father more relaxed now that he had something to do. And he was not rubbing his jaw.  

“How are your teeth?” I asked.

“Better,” my father said. “I don’t need that dentist.”

As we went upstairs for dinner, my father, who had a good singing voice, hummed a Bing Crosby favorite, “I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.”  

* * *

When my grandfather moved out to live with my Uncle Louis, he left behind a roll top desk where I did my schoolwork. I remember one evening working on diagramming the sentences that Sister Martin had assigned. I loved the complicated sentences with series of dependent clauses, tiers of prepositional phrases descending from the main clause, and gerunds and participles rising on stilts. When I finished the homework, I took my notebook out of a drawer and turned to the page of my latest story. So far, I had only a title: “The Death of a Rat.” I pondered an opening sentence and wrote: “Why did the rat have to die?”

My parents had gone to bed early and Edward was asleep on the other side of the room. The house was silent and with the basement door open I could hear Goldie, Spike and the others running on their wheels. It seemed they could run all night. The sound of the spinning wheels distracted me, and I went downstairs.

In the basement, Goldie, Spike, and the eight hamsters produced from the first round of breeding were running in their cages. A white 3x5 index card, attached by a thumb tack to the upper left-hand corner of each cage, registered the date of birth and sex of each hamster. A line for the names was blank. Edward wanted to name them after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but I said they were too young to know whether they were male or female.   

Suddenly, I heard a rhythmic sound above me coming from my parents' bedroom. I was old enough to be embarrassed by sounds that made me think of breeding hamsters in the basement. I rushed upstairs to my bedroom and shut the door. Edward was still sleeping. I sat on the bed in darkness. The headlights of passing cars on Route 51 swept across the ceiling. I focused my attention on the ghostly lights and the rumbling sounds made by the trailer trucks as they shifted gears coming off the hill and sped down the highway into the night. I did not want to hear anything else.

* * *

As with the first round, my mother supervised the second round of breeding. She had told me stories about raising chickens and said, as a country girl, she knew her way around animals. I watched her pick up Spike and put him in Goldie's cage. When Spike approached Goldie, she showed her teeth and charged, driving him into a corner of the cage. My mother quickly removed Spike.

“We'll try again tomorrow,” she said.

Over the next two nights she bred all the hamsters. Three weeks later there were five litters of hamsters hidden in wood shavings in the corners of the cages. They were blind for a week and then they could see. I counted them and entered the numbers on the index cards. There were forty-two in all. By Thanksgiving, when the hamsters were a month old and crowding the cages, we moved them to a large weaning cage built by my father.

The bunch was just in time for the Christmas season. We loaded the large cage into the car and drove to the pet store and the manager unloaded them into the glass container.

“If you ever get a cream colored one, that's special,” the manager said. “That's worth some money.”

He paid fifty cents apiece for the hamsters. My mother took the money. Two tens and a one. She gave Edward and me a ten-dollar bill.

“Buy me something nice for Christmas,” she said.

* * *

By late winter with the addition of four more breeding pairs, there was an even larger cluster of hamsters swarming the big cage.  My mother called the pet shop manager and set a time to bring them in. My father’s teeth had gotten worse, and he was sick in bed with a fever. Edward and I helped our mother load the hamsters into the car. The pet shop manager frowned when he saw them.

“How many do you have?” he said.

“Eighty-eight,” my mother said.  

“Things are pretty slow right now,” the manager said. “Sort of a lull after Christmas.”

“Easter’s coming,” my mother said.

“Easter’s rabbits and chicks,” the manager said.

“How many can you take?” she said.

“I don't know,” the manager said. “Truth is, the hamster craze is over.”

She stared mournfully at the cage of hamsters.

“I don't know what to do with them.” 

“I'll help you out this one time,” the manager said. “I'll take twenty of them for ten cents apiece. But this is the last. I just can't use them anymore.”

The manager counted out twenty hamsters and put them in a glass enclosure. He went to the cash register and retrieved two one-dollar bills. My mother stuffed the money in her purse, and we took the cage with the remaining hamsters back to the car. When we got home, my mother sat motionless in the parked car staring at the house.  

“I don’t know what to do with them,” she said.

At that moment, I realized that something was off with my mother. Although I did not have the words for it then, I sensed her helplessness, her loneliness, her desolation. Over the years, when I have reflected on this moment, I have realized that she was deeply depressed.

* * *

The pain finally drove my bedridden father to the dentist. The disease in his gums was so advanced that none of his teeth could be saved. The dentist pulled them in one sitting and the family doctor that saw him afterwards said the toxins released into his bloodstream had nearly killed him. A week after the procedure, he was still sick in bed, locked in feverish silence. I needed to get out of the house. Fresh snow had fallen on a Saturday. I put on my winter coat. On the way to the back door, I passed Edward standing vigil outside our father’s bedroom. 

“Don’t bother him,” I said.

“Is he going to die?” Edward said.

“Of course not,” I said with forced assurance.

“When is he going to talk?”

“He talks to Mom,” I said.

“Not anymore,” Edward said, his eyes filling with tears.

“He’s going to be okay,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“The woods.”

“I want to come.”

“You can’t,” I said.

“Why?”

“You can read my comic books while I’m gone.”

Edward was satisfied. I stepped out into a frozen winter morning. Instead of going to the woods, I found a path into the blackberry patch and followed a track of fresh boot prints that led to an oblong, wooden box tucked under a cluster of blackberry bushes. I peeked into the wire mesh covering one end and saw the rabbit. Wide set eyes. Upright ears. Frozen brown fur. I flipped the trapdoor and coaxed the rabbit out. Once it cleared the box, the rabbit bolted into the bushes.  

I started back up the path. There must be more of them. I would find them all and set them free. As I approached the main path, a large man stood in the middle of the spur path blocking my way.

“What are you doing?” The voice was dominant, authoritative, menacing.

I hesitated for a moment and then ran straight toward the man, colliding with him and knocking him back into the snow. I leapt up to flee but the man swung his arm around, gripped my leg, and jerked me back. The man’s face brightened to a fiery red by cold, exertion and anger. The hairs in his nostrils flared with his heavy breathing. He stood and gripped my coat collar. He lifted me off my feet and the collar tightened around my throat. 

“Where do you live?” he demanded.

I could not breathe. I gritted my teeth and looked down the main path out of the briar patch. In the distance, I could see my home.

“Tell me where you live!” The man pulled tighter on my collar. Then he put me down and relaxed his grip.  

“You can take me to your house, or I can take you to the police.”

I pointed toward my house at the base of the hill.

“Let's go,” the man said. He marched me down the path and up to the front door.  

My startled mother let us in. I stepped away from the man and stood near the furnace grate in the center of the living room floor. My mother stood between me and the man.  Edward came into the living room.

“Go back to your room,” my mother said, and Edward disappeared. My father emerged from the bedroom in pajamas wrapped in a blue bathrobe.

I felt dizzy as the man recited the charges. Only certain words registered: private property, trespassing, vandalism, rights, lawsuit, juvenile court. My father listened in silence until the man was finished.

“He won’t bother the traps anymore,” my father said.  

The man continued. There were expenses that were incurred. It cost money to have a trapper come out. The neighbors in the new subdivision at the top of the hill had paid good money for his services. They didn’t want his work undone by vandals.  The man demanded names and a phone number.

I took off my coat and rubbed my neck where the collar had been pulled tight. My father saw the mark on my throat. His eyes blazed with an intensity fueled by fever and anger. Suddenly, he stood within arm’s reach of the man.

“I said he won’t bother the traps anymore.”  

The man flinched and backed away, startled by his ferocity.

“Someone’s got to pay,” the man said weakly.

“Out,” my father said in a low voice. “Or you’ll pay right now.”

The man backed away. There was fear on his face.  

“White trash,” the man said as he walked out the door. 

I looked at my father who now seemed exhausted.

“You need to get back to bed,” my mother said.

“Lesson number one,” my father said. “Never get trapped in a corner.” He went back into the bedroom and closed the door.

* * *

A week later the infection and fever fled, the strike was over, and my father went back to work. One Friday, he came home from work, ate dinner in silence and went to bed without watching the Friday night fights. I took an apple from the refrigerator and went down to the basement to check on the hamsters. I passed the overcrowded cage where the hamsters were fighting now and bore slashes and puncture marks. I took a handful of sunflower seeds from the dwindling supply and put it in the cage and the hamsters swarmed.  

I walked down the line of cages, past the hamsters that Edward had eventually named after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs without regard to sex, until I came to Goldie and Spike. I cut the apple in half with my pocketknife and fed them. Whatever might happen to the others, I would make sure that Goldie and Spike were safe. My mother said they could not afford to feed them. My father said nothing. Where would they go? I thought of freeing the others in the woods but knew they would never survive. In their native habitat, they were desert animals. In the woods, they would not have the survival skills of a rabbit or a rat.

When I went back upstairs, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table. She had the same forlorn expression on her face as she had on the day we returned from our disastrous trip to the pet shop.

“Why doesn’t Dad talk?” I asked.

“Keep your voice down,” she said. “Your father is sleeping.”

“The sunflower bag is almost empty,” I said.

“We're not buying any more sunflower seeds,” she said.

“What will they eat?”

“You should have saved your Christmas money instead of spending it on yourself,” she said.

“What can I do?”

“You can make it all go away,” she said. “You can get me a black pill.”

 She left the kitchen, went to the bedroom, and shut the door. 

* * *

The next day when I woke up, I looked out the window and saw that the car was gone. I was surprised because my father’s habit was to do his Saturday errands in the afternoon.  Gas up the car. Make a stop at the beer distributor to pick up a case for the week ahead.  I came downstairs and heard noise in the basement. I thought my mother must be doing laundry. I went into the kitchen and heard a pock-pock sound in the backyard. Outside, I found Edward playing with a ball attached by an elastic band to a paddle. He was having trouble keeping it going.

I tried to take the paddle and show him how to do it right. But Edward refused to give it up. Finally, Edward threw down the paddle in frustration and went back inside the house. I took the paddle and smashed the ball. I kept hitting it harder and harder until the rubber band snapped, and the ball went flying. At that moment, Edward came running out of the house crying. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me toward the house. 

I remember the fear I felt when I entered the house. But it was a new fear different from the raw fear of the trapper or the intangible fear of a silent father. The kitchen was empty. We went into the living room and stood in the doorway to the basement. I should probably give a warning before telling what followed. At the base of the stairs, my mother stood over the laundry tubs. One tub was half filled with water. The breadboard from the kitchen leaned against the foot of the tub. She lifted a metal bucket and poured hamsters out of the bucket into the tub of water. She set the bucket down and picked up the breadboard.

The hamsters squealed and thrashed in the water. My mother submerged the swimming bodies, pushing the breadboard down until her elbows reached the water line. She did not notice us at the top of the stairs. She lifted the board, and the water was still. She went and got another bucket of hamsters and poured them into the water.

“Make her stop,” Edward whimpered.  

I stood frozen at the top of the stairs. She held the board down again for a long time and then let it up. She pulled the plug in the tub and the water gurgled down the drain. Then she looked up and saw us standing at the top of the stairs.

“Go away,” she said. “Both of you. Just disappear.”

She picked the bodies out of the tub and dumped them into a garbage can.

Later, when I heard my mother crying in the bedroom, I went down to the basement and retrieved the bodies from the garbage. It was all of them. The unnamed ones. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Goldie and Spike. I put them in a cardboard box and took them out to the woods and buried them. I stood still in the woods listening for the scurrying sounds of rats and rabbits running free.

When I have told this story, some people have said that my mother was demented. I believe that she was chronically depressed and was devastated by having to face life’s failures alone. People have asked me where my father was. I now believe that he knew what she was planning for that day and had left her to carry out the destruction on her own. Although there were some better times to follow, that day was a harbinger of my mother’s imprisonment in depression and my father’s destructive self-medication with alcohol. As for my brother, Edward, his late life suicide has made me wonder what impact the trauma of that day might have had on him.

In the afternoon, when my father came home, we burned the cages.

 

 

 

 

 

James O’Sullivan is a short story writer and novelist. His story, “Last Rockfish,” published in Bay to Ocean Journal 2024, received a Pushcart nomination. Other short stories have appeared in Northern Appalachia Review, Passager, Straylight Literary Arts Magazine, Pennsylvania English, and Sheepshead Review. He received an Artist Project Grant from the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County (2024) and an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council (2022). Jim earned an M.A. in Writing from The Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Connecticut. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.