Osagi and Shiloee

Hye Sook and I stood in the department store in the pet section. I kneeled down to get a closer look at the rabbits.

"Which one do you want?" she asked.

"Which one do YOU want?" I replied.

We looked a little longer.

"What about the one with the brown ears?" I said.

She nodded.

"Or what about the white one?"

Again, she nodded.

"What about them both? I heard rabbits get lonely easily."

Again, she nodded.

We had decided over a month ago that when we came back from Japan that we'd get a pet rabbit. Aside from just mentioning it and both agreeing, we hadn't planned too much. We bought a cage, but that's about it. We hadn't even decided how many we'd get. Standing in the pet store, the task seemed too daunting.

That's when we noticed the dead hamster.

The cage beside the rabbits was the hamsters. There was a crazy one running back and forth in the cage. I watched him for a while before I noticed the pink smear in the woodchips that he was running over. I looked closer and could make out fur and bones in the pink. This hamster was running back and forth over the top of one of this fallen comrads.

And with this I decided a department store isn't the best place to buy a well-adjusted rabbit. I turned to Hye Sook and said that I'd rather go somewhere else. As she took a moment to consider it, a guy came up to get us our rabbits. Had he come a minute later, we would have been gone.

"What would you like?" he asked.

We looked at each other and Hye Sook asked me in English (so the guy couldn't understand) "do you still want to get two?" I thought about the dead hamster, and I looked down at the cute rabbits. Well, I thought, at least we'll save them from a trampling.

"Yeah, let's take two," I said.

As he handed us our bunnies in a shoe box, I pointed out the dead hamster, too which he only gave an embarrassed laugh. And then we were on our way.

R